The Last Right

by Marianne Thamm

  love

  C

  From: Craig Schonegevel

  To: Michael Quinton Gilbertson

  Sent: 7 August 2009 17:52

  Subject: Tks

  Quin

  For all that you have done, for all that you are doing, for what you will do, I thank you with every fibre of my being. You have a beautiful heart.

  I have created my own “green light” as the manner in which Dignitas is dealing with me is appalling. Know that I will keep you in my heart always.

  C

  From: Michael Quinton Gilbertson

  To: Craig Schonegevel

  Sent: 7 August 2009 07:25

  Subject: Re: Thx

  Dear Craig

  Never have I been more lost for words when trying to write an email. I want more than anything to plead with you to wait at the red light but I know this would just cause you more pain.

  You are more of a man than I could ever be.

  With much love and admiration

  Quinton

  From: Patsy Schonegevel

  To: Brian Gilbertson

  Sent: 12 August 2009 12:58

  Subject: Thank You

  Hi Brian

  Thank you for making a special trip to see Craig.

  Coming home from the Radisson Hotel this afternoon, Craig and I were both in tears. Craig just carried on saying what a beautiful heart and man you are. I could not agree more. Thank you for helping us to deal with this situation. The days are very long here at home.

  You remain my soft pillow to fall on and I could not love you more.

  Patsy

  From: Brian Gilbertson

  To: Patsy Schonegevel

  Sent: 12 August 2009 08:34

  Subject: Re: Thank You

  I am so pleased I could see you (pl). Am filled anew with admiration and awe for how you (pl) are dealing with this awful situation. What a fine young man C is. Mature and reflective and with such dignity and gravitas.

  We will feel some of the anguish of your night in Gethsemane.

  With Love

  B

  11

  George Irvine: Sacred Turf – Encountering a Mystery

  George Irvine is a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner and former Methodist Church of South Africa Bishop of the Grahamstown District, and later Natal Coastal.

  He is well known for his outspokenness and uncompromising resistance to state oppression during the most violent years of apartheid rule, organising and leading a number of marches, assisting activists and their families and establishing the counselling service LifeLine.

  For his contribution, Irvine has been honoured as one of the Forgotten Faces exhibition on permanent display at the Red Location Museum, named after one of the oldest townships in Port Elizabeth. The museum is part of an urban renewal project that aims to keep alive the memory of the anti-apartheid struggle in that region.

  Although retired, Irvine remains active in a variety of fields, having started the Institute for Spirituality. He continues to preach, offer spiritual counselling and whatever else may be required of him. He also writes a popular weekly column for The Week End Post, a local English newspaper.

  Irvine, an avuncular man in his seventies, works out of a sunny but utilitarian office at the rear of the Humewood Methodist Church in Port Elizabeth.

  Humewood is a prosperous and well-manicured suburb, close to the warm Indian Ocean, the popular Kings and Humewood beaches, as well as one of the city’s main tourist attractions, Bay World, an oceanarium and snake park.

  One morning in April 2009, Patsy and Craig walked into his office. Craig’s conversations with George took place over five months, sometimes twice a week, before Craig ended his life.

  My first impression of Craig was that he looked to me like an average young man. I knew absolutely nothing about his background or where he was coming from. Patsy and Craig walked into my office together.

  He began by asking me what I thought about suicide.

  I told him that, sometimes, I could understand why people take their own lives. I began talking almost philosophically about it. I told him I have had the privilege of reading letters from people who have committed suicide and I can understand why they do that.

  When I read the letters those who have committed suicide have written to me, this course of action is, for them, the completely logical thing to do.

  But sometimes there is another option and I think we have to be very careful that we know exactly what we are talking about because I am not saying that suicide is right, nor am I saying that the person who commits suicide is wrong. And so the discussion continued.

  Patsy spoke and said that Craig wanted to take his own life.

  And I said, “Tell me, Craig, why is that? Help me to understand.”

  And that began a five-month journey until he took his life in the end. And the journey for me was frightening and fulfilling because Craig wasn’t talking so much about suicide but about ending his life as a whole person and going to be with God.

  Craig had a profound faith and he was totally convinced that God would agree with him doing this because he said he did not want to get to the stage of lying in a bed no longer his real self but a body that would only be a shell because of necessary surgical procedures. The thought of visitors coming to see his “shell” was frightening in the extreme. And so he asked, “George, can you imagine what that would be like? Would God want that for me?”

  He never asked the question why God would do this to him. He accepted the journey he had been on and by the time he came to me, he had decided how this journey was going to end.

  He never once said to me: “Why did God allow this to happen?”

