I think you may be misunderstanding me, TonyRey.
Since I have a firm belief in God, I know that my sufferings, as well as everyone else’s are part of God’s Plan. I know that is part of the temporal punishment for sin. Even in my bleakest hour, which wasn’t too long ago, I told myself that suicide would never be the answer, no matter how much I was tempted, because then I would never see the man that I love again, not in this life or the next. I may not ever see him again in this life, but I believe in God, in Heaven and Hell, and I hope in God’s Mercy, and in His Mercy, when I am through with my long time in Purgatory, I will see the man I love again.
I was merely replying to the OP’s question, “in character.” If I did not believe in God, etc., then, at that point 35 months ago, I would have ended it all, because I saw no future and it would have seemed irrational to go on in this life.
To add to what I said about my atheist friends: one of them did come to the end of his rope, and attempted suicide. He planned it all out. He mailed my mother the key to his apartment, told her what to do with his belongings, and told her his plan. He had taken his .45 automatic on the bus with him, as far as the bus line went into the foothills of Los Angeles. He then got out, setting off on foot into the wilderness. He was going to shoot himself, leaving his remains for the coyotes to eat.
Needless to say, our household went into mourning. My mother managed to contact his elderly mother in Kansas to relay the news. It seems that he’d cut off contact with his religious mother some twenty years before. This was long before computers and social networks, and my mother made a great deal of effort to reach her.
A few months later, I was visiting the kids across the street, when my mother let out a shriek heard throughout the neighborhood. Our friend was standing on our front door, in the flesh!
He’d changed his mind, when he got up into the hills, because it was raining. He decided that he didn’t want to die in the rain and the mud. He came back to us, having spent some time at the Salvation Army shelter.
With the help of the SA he was able to get a small room in a downtown flop house, and was looking for work again. We tried to get him to move in with us after he was robbed at knife point of his watch in the building. He was stubborn and said he had two weeks more on his voucher. Near the end of the two weeks, he was taken out of his bed, not even allowed to put his boots on, taken to the roof of the building, and murdered by knife because he had nothing left to be robbed of.
My mother and I have prayed for his soul, all these years, because we do believe in God, even if Bond didn’t. We pray that somehow, deep down, when faced with certain death; maybe even as he lay in his own blood on that rooftop, that he called upon the God of his childhood to save him.
