To help people think through the issues of depression and suicidality on RUOK? Day on September 10 we are sharing this challenging article, written some years ago by the Rev David Mansfield. 

I recently commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the death of a man who was one of my dearest friends.

I did it quietly, over coffee, with a couple of mutual friends. We recalled some of the ways our lives were blessed by our friend. We drank our coffee pensively and prayed together, thanking God again for the gift of life and friendship.

My friend died alone, in despair, in the dark hours of a late Saturday night. For the past 20 years I have lived with the ambiguity of my actions, or should I say, my inactions, on the night of his death.

I knew he was very low. He had spent the previous week in our home, as he often did, as a kind of halfway house between hospital and his own home. I knew he wasn’t in good shape. But then he hadn’t been in good shape for most of the previous 25 years.

In the last 10 years of his life we’d made a pact. He promised to tell me whenever the temptation to end his life became overpowering. I promised that, when he rang, I would drop everything and come to him. I would stay with him for as long as it took to help him step back from the brink. It worked until it didn’t work.

I began to ring him. It was mid-evening and I had just returned home from a wedding reception. I had the receiver in my hand and was poking in the numbers. But then I remembered that he had plans to be out that night and I thought he might not be home yet. So, I hung up before it rang out, or before he had a chance to answer, if he happened to be at home.

The autopsy estimated the time of death at around midnight. Could my phone call have been a circuit breaker? May it have saved him? Or was he already past the point of no return? Questions like these taunted me for months, even years, after his death.

More than 2100 people in Australia take their life each year [by 2018 that number had risen to 3046]. The group most at risk are young people between 15 and 24. These figures are so frightening and frequent that most Australians will be touched by this tragedy through their network of family members or friendships.

“The pain was so awful, I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.”

Many others attempt to take their life but are intercepted in time, or are giving out a desperate cry for help. Just in the past 12 months a friend has attempted to take his life twice. He trusted people way past the point of naivety. He seemed hurt beyond ever being able to hope again. He told me, “The pain was so awful, I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up”.

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with “trauma, loss and circumstantial depression”. An unexpected sequence of events turned my life upside down. It felt like a builder’s wrecking ball smashing through my heart in slow motion. I was urged to seek intervention. But I just tried to push on in denial, believing, as I had been doing since adolescence, that I was indestructible.

Good friends, one a doctor, could read the signs. They persisted with me and organised a visit to a specialist. I was told with the right medical help (counselling and meds), I would get through it in 18 months. That prognosis was accurate almost to the day.

But I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that a residue of grief and trauma remain. From time to time I process these feelings with friends. I am blessed to have some friends who regularly ask me how I am – not as a superficial greeting, but as a meaningful reference to that painful episode in my life. I know of friends who pray for me every day. Others do frequently. I am forever grateful for their care.

Our nation now acknowledges a day, RUOK (Are you okay?) Day, designed to heighten our awareness and deepen our sensitivity towards those suffering from mental health issues and emotional injuries.

Holiday seasons can be times when people may feel, even more acutely, their despair, loneliness and sense of hopelessness. May they be times when we aren’t so distracted that we forget our friends, who feel they have little to celebrate and nothing to look forward to.

“I want to assure you that hope is only an outstretched hand away.”

My dying friend left me a suicide note, assuring me, and asking me to assure others, that he loved us and valued our love for him, and didn’t want us to beat ourselves up or feel there was more we could have done. His note even said that he was praying that God would forgive him for what he was doing and hoped we would meet again in heaven.

But even his dying words, scrawled on a piece of scrap paper, as precious as they were and are, didn’t – and haven’t – eased the pain and the feelings of failure that I didn’t do enough.

You may be struggling like my friend, deep in despair, hoping that an endless sleep will sever you from the pain. I want to assure you that hope is only an outstretched hand away. Take that hand, the hand of a friend; and, above all, the nail-scarred hands of the Friend of friends. Take those hands. They will ease your pain and prevent further pain that you may otherwise leave with others.

You may be like me, beaten up by a friend’s unnecessary death. You will need to move on, but keep holding out a hand to those who feel there is no hope.

Are you unsure whether to make the call, assuring a friend that you are there for them, and will always be? Are you thinking that it won’t matter if you leave it until tomorrow, or after the weekend?

Make the call.

Always make the call.

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