  I remember saying to Craig one day, “Don’t you feel any anger with God?”

  He said, “No, I really don’t. I have been well looked after with this thing. But I now know how it will end and I refuse to let it end like that and I believe that God would want me to finish it in a dignified way.”

  So, because of my attitude to counselling, I was then able to enter his world and to walk with him on his piece of sacred turf, which was, “You know how much I love God. You know how much God loves me. He doesn’t want me to go on like this.”

  So, he would come week after week after week. He began to care for me as much as I cared for him. He would say things like, “You are looking tired this morning, George. Have you been working too hard?”

  And it became a mutuality.

  After a month or so, we would talk about his relationships at home. He felt totally understood by his mother but he felt that his dad didn’t quite understand him. That his dad was very perplexed and worried by it all.

  Neville, Craig and I walked very closely together towards the end. Very closely!

  Sometimes Craig thought that Neville was angry with his mother who did not want to go out with him any more because she wanted to be with Craig. All of it understandable, of course. He would write letters to his dad. But eventually his relationship with his dad shifted to one of deep trust.

  What was really difficult for Craig was that after he approached Dignitas and had paid his money to join as a member, he didn’t hear from them for a long time. He was very angry about this.

  For Craig it was all about the future and how he would end up. It’s a bit like a person who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when they think: “I don’t want to go down that road.”

  The difference here was Craig was 28. He could see what his life would become if he allowed the illness to go on. Before he came to me he was playing golf, walking the dog. He tried really hard to make something of his life, to find happiness. I can’t emphasise this enough.

  And as he contemplated his end, without taking his own life, all he could see was more scalpels, more intrusions and maybe the removal of more organs.

  He said, “What if they want to take out my remaining kidney, what if something happens to my liver? Do I want to be on dialysis for the rest of my life?
”

  What happened to him as a child, I think, lived with him and he could look up the road, and these things were beginning to grow again and he could see, more than anyone else could, what would happen to his body if all these intrusions were allowed.

  He felt he couldn’t cope with that.

  Craig made a pact with God that he would finish it in a dignified way and that God would receive him, without his body that was going to be left behind, and that God would welcome him.

  It was more than unusual.

  I remember speaking to a doctor friend, telling him about a young man who wanted to take his own life, asking what I should do.

  And she said, “Put him into Hunterscraig,” which is the local psychiatric hospital.

  And that helped me to focus.

  Could I do that to Craig?

  No way.

  What we were all doing was trying to help a person who was sure of his decision to take his own life.

  Craig felt very much to me like an older person. He couldn’t form relationships with someone his own age. He was mentally and emotionally and spiritually beyond someone in his age group.

  It made it very difficult for him, in his life, to find someone his own age. For Craig, sharing was important, talking about what he felt; unlike most men who keep it close to their chests, he was happy to sit and talk to someone who listened.

  I have worked in pastoral counselling with a number of depressed people and I have personally sent them to psychiatrists for medication. Never once did I think Craig was depressed.

  I have been counselling people with depression for 40 years and I know what it is like to live with depression. It would have been normal for me to have spotted it if he had been depressed and say to him: “You know, you should revisit your medication just to help you over the hump.”

  For many depressed people, once they get over the hump, they can see things differently. Depression need not be a fatal illness. I often tell people that I will go with them to a psychologist or psychiatrist if they want me to.

  But I never once said to Craig, “I think you need medication for depression.”

  He was totally focused on what he felt he needed to do.

  I didn’t take notes as we talked and we ambled up and down a number of metaphorical streets. He told me about his family life, his worry about his father. We also talked about his need to help himself to die and turn his back on everything else.

  And I said, “You realise what you are doing, Craig? You are going to bring to an end your earthly friendships. You are going to bring to an end the earthly love that people have for you.”

  And he would say, “I will tell them why I am going to do it and they will understand.”

  He said that if things went on the way they were going health wise, he would be physically there but he would really be gone. He said people would be coming to visit someone who wasn’t there any more and that God did not want that for him or for them and that he needed to take his life “so that I can go while I still have my senses”.

  So, we kept on like that. He would be here for half an hour, an hour and then he would come back the following week.

  Sometimes we just talked about life. About some of the experiences I have had, some of the experiences he had. We shared, strangely, with no sense of an age gap.

  He called me George and he was very grateful that I was his friend.

  At some point there were religious ministers who got to hear about our conversations and I was criticised for not getting Craig off his line of thinking about taking his own life.

  His grandmother, whom he loved very much, was against it almost right up until the last two or three weeks when she came to live with the family.

