Tag Archives: suicide

The recent suicide of WSU quarterback Tyler Hilinski hit me harder than most news stories. I don’t know the circumstances that led up to his death or the state of his mental health, but it made me reflect on the millions of Americans, especially those in my own millennial generation, who suffer from depression and anxiety.

The first time I experienced suicide was when I was 16 and my mom attempted to kill herself through a prescription drug overdose.

Today there is a much more compassionate understanding of the mental and emotional turmoil that would lead someone to take his or her own life and there are no restrictions on funerals for those died this way being held in LDS chapels nor are there any other arrangements that would set them apart from other funerals.

The question of taking any life, even one’s own, is taken very seriously in Buddhism.

As suicide harms the victim as well as those left behind, it is clearly an act with significant consequences.

In light of what I wrote over the past two weeks about grieving and divine healing, I find myself facing a challenge: What would I have said to Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old woman with incurable brain cancer who committed assisted suicide on Nov. 1?