Suicide also harms those left behind

Tamno great fan of Michael Portillo: he has struck me as an averagely opportunistic political anima] who has• successfully traded a patchy political career for a successful media one. He often seems smug and a mite shallow.
But in taking on the issue of teenage suicide, in his television documentary Death of a Schoolfriend, he certainly went up in my estimation. Especially since the programme, probing the sudden suicide of a schoolmate from Harrow County Grammar in June 1969, was done with care, sensitivity and lack of egotism.
Gary Findon was almost 16 when he overdosed partly out of an innate melancholy, it seemed, and partly over disappointment with a jilted budding romance. And for more than three decades no one ever spoke about the death: including his parents.
It was distressing to be told of the silence which greeted the boy's death. When Ronnie Findon, his musician dad, went back to work his colleagues simply said nothing as he entered the rehearsal room. I am aware of the cultural differ ence between the Irish and the English way of death: the Irish make as much ado as possible over a bereavement, while the English regard death as intensely private. The Findon family had, it seemed, a Jewish funeral: but not the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, which involves a week of open and manifest mourning.
What Michael Portillo highlighted was the legacy of suicide. It is not, and never can be. an act free of consequences. The so-called "right to suicide" means inflicting an aftermath of loss, emotional pain, bitterness, remorse and family wounds unto the third generation.
This is one of the reasons why traditional religions have anathemised what Hamlet called "self-slaughter". At the root of the taboo is not cruelty but the prevention of that dreadful legacy. In contrast to John Prescott who turns every television opportunity into an argument Michael Portillo focused on the feelings of others: in his quarter century of public life, this teaching documentary showing the suffering inflicted by suicide is perhaps the best thing he has yet ' accomplished.
here are, as I have mentioned. many fine aspects in the political tradition inspiring Barack Obama, particularly that of Martin Luther King.
But it takes Peter Hitchens, writing in the Mail on Sunday, to put his finger, somewhat robustly, on the weak spots. Hitchens, always fiercely honest. castigates Obama's "cowardly voting record" and "his blundering trip to Africa": Obama is an "undistinguished
and conventionally Left-wing machine politician" whose oratory amounts to "brainless slogans". Mr Obama, says Hitchens, reporting the election from the States. "is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in Americathe Chicago Democratic Party.
Peter Hitchens pinpoints an uneasiness for Catholic supporters of the new president: his "astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion" (which includes federal funding of abortion at any stage in the pregnancy).
Nonetheless, 54 per cent of American Catholics voted for the Democratic President, many in defiance of their bishops' moral guidance.
In general, I believe an incumbent leader with a democratic mandate should be given a fair wind. But many problems loom.
we went out to supper last week where the restaurant waiter was a pleasant young man, but slightly hesitant in manner. "I'm sorry if I'm a bit uncertain,he said. "But this is my first day at the
job." What had he done before? "Oh I still do it, during the daytime. I'm with the prison service. I deal with young offenders." Working part-time as a waiter supplemented his income and cheered him up a bit. Are the adolescents in his care difficult to handle? "Very challenging! I'm used to plenty of abuse!"
Do any of the young offenders come from intact families? "Not a single one," he said. Do any of them re-make their lives? "Occasionally. Just occasion
ally:, 6 / am a Catholic. In case of an accident, please notify the nearest Catholic priest" a sentence often printed in the front of Catholic diaries.
At the rewarding one-day conference on G K Chesterton last weekend, held by the Chesterton Institute, Dr Dermot Quinn of Seton Hall University gave us the celebrity version of this: "I am a Very Important Catholic. In case of an accident, please notify the nearest bishop! .
mary@mary-kenny_com