ABSTRACT
When David Lester asked me to participate in this project, he invited me to consider the potential value of my interest in spirituality and suicide to writing about Katie. As serendipity may have it, a third area of interest emerged in my life work during the past decade which also affects my contribution to this project —that is, my work with post-traumatic stress. “Spirituality” and “post-traumatic stress,” it is argued, are two frequently ignored or de-emphasized factors which affect well-being and suicidality. Katie’s personal struggle in life presents one significant example of how these two factors influence decisions of life and death and how we may view an alternative for healthy transformation in life. It is my hope that this contribution will help others achieve well-being, assist in the valuable work of suicide prevention, and serve as a significant memorial to Katie for her friends and loved ones. Diaries present a distinct glimpse into a person’s life, wherein “the personality of its keeper is richly found” (Leenaars, 1988, p. 37). Katie’s diary portrays the struggle of a young woman who desired well-being passionately, yet was unable to transform her life adequately after her traumatic experiences to achieve this goal. Frustrated, embittered, exhausted, and desperate, she succumbed to the attractiveness of a premature death by suicide as the solution. Katie’s religious faith appears as both substantial and symbolic in her attempt to achieve wellbeing; that is, on the one hand, as a genuine, substantial expression of her faith and hope that salvation was possible now, and, on the other hand, as a symbol of modern society’s departure from life’s ideals, our present “spiritual vacuum,” that is, our “hunger for community, for meaning, for a sense of the transcendent…” (Myers, 2000, p. 262).
