Suicide

I mentioned in the '6 things about me' post I once tried to talk someone out of suicide. This was a nurse who'd had a marriage end in divorce. She started calling me at times, always late night, to ask how I'd do it. I always tried to move it to "I've had bad and good, but it hasn't been worth that", which irritated her. She'd never speak of why she asked, she'd just call up and ask.

One night it got more specific: "If you were going to kill yourself with a .32 pistol, how would you do it?" followed by "in the mouth, in the temple, where?" Scared hell out of me. I'd known she was thinking about it, this time the questions and voice said she was near to it. Spent a while trying to talk around it/out of it, starting with "I wouldn't", until she got pissed and hung up. Tried to call her back, no answer. Tried to call some people. No good. Finally called the police and described the conversation and they said they'd check(yes, strictly speaking it's anyones' right to check out; I was so rattled I wanted to do something to prevent it). PD called back a while later- it's now about 0230- to say she'd answered the door, said she was with a friend, and had no idea what the officer was talking about. I figured at this point if there was someone else there she was less likely to do it, so I went to bed.

Next night, got home to find a message: "I'll make a deal with you. I won't bother you with my problems again and you won't send the police after me. OK?" And no further calls.

About three weeks later I found out she'd done it. She had a good job, lots of friends, but had decided that if she reached this birthday without being a: married and b: pregnant, it wasn't worth going on(found out all this after the fact). Day before the birthday she'd borrowed a gun from a friend "to go target shooting". He wasn't suspicious because she'd done so before. On her birthday she put on a nightgown, sat down on her bed and blew her brains out.

I mentioned she was a nurse; that's important- to me at least- because of the method. She had access to drugs of all kinds, and could have ended her life with any of them. One of her closer friends(one of those who'd said "as long as she's talking about it, she's not going to do it") related that she'd mentioned that if she did it, she'd use a gun 'to make sure she couldn't be saved'. I call bullshit. I think she decided that if she did it, as many people as possible were going to be affected as much as possible("I'm not happy so why should anyone else be?"), so she borrowed a gun so the friend would have to live with it for the rest of his life. Which pissed me off enormously.

Still does.