Article June 21, 1993 Issue

What stopped me (from suicide)?

Judith Hardy Olson

THE thought of suicide came suddenly and seemed to surround me. Not by that name, though. (I'd have been alert to the word suicide.) Comfort and sweetness—that's what it promised. Yet something stopped me.

All this happened late one night a few weeks after my husband had passed on. While driving home alone, I came to a bridge under construction. The guardrail was missing, I noticed, and two barricades had been moved. "Why, anyone could drive right off this bridge and plunge into the water below," I said aloud. In that same split second I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to do just that. The pull was so strong that said, "Then we'll be together again." How sweet, comforting; quick and easy.

While something kept me from giving in to that pull, these thoughts really scared me. Shocked me, too! I was so shaken, there was no way I could go to sleep that night without first getting some answers. Two questions loomed large in my mind: What had come over me to make me want to do such a thing? And what had stopped me?

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