There seems to be an influx in the chatter about suicide today. I don’t know if it is because talking about it in public stopped being taboo or if there is an increase in suicides from earlier years, but either way, people are affected. It is the people part that I am interested in talking about here. The fate of people affected by suicide is just as eye-opening as that of the person suffering enough despair to take his life. I use the word eye-opening because essentially, that is what has to happen before someone can deal with a loss of this magnitude. When someone dies from a disease, old age, or even an accident, there is never the blame factor associated with the survivors. People just cannot help or change these circumstances. People often, in the case of suicide, blame someone. Usually, the blame is felt by and projected onto those who were closest to them. If we take a look at fate instead of blame and guilt, we might be able to understand or open our eyes to see why this happened when it happened. This is what I did when I experienced a fate filled suicide.
Fate is one of those words that is left to interpretation. For some, it has a negative connotation. 
When something unfortunate happens to them, it is fate. They were meant to have this misfortune. Others think fate is a glorious thing. Fate is what brought the two of us together, sometimes said about chance meetings. But for me, fate is a predetermination or a predestination as it were. Predestination is an act of God and God alone. He is all-knowing, so he has to know that all of these things are going to happen to us. That is predestination; however, it is a result of the free will choices we have made, that God KNOWS we will make, that God allows us TO make because he is a fair and just God. He is not a dictator. He is not a magician that magically poofs these events into our lives as it suits Him. BUT, in the same breath, I will say that He allows them for a reason, and THAT is what I want to focus on here. I am talking about THAT fate.
Whether or not it is known or predicted or even planned (in the hopes that another change will occur for someone else) suicide has consequences that result. There is no getting around that, is there? But if you take a look at the consequences, they are not always in the form of punishment or have derogatory meanings. Consequences are just the aftermath, what happens after the event, in this case, what happens after the suicide. I believe that this is also predestined but at the same time, again, a matter of free will choice. Let me reiterate here that just because we have the choice, doesn’t mean God doesn’t know what that choice is before we make it. The consequence is just the aftermath.
My brother was almost 28 years old when he took his life. At the time, it was, of course, a devastating blow. I was four years younger but closer to him than the other siblings, for the most part. I worked with him; I lived in the apartment across the hall from him, and we shared a lot of fun and friends. His friends were my friends. We had been separated by circumstance and went our ways for about a year or so befor
e his death, but we were still in touch. So, yes, it was devastating, however, what was to come of it could never have been foretold by any human on earth. THAT is why I call this a fate FILLED as opposed to a fateful suicide.
Fateful denotes catastrophe. Fate filled, now that denotes a lot of fate overflowing in both directions. Sure, devastation had its place, but so did a rebirth of new life. It was at the reception after the funeral that I met up with an old friend my brother and I shared. He was five years older than I, but I had known him, then, for ten years. We hadn’t seen each other in a while and even then it was just in a group at get-togethers. We never formally dated. Well, he asked if I would sit with him and his friends at the dinner after the funeral and we talked and reminisced about my brother and all the things we had done back in high school. It was a nice way to end an otherwise traumatizing day/week. That was the day that started the rest of my life. I had not known at the time, but it was predestined, that I would marry that man a year later and in the course of the following twenty years have fourteen beautiful children raised in the Faith as God would have it. The fates of 20 people (four of my babies in God’s hands) were determined by that meeting that never would have happened if it were not for the fate determined for my brother.
That is our love story. Predestined from a love lost story known only by God at that time. I will always be affected by his suicide, and it will always sadden me, and I will always be affected by the consequences/aftermath of his suicide, and that will never sadden me. He would have loved these children, and I speak of him often to them. It is easy to close your eyes, turn into yourself and determine that this kind of event will overtake you but it is just as easy to open those eyes and look around to find peace outside yourself that may just have emanated from that fate filled suicide.