Short death certs will not ease the pain of suicide
Tanaiste Joan Burton is wrong to offer a choice of obliterating the cause of death, says Emer O’Kelly
THE death certificate for a man called Andy Morgan says “Death by hanging.” It’s stark: dreadful in its brutal finality. It is also the truth. On New Year’s Eve 2010, in the middle of a party, the 39-year-old plumber had a tiff with his partner Joanne, the mother of his three children, left the pub, went home….and hanged himself in his elder daughter’s bedroom.
Joanne Fetherstone wants people to know how he died. She doesn’t see anything shameful in it; only that it was tragic. She also believes it might not have happened if only Andy had felt himself able to talk about feeling overwhelmed by life. And months after his death, she set up a foundation to encourage openness among those bereaved by the suicide of a loved one.
But there is now a wellmeant attempt at “official” comfort which may further stifle openness about suicide in Ireland. The Tanaiste and Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton is about to introduce regulations which will allow families to choose shortened versions of death certificates, which will not include the cause of death, whatever that cause might be.
Specifically, Ms. Burton told Richard Boyd-Barrett in the Dail, she hopes the measure “will provide some comfort to families where the details of the cause of death registered are upsetting.”
Leaving aside the fact that death is almost always upsetting for those left behind, Ms Burton’s measure, it seems to me, will, where suicide is concerned, contribute to our national failure to reverse the terrible growth in the figures.
We need the harshness, the ugliness of the truth, if those sad deaths are not to have been in vain. We continue to speak of the horrendous figures of between 400 and 500 suicides per year only in the abstract. As a result, dreadfully, people contemplating suicide may believe it to be a kind way out for those left behind, and an easy one for themselves.
This is particularly the case with young people, who have never heard the ugly physical reality of sudden death spelled out.
It is the desperate unhappiness represented by suicide which makes us want to blot out the reality and refuse to face it as Joanne Fetherstone and her children have decided to face it. They have recently posted a video on Facebook in which Andy Morgan’s youngest child, Alex, now 10 years old, says she is “much happier” knowing the truth of her father’s death.
But the final fact of the hopelessness which drives people to suicide, and which can create so much guilt in those left behind, also guided the cruelty which existed until comparatively recently in the Catholic Church, which refused to bury suicides in consecrated ground, considering them damned forever for having committed the ultimate sin of giving way to despair rather than trusting in God’s help. That, at least, is no longer the case, and believers have the comfort of Christian burial for their dead loved ones. But while there may be stupidity and cupidity involved in some suicides, the act of suicide is not shameful.
To blot out its reality does nobody any favours, least of all in failing to record truthfully the life and true cause of death of the person who has chosen to die by his or her own hand. It makes no more sense than to decide that cancer deaths should not be recorded as such because medical science has not yet reached the stage where all cancers can be cured or at least contained, and it will cause pain to the living to remember the possibility of such mortality.
South Kerry coroner Terence Casey criticised the move, but other experts in the area of suicide intervention have given a cautious welcome to the Minister’s proposal. Ciaran Austin, Director of Services at Console, the national suicide charity, believes that during a time of desperate trauma, people should have the choice of privacy about the death of a loved one, whatever the cause. He also says that choosing a short form of death certificate will have no impact on the collection of suicide statistics. With respect (and I have lost friends to suicide), I disagree with him. With suicide, as with most other issues relating to life and death, the honesty of reality can never be anything other than helpful in the long run.
The problem is, it seems, that everybody agrees that knowledge and truth are important but they make exceptions — except in my case, my child’s case, my beloved’s case. I am different; my loved one was different. This was an aberration; he/she didn’t mean to do it.
Tragically, they did mean to do it; that’s how they succeeded. They probably didn’t need to do it: the seemingly insuperable obstacles to going on living, particularly for a young person, were probably not insuperable. But they saw them as such, and their sad memory deserves the love and sympathy of family and friends. It does not need a whitewash that denies reality, particularly from the official records of the country in which they lived.
To deny that reality is, in a way, to turn our backs on those who have died. We need, individually and as a society, to look into their graves, however painful that may be, and change the mind-set which sees oblivion as preferable to living our lives, however emotionally painful they may seem to be at a given moment. We won’t do that by a well-meant official fudge. To fudge the issue, even from the gentlest of motives, colludes in the sub-conscious sense of shame.