The night I stopped thinking about suicide

By Chestnut P. Booth

Early in my career, I went through a six-month period when suicide was always on my mind. I was a young mother, working, in graduate school, and very active at church. My husband and I were still learning how to make the marriage work. And I wanted to do everything perfectly. But I just couldn't do it all right, all the time. I reached a point where suicide seemed the only way out of the pressure I was feeling.

I am deeply grateful that, at the same time, spiritual truths from Mary Baker Eddy's book Science and Health were also always in my thought, correcting and guiding me. Two statements in particular helped me to stay focused on patiently working out my problems so that I didn't just take them with me to the other side of the grave: "Death is not a stepping-stone to Life, immortality, and bliss" (p. 203) and, "As death findeth mortal man, so shall he be after death, until probation and growth shall effect the needed change" (p. 291).

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