What really matters

Ever talk someone down from suicide? I have. And I forgot all about it until just now. How could I forget something so huge?!

Photo Credit: kainr via Compfight cc

It was 1971 and I was visiting my friend Kay and her little girl Mesha, a two-year-old bundle of energy and joy. But Kay was unhappy. More than unhappy, I realized as she talked—she was seriously depressed. Kay had decided, she told me quite calmly, to kill herself.

At first I didn’t take her seriously—until she began to describe her plans. She had decided who would take care of Mesha, what she would write in her suicide note, everything. She had a gun and she was going to use it tomorrow when her daughter was in daycare.

“But why?” I asked, after trying everything else I could think of to talk her out of it. “Why would you want to leave your beautiful little girl?”

“Because I failed,” she said. “She deserves a mother and a father.”

Kay was a single mom when that meant unwed mother, when that meant hopeless failure in life. Or at least that’s what it meant to Kay. She was beautiful and intelligent and could have had the world on a string, if only she knew it. But there was no convincing her.

“She’ll be better off without me,” she continued.

That’s when I got mad.

“Better off without you? How can you say that? You are the most important person in the world to her.”

I talked and talked, afraid to stop. I told her how my mother had raised me alone after the divorce and my father’s death a few months later, how she worked long hours and had to leave me alone too many times, but she managed to take me on long drives after work, and camping in the summer, and swimming, and sometimes just to the drive-in for dinner because she was too tired to cook. But we were together, and I knew without a doubt that she loved me more than anything. I told Kay how much I still needed my mother, even now as an adult.

And she changed her mind, right then and there. It was like a miracle.

We never talked about that night. A few months later, I moved to California and never saw her again. I went on with my own life of chronic depression, feeling like a failure until I started to pull myself together. I went back to school and began a surprisingly successful career.

Then one day, years later, I ran into an old friend we both knew. I asked about Kay, hoping to hear she was all right. I did. She was in Colorado now, married and raising Mesha and another daughter. Was she happy? I don’t know, but she was alive.

Funny how we can forget what truly matters, isn’t it?

Money and success don’t mean much compared to saving a life, or raising a child, or caring for an elderly parent, or simply loving someone. Now, those are accomplishments to be proud of.

What are you proud of? Tell me in the comments below. I want to know!