By Sarah E. Murphy

Today is September 10, which is also Suicide Awareness Day here in America. It’s something that impacts all of us, whether we address it or not, for it doesn’t discriminate. There are many people I keep close to my heart who have died by suicide, and I think of them often. My father’s two Irish immigrant uncles – my beloved grandfather’s older brothers – whose tragic deaths I only learned about in adulthood when editing a memoir for my father. Bobby, my cool California cousin, and the first grandchild on my dad’s side, whom I never had the chance to know until we bonded on my cross-country trip in 1998, and died in 2009 at the age of 57. Jocelyn, the daughter of my dad’s college mentor, who became a friend and mentor to me by giving me my first paid writing job when she hired me to do the newsletter for her Waltham brewpub. She died in August of 2015, and I couldn’t attend her funeral because my father was in a Boston hospital bed facing his own impending death at the time. The day after her identity was confirmed on the local news, I suddenly smelled her Jessica McClintock perfume in the hospital elevator.

The brave survivors of clergy sex abuse, whose stories I’ve heard and cried over, who couldn’t live with the all-encompassing trauma and shame. Parishioners from the  Catholic community right here in my hometown of Falmouth, and St. Patrick’s Church, the parish I attended in my youth, before denouncing the Catholic faith as a teenager. The people who reach out to me privately on Facebook and Instagram to share their loss. Family members and friends of these beautiful souls have confided in me, including one family shattered by the suicide of both father and son. 

I’m also thinking of a scared little girl who, weeks before her college graduation in 1995, initially contemplated suicide because the “alternatives” – giving birth or getting an abortion – seemed unimaginable. If you think you can handle the terror of an unplanned pregnancy after growing up in the purity culture of Catholicism, in which sex out of wedlock is an unspeakable sin, think again. You have absolutely no clue of the weight that shame brings. 

Today, I’m also thinking of David Leonard, who has become a kindred spirit in recent months. David’s childhood abruptly and violently ended at the age of 11 when he was raped by Father Ronald Dorsey at Camp Wyoma in Hindsdale, Massachusetts, a summer camp run by the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers, an order of the Boston Archdiocese. That was just the beginning of a lifetime of trauma and mental abuse inflicted and perpetuated by the Roman Catholic Church, a cover-up and abuse of power that extends all the way to the Vatican, from small town USA to St. Peter’s Square in Rome. 

After years of being scapegoated by the Archdiocese of both Boston and New York, (which later continued under the “leadership” of Sean O’Malley and Timothy Dolan) among many other flying monkeys, including his uncle, a Stigmatine Brother who was the reason he went to the summer camp in the first place. David survived, only to be committed to a psychiatric hospital and subjected to shock treatments, thorazine, and lithium, while dubbed “crazy” by the Church and a “troublemaker” by his uncle. 

David contacted me in April after finding my website and reading my work advocating for survivors of clergy sex abuse, which also includes the spiritual abuse I suffered (and still stuffer) due to the shame of my abortion – having to hide it from family and friends for 25 years, feeling like a liar, a disappointment, and a fraud, all while listening to women like me being vilified and used as political fodder, in a much more unapologetic and disgusting fashion since 2016, which is why I went public in 2020. My mind and body couldn’t take the repressed trauma any longer, particularly since my work is all about the hypocrisy, double standards, and corruption of Catholicism. 

In America, we continue to stigmatize mental health while claiming to be a champion. In 2024, it’s easier to get an assault rifle than an abortion, or a therapist, and people who aren’t willing to connect the dots between reproductive freedom and mental health, whether it’s for their own political or religious prejudice, may very well lose someone to suicide someday. 

Hearing David tell me that no man has the right to control a woman’s body and dictate that personal and painful decision feels like a hug from Heaven from my own dad, who was one of my closest friends, and never knew my secret. I almost told him in 2011 when I was struggling with the decision of motherhood, but I was still controlled by shame.

I’ve written before about the overarching theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” one of my father’s (and my) favorite films. A holiday film on the surface, it’s far deeper, for it addresses suicide. In particular, it underscores the connection between financial insecurity, shame, and suicide, which were contributing factors in my great-uncles’ deaths.

As I write the second article in a series I’m working on about David’s journey, not only am I overwhelmed by the trauma he has endured, I’m inspired by his bravery and moved by his genuinely spiritual nature. He doesn’t have to try to be a loving person, for he is. He doesn’t need a church or a pew. He already has a pure heart. 

He has impacted people like me just by coming into my life from the other end of the telephone. His praise and validation of my writing and social justice work also feel like heavenly hugs from my father at a time I need them more than ever.

I wouldn’t be writing this if David had been successful in his attempt in 1979. I wouldn’t have the honor of today calling him a friend.

“Each man’s life touches so many other lives,” Clarence says to George Bailey.

David Leonard is an angel in mine.

If you’re having suicidal thoughts or you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, isolation, or you just need someone to listen, call 988.