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This is Catherine. She was tall and thin and beautiful. She was so intelligent that she made even the most well adjusted among us envious. She had been raped twice and once saw her two-year old son lying dead in a pool of blood on a twisting country road where a teenage boy was driving too fast to stop. Then one day ten years ago, while having ventured only slightly into middle age, she picked up a gun, put it to her head, and pulled the trigger.
Since then, I've had my anti-suicide argument ready. Commit suicide and your enemies win. One by one, they'll venture forward with words of how they always knew you were a loser, of how they had expected your ultimate failure all along. Do you really want that?
I often rehearsed that speech in my mind, but no occasion arose for me to use it until last year. A friend came to my door to say goodbye; she couldn't take the physical and emotional pain anymore. I then presented my prepared speech as fervently and eloquently as possible. My friend began to nod her head and smile. She was to go to Birmingham for a medical appointment the next day; she would wait.
The doctors in Birmingham gave my friend three months to live. She died in three weeks. Perhaps my speech was wasted, but perhaps those extra three weeks of her life had a lasting impact on someone else out there.
I just wish someone could have been there to do as much for Catherine.
