"Did My Person Go To Hell?"

An interfaith answer for survivors of suicide loss

Content warning: suicide loss, religious harm Many survivors I've sat with have this question somewhere in them. Very few say it out loud.

They'll say a lot of other things first. They'll talk about the funeral, the paperwork, the relative who won't return calls. And then sometimes, near the end of an hour, quietly, almost as an aside: I keep thinking about where he is.

If you've been carrying that one alone, I want you to know it's one of the most common questions in this kind of grief. It's also one of the least answerable, and I'm going to be real with you about why.

The 2am search

There's a particular hour when people type this into a search bar. You know the one.

What comes back is a wall of doctrine. Denominational Q&A pages, apologetics sites, seminary blogs, a peer-reviewed article or two. Some of it is genuinely merciful. Some of it is very much not. All of it is arguing about a category — "people who die by suicide" — rather than about your person, whose laugh you can still hear.

That's the first thing worth naming.

You are asking a question about someone you loved. The internet is answering a question about a policy.

Photo: Daniel McCullough/Unsplash

What someone wrote about my father

Years ago, there was a message board called Topix. It doesn't exist anymore, but if you grew up in a small town, you might remember it. It was where anonymous people said things about their neighbors that they'd never say at the post office.

Someone wrote there, a couple days after his death, that my father should have accepted Jesus as his personal savior.

I don't know who wrote it. They didn't know him. They had no idea what his last months held, what he'd tried, what he was carrying. But they knew enough, apparently, to file him. By the way, some folks I did know came to bat for my family and me and responded to ask them to let us grieve in peace without comments like that.

I want to be precise about what bothered me, because it wasn't the theology. It was the ease of it. Somebody looked at the worst thing that ever happened to my family and found in it an opportunity to be certain.

What the Baptist minister said

Not long after, the Baptist minister came to see my brother and me. We weren't active in the church by then, and I wasn't looking for a fight. I asked him — not particularly attached to the answer, but knowing that plenty of people believe it — whether he thought people who die by suicide go to hell.

I watched him take off the professional hat. I could see it happen.

He said: "I believe God feels for those in deep pain."

That's it. That's the whole answer. I've been carrying it for years.

He didn't cite anything. He didn't reassure me, exactly — he didn't say your dad is fine or don't you worry about that. He said something about the character of God that left room for my father to be a person rather than a case.

Same question, two answers, and the difference wasn't doctrine

Here's what I want you to notice, because it's the actual point of this post.

The man on the message board and the man in my living room were both Christians. Both Protestant, even. They gave opposite answers.

The difference between them wasn't scripture. It was proximity. One of them had to look at two grieving kids while he answered. The other one never had to look at anybody.

This is why I'm careful about how I talk about beliefs about suicide and hell. You'll hear people say "the Church teaches" or "Islam says" or "Buddhism holds." I don't think that's honest. The most that's ever true is that some Catholics believe this, some Muslims believe that, or this particular writer holds this position.

And the disagreement inside traditions is often sharper than the disagreement between them. Some Catholic sources emphasize that mercy, not condemnation, is the response, and that burial with dignity in consecrated ground is provided — while noting that this was not always so, and that Christian burial was once denied to those who died this way. One Catholic explanation stresses that psychological distress and illness can impede the knowledge and consent that a grave sin would require.

Meanwhile, there are Reformed writers arguing that a death by suicide is itself evidence the person never truly believed at all — which is about the cruelest construction available, because it makes the manner of death into proof of damnation. Substack

In some Islamic scholarship, there's a similar range: a position that a believer overwhelmed by pain and difficulty may be forgiven, alongside harsher readings. Lifeway Women

Same tradition. Same texts. Wildly different verdicts.

So when the answer changes this much depending on who's talking, that might tell you something. The answer isn't a fact about your person. It's a fact about the person answering — what they believe about God, and how close they're willing to stand to human suffering.

What I believe, since you asked

I'm an interfaith minister, so I'm not going to hand you a doctrine and I'm not going to pretend I have access to the afterlife's filing system. I certainly haven't cornered the market on God any more than anyone else, although some sure act to me like they have.

But I'll tell you what I've landed on.

Every tradition I've studied has, somewhere in it, a strand that says the divine moves toward suffering rather than away from it. Not toward the deserving. Toward the suffering. That strand is old, it's durable, and it shows up in places that otherwise agree on nothing.

A God who would look at someone in unbearable pain — pain that distorted their thinking, narrowed their options down to one, and convinced them the people they loved would be better off — and respond to that with punishment isn't a god. That's a bureaucrat.

I don't think your person is being punished for the size of their pain. That's what I believe, and it's what I feel deep in my bones.

And if that doesn't fix it

It might not. Totally fair.

You can be told a beautiful thing by a kind minister and still wake up scared at 3am. You can intellectually reject every punitive doctrine you were raised in and still feel the old fear move through your body when you're tired. That's not a failure of faith or a failure of healing. Doctrine gets into us young and it doesn't leave on a schedule.

You're allowed to still be afraid. You're equally allowed to be furious that anyone made you afraid in the first place. You're allowed to keep the question open, or to set it down for a while and pick it back up in five years.

And you're allowed to stop asking permission from people who never met the person you love.

One more thing, and it isn't personal

The idea that people who die by suicide are damned wasn't a private opinion. It shaped things. It kept families out of cemeteries. It kept causes of death off headstones and out of obituaries. It taught generations of people that this particular grief should be conducted quietly, if at all.

It is likely where the term "committed" originally came from, and now we're asking people to stop using it because of the shame and criminality that has been attached to it. "Died by," not committed.

We inherited stigma, shame and silence that were all built on purpose.

Part of what we do now, I think, is refuse to keep it. Say the word. Say their name. Ask the question out loud — in your own living room, to someone who has to look at you while they answer. That's usually where the humanity shows up.

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If this is your grief

Befriend Your Grief is a 12-week companioning program for survivors of suicide loss. It's not therapy and it's not a lecture — it's a group of people who understand this question because they've asked it too. Learn more.

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