Lutheran Pastor Recalls Productive Life Stolen by Mental Illness
A Funeral Mass and Service of Holy Communion was held in Brooklyn's St. John-St. Matthew-Emanuel Lutheran Church two days before Christmas for the brilliant, NYC-born writer Ned Vizzini, who tragically leapt to his death last Thursday at age 32. Foremost on the mind of every speaker at the gorgeous tribute attended by perhaps four hundred people was the welfare of Vizzini's devoted teenaged readers, many of whom, like Vizzini himself, have struggled or been hospitalized with depression and mental illness. Reverend David Parsons was quick to clarify: "Ned didn't commit suicide. Mental illness took his life from him."
Vizzini's sister emphasized that it was important to Ned that his fans never lose hope. Ned was able to turn "demons into muses," she said, when he wrote the critically-acclaimed books "It's Kind of a Funny Story," and "Be More Chill." She praised him for his humor and his "emotional honesty." Vizzini's brother told charming, funny stories of childhood, described how Vizzini had been loving his Los Angeles screenwriting job, and expressed gratitude for his sibling's most important legacies--his ability to write about depression with grace and humor, and a toddler son, who didn't yet know what death was (which is as it should be, he said). Vizzini's god-mother also spoke, saying "Life is way bigger than any story we can tell about it." Most moving perhaps was the reading of the following passage (Matthew 6:25-29), which Vizzini once stated was of comfort to him in hard times.
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these."
Also read: This passage from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Psalm 77 and Romans 8:31-35, 37-39. Hymns selected: Shall We Gather at the River? and Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.
