"Even when I grew to know a loving God, I could not always see the connection between God and what stopped me from suicide."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

You can visit Lara's web site at www.miracleanimalrescue.com (site will open in a new window).

I dedicate this article to a friend who is deciding whether to die or not to die.

People have often told me that I have a lot of courage.

I always have the same response.

"It’s not courage," I tell people. "It’s that I couldn’t stand the pain anymore."

I once drove drunkenly down the highway – the wrong way. The God I did not know at the time sat in the passenger seat, seatbelt fastened tightly, and mistook me for a woman of courage who wanted to live life in a different way.

He turned me around on the highway, took me home safely, and said the silent, sweet prayers I could not yet speak for myself.

Although I spent years of my life trying to die in one way or another, I made a conscious decision to die one sunny, warm, light afternoon.

I had a two-bedroom, oceanfront condominium to myself, rent-free. I had money, a job, a handsome boyfriend, a loving family, my own car, a fabulous education, and, alas, a desperate desire to die.

I had an ambitious road map for the summer. I would write my first novel, and my writing career would be off and running. Only, my writing career did not take off. Instead, I decided that I would take off. Off of this planet. Off of the earth. Out of my body. Gone. Finished. Blotto. The end. I was through with life, and there was nobody there to stop me.

I sat before my personal computer, looked out the window at the sea, drank down my parents’ bottle of vodka, and decided to die.

My plan was plain and simple. I would get drunk, which was nothing at all unusual, and I would walk off into the ocean to never come back.

Strangely enough, I was not the only one to choose suicide in that very condominium. I would never forget the summer a man with terminal cancer jumped off the 13^th floor and landed squat and dead right in front of the grocery store. An imprint remains all these years later on the pavement, and I am not sure how much of that imprint is on the gravel and how much on the minds of those of us who were there that summer. The lifeguards had to help scrape his body up off the pavement.

I would not need to be scraped. Nobody would ever find me. I made a few phone calls as I drank my vodka, and I didn’t bother to say goodbye to anyone. I was not concerned with their views, their opinions, and certainly not their feelings. I was on a mission. A death mission. And that was that.

God had his own plan, however, and to this day there are some that do not understand how exactly this happened.

I became too drunk to follow through with my plan. I just couldn’t get my act together. My brain was too dulled to continue what I had started. So instead, I got in my car and hunted down my boyfriend.

"Are you okay?" my friends asked when I stopped off at one bar. "You’re really drunk."

I didn’t care. "I’m fine," I said, and clearly I was not.

God drove my car that day, and I obviously did not die. But neither did my predisposition to suicide disappear. Instead, my thoughts increased drastically over the years. I wanted to die. I wanted to die. I wanted to die.

I drank too much, starved too much, sliced at my skin and wrists, took pills, and thought and thought and thought about suicide.

But something very strange happened. The more I wanted to die, the more God intervened.

Most of the time, I had no awareness of God. Even when I grew to know a loving God, I could not always see the connection between God and what stopped me from suicide.

"I was really worried about you," my boyfriend told me when he learned about my date with the vodka bottle.

I doubt I told anyone at the time that I had decided to die.

I moved on from that boyfriend, but I became increasingly wrapped up in my mission to end my pain. Even when God helped me to get sober; even when God helped me to become abstinent from my eating disorder; even when God helped me to stop cutting myself, I still was obsessed with what I saw as my right to die.

Some might wonder why I didn’t just go through with it. I could wonder the same, but I know better today. God blocked my path, and I wasn’t strong enough to block him off.

Something happened to me that changed my life once and forever.

While in the hospital because of my eating disorder, I wanted to die more than I had ever wanted to die in my life. I could see no other way out of the pain.

Then I reached that fine line between life and death, much like the one between love and hate, where there is almost no discernment between the two.

I wanted to die so badly that I might as well have been dead. Metaphorically, I was standing over the cliff of my life. One more step forward, and I would kill myself.

But then I turned. I turned around. I looked back over my shoulder to take a last look at my life.

And I saw something I had never seen. I wanted to live!

I had reached that fine, fine edge between wanting to live and wanting to die, and the pendulum swayed until I stood back onto safe ground.

I wanted to live!

Not only did I want to live, I wanted to live!

I had always known such misery. I had never considered that I might find a way out of the pain. I had never considered that I might actually find a life that was fulfilling. And I never considered that I might find a life that was abundant, prosperous, joyful, and full of hope, grace, and God.

I saw at this juncture that if I died, that would be the very end. If I lived, I could always try something – anything, anything at all, that might help me find the life I had never known.

Do you know what? That’s exactly what I’ve done.

I have worked and worked and worked at my recovery until I have established for myself a life of grace.

I love my life today. I love my life today.

I could have chosen to die. I still have that choice.

But there is no going back on suicide.

Suicide is permanent.

I pray that others contemplating suicide will not have to go as far as I did before they look through their narrow windows to see the spirit of light.

I pray that they might learn from experiences like mine that there is a way out – a way out that is fabulous, glorious, and brilliant. A way out that is not death.

A way out that is life.

May we all look through our windows, whether they be narrow, whole, small, enormous, or any size at all, and may we see the light that will carry us to find the way back to the love in our souls.

Amen.

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