Bruised and Wounded

Struggling to Understand Suicide

By: Ronald Rolheiser

Narrated by: Brad Lussier

Recent events have shown again how suicide touches all of us, and often, when we least expect it. But how to unpack the grief that follows such a painful, and often stigmatized, death? Ron Rolheiser can help.

When someone is stricken with cancer, one of three things can happen: Doctors treat the disease and cure it; professionals can’t cure the disease but can control it so that the person afflicted can live with the disease for the rest of his or her life; the cancer can be one of a kind that cannot be treated, and all the medicine and treatments in the world are powerless and the person dies.

Emotional depression leading to suicide can work the same way. Sometimes, a person can be treated so that, in effect, they are cured; sometimes, they can’t ever really be cured but can be treated in a way that they can live with the disease for their whole life. And sometimes, just as with certain kinds of cancer, the disease is untreatable, unstoppable, and no intervention by anyone or anything can halt its advance. It eventually kills the person, and there is nothing anyone can do. Thus, Ronald Rolheiser begins this small, powerful book.

With chapters like Removing the Taboo, Despair as Weakness Rather than Sin, Reclaiming the Memory of Our Loved One, and The Pain of the Ones Left Behind, Fr. Rolheiser offers hope and a new way of understanding death by suicide.

©2018 Ronald Rolheiser (P)2019 Paraclete Press

This book!!!

Been in therapy, have searched high and low for answers and nothing was of help, till THIS BOOK! I went back and listened to it again to take notes of what I found most healing and hugging.
I lost my only daughter, my first born, one of my 2 kids at the tender age of 16. This journey has not been anything easy however, this brought some clarity.

Suicide

This book on looking at suicide is spectacular . We need more people to explain the reason for suicide as a cancer and not
a hateful stigma.

Very well written and helpful

As a mother who lost her youngest child at the age of 26 to suicide, I have been grieving terribly since he died in 2019. Nothing has been able to console me - not therapy, not medication, not time. I have never felt more alone or more disconnected from the rest of the world than I have from this experience. I literally count the days to reunite with my child. I say all that to say this - NOTHING will kill this kind of pain and yet this book has definitely given me a new perspective, a new outlook on what has happened. I still hurt, I still miss him, I long to hold him - knowing that only God can love him more than I, only God can cradle him more lovingly than I, and only God can heal his illness of depression… this helps me to go on.