About ten years ago, I used to volunteer for a suicide/depression hotline. A lot of the calls were time wasters (prank calls, heavy breathers, guys that would try to keep you on the line while they mastubated) but there were also some genuinely harrowing cases. We were all trained for "actives" (as in active suicide) and since all calls were anonymous and untraceable, there was no way to intervene unless the person volunteered their details and asked for help. They were rare but they happened.

This guy called when I was on nightshift. He'd already taken an overdose and just didn't want to die alone. He didn't give his name or location, he just wanted someone to talk to him while he slipped away. There was nothing I could do, I just stayed on the line with him, listening to his breathing get slower and slower and his words get more and more incoherent, just kept telling him that I was there, that I wasn't going anywhere. Eventually he stopped responding, it was just slow breathing and then there was a thump, like the phone slipping out of his hand and falling. I stayed on the line listening to silence for hours, every few minutes saying, "I'm here, I'm still here", hoping that he'd pick up the phone again, tell me where he was, ask for help. He didn't. Eventually my shift partner knocked on the booth, because I'd been in the call for so long, and I just wrote "active" on a piece of paper and held it up to the glass. She came in and sat with me and we waited some more and eventually we put the phone down.

I'll never know what really happened to him. I'll never know if he died while I was on the line, if someone found him, if he regained consciousness eventually or if the whole thing was just an elaborate sick prank. I went through a phase of obsessively hunting for suicide obituaries for that date but I didn't even have a last name or age or location to narrow it down to (it was a national hotline) and this was nearly ten years ago, when this kind of inform wasn't as searchable online.

I don't know how to feel about it. If he died, I'm glad he didn't die alone. But I wish I'd been able to do something better than just be a voice on the end of the line. I wish he'd called before he took the pills.

Guys, if anyone out there is thinking of ending it, please reach out and pick up the phone. Call someone before it's too late, not after.