Throughout 2025, death by suicide, as reflected on below, continued to have a powerful impact on my life and most certainly on the lives of others involved. The marking of years does nothing to lessen such impact. In fact, far from lessening, as is often suggested, it increases. This truth is not confined to loss by suicide but to the experience of grief no matter its cause.
I reflect again then on the experience of boughs breaking ….. and offer this for all those today who know the realities of grief that changes, that changes us but that never ends.
The suicides by men I knew personally and professionally were five in total. Hardly surprising then for me to have need to process something of these losses in dreams. Our unconscious dream life serves us well.
In the early hours of one morning, I was awakened by a powerful dream. In the dream I was looking at an impressive oak tree, its massive trunk bearing equally massive boughs and branches. Each bough looked strong, healthy, full of life. But as I looked my admiration changed to massive anxiety, fear even. The boughs were crumbling, disintegrating, coming apart and in a matter of moments they fractured and fell to the ground. The sight was devastating. The abundance of life that I had been marvelling at, was no more. I was not only deeply shocked at what I saw, but also shocked as I hadn’t noticed that all was not well.
My dream was made even more powerful as whilst this drama of sudden decay unfolded, a woman was singing softly in the background the nursery rhyme ‘Rock A-bye Baby in the Tree Top with the haunting line “When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby cradle and all”. With all the boughs now broken on the floor and the women’s haunting singing, I continued to look at them. One by one they morphed into the each of the men who had ended their own lives by suicide over the course of last year.
My distress on waking did not need any clever psychoanalytic interpretation. Each one of the men who went out of my life last year and away from our world were extraordinary individuals. Each a massive presence. All, without fail, contributing something special, inspiring, creative and unique to those around them and their communities. We who knew them, knew that. We saw it. We witnessed it over weeks, months, years and we loved them for it.
As in the dream and in reflection, clearly there was also much that we did not see, much we did not hear, much that was not revealed to us and much we chose not to know about. None of those five men I would have recognised or even thought about as vulnerable. I had never held them in my mind as not being anything else than the wonderful selves and all of what, like the oak tree in my dream, that they magnificently showed to the world. So, when just like the baby the haunting nursery rhyme they in all their vulnerability came crashing down, it was all heartbreakingly too late.
Every parent will know, better than I, what it is to recognise the vulnerability of a new born child. The symbiotic gazes in early life are the skipped beating heart moments between parent and child where vulnerability alone is for the learning. The sacredness of parenthood. For me, not being a father, this experience has been outside of my call. Until this Christmas that is.
Decades of Christmases have come and gone with me gazing on nativity scene after nativity scene. Blessing myself, as we Catholics do, in front of the alabaster baby Jesus’ ranging from cheap and tacky to the stunningly beautiful. But only this year did I notice the immense vulnerability of the baby in the hay, legs outstretched and arms reaching up. I noticed it as never before.
My only response seemed like the only response possible. As we say daily in the Divine Office, it was to ‘bow and bend low’. From that position it was possible to enter into that specific manifest vulnerability of the new born child. From bowing and bending low I have found it possible to weep for and with all the vulnerabilities of the world.
My dream however was a powerful reminder that pious acts before a nativity crib are one thing. The vulnerabilities unfolding daily in the crib of life quite another.
For my five men who died, the question must be asked, where was there room for their vulnerability? Where could their vulnerability be recognised witnessed, met, valued? Why can we in symbiotic empathy enter with open hearts into the vulnerability of a child and yet not do so in relation to the same vulnerability when manifest in an adult.? Why as adults can we not value and venerate the very real vulnerabilities of our adult lives?
Truth is, we do not grow out of our needs and vulnerabilities. We remain, in ways hidden by our adult self, always something of the vulnerable precious baby we once were. Truth is, when we don’t allow room for vulnerabilities, that of others and most certainly those of our own, then our ignored fragility comes with a very high price indeed. In life and for even the most magnificent of oak trees boughs break and do come crashing down. Oh that my dream may have a different ending.
Br Stephen Morris FCC