  She went to her minister and told him about Dignitas. And everybody she shared with was kind of quietly agnostic and did not want to get involved.

  It was very, very hard for the family. It amazed me that they stayed together because, very often, this type of stress shatters people and families. But in the end, each person in Craig’s life played the role they needed to play or did what was required.

  Craig had enormous faith in his mother’s understanding of him and what he was going through. She was prepared to go to Dignitas with him. He was so convinced of her understanding of him that he knew that she would be incredibly sad and that she would miss him, but he felt that she would not wish him back in his present condition.

  It is almost unforgivable that human beings have to go through this because they were caught between their love for him and their need to support his decision.

  And in a way I was caught up as well, in my love and concern for him and setting him free from my limitations on him, setting him totally free from any requirements I wanted to make. I could make no requirements, no requests. I had to travel with him on this road.

  After I buried him I went for therapy. I was dried out emotionally and spiritually. So I went to a friend who was also a fine therapist and spent a couple of hours with her. She affirmed me, as I was asking myself, “Did I do the right thing? Could I have handled it a different way?”

  I left the therapist feeling a lot better, trusting that I had done the right thing. I know that in the end it is not about me but about the person who seeks my help.

  One of the things that helped was to remember that I was dealing with a mystery and not a problem. If I turned Craig’s situation into a problem, I would have tried to solve it.

  If something is a mystery, the only way you can encounter it is to enter it and experience it, to move into that mystery as deeply as you can and to treat the questions and answers as doors through which you walk, continually seeking deeper insights and truth.

  At no stage did I have the answers. Each answer that came was a door through which I walked in order to reach deeper understanding.

  I would, in walking this path, find doors that would take me closer and closer to Craig’s heart, to the mystery that was Craig, and that, for me, is perhaps the most important thing about how you treat another person.

  I see myself as a “second-word person”. By that I mean that I cannot speak unless I hear the first word that someone wants to speak. Once I hear that first word, I can speak the second word.

  And that is the way I was with Craig. It was about listening to him. I was then able to distinguish in my mind the difference between suicide and dying to find life.

  The people who have committed suicide that I have dealt with have been very worried people, very distressed and often depressed, and we have worked hard at leading them towards healing.

  Eventually we lose some of them because they take their lives when we least expect it. In fact, when they are beginning to feel better they are at their most vulnerable for they now have the energy to take their own lives.

  I have wept over suicides. Sometimes to describe the way suicides see the world, I tell the family how some people look at the world through the crinkly glass in the bathroom. The other side is always out of shape. Forgive him or her, they were looking at things out of shape.

  And then some of these families would say to me, “Would God receive him or her?” And I would say, “Let’s pretend that you and your husband took over from St Peter at the gates of heaven for a day and your son came walking up having committed suicide. Would you let him in?”

  They would reply, “Yes, we would embrace him.” And I would reply, “I don’t think that God would do less. I think that God is more loving than any of us can believe… If you would embrace your loved one just imagine what God would do?”

  I can still see Craig sitting in my office, and I would see none of the symptoms one would expect from someone so intent on suicide. Let me try to describe how he came across to me.

  He was a person who had made a decision, an almost clinical decision that, because God loved him so much, God would understand if he took his own life. So there was no treatment necessary, he was like an arrow aiming for the bull’s-eye.

  Th
ere was no way I felt like stopping him. Why? Because I felt I was in his world and it was right for him. And to be quite honest, if I had tried to stop him, he would have had no one to go to.

  He was a gift to my life. And I think I was a gift to him. He taught me some of the deepest lessons I have learned. One was, and it was the most significant, learning to put myself to the side and totally enter his world. Being with him was an unrepeatable experience.

  Or to put it another way, Craig and his parents and their relationship with me was unique. I know I keep on saying this but it was special. Mind you it was a journey that had its critics. I didn’t mind this for they were looking at things from the outside.

  So, Craig enriched my life. The therapist I went to see told me that she had been doing a paper on altruism and my story to her was the closest she had come to altruism. She said, what you are weeping about now is the cost of altruism where you are able to put what you believe to the side, what you have been brought up to believe to the side, what you would actually teach to the side. What you would actually preach to the side, everything, everything goes to the side and you are with this young man on his journey.

  So, can I say to you that that experience enriched me? I am not giving myself marks for being altruistic. I was put in a position where I needed to forget myself.

  I think Craig moved in his thinking from performance to meaning. He came here talking about performance. How he had to end his life. And we went from action into meaning. It was the meaning that kept him going.

  When I counsel suicides, they usually tell me how they are going to do it. Craig didn’t.