Okay, this may not be a favorite response but since it's a legit question, I'm going to give a proper answer without covering dark bits.
Until about 3 and a half years ago, I'd attempted suicide roughly 45 times in my life. I'd been doing this since I was 6 years old. Yes, that's not a typo. I was 6 years old when I first tried to throw myself in front of a car and my godbrother pulled me out of the way. It was a warped spiral from then on.
There were a LOT of reasons for this. Reasons far too numerous to delve into here without hijacking your thread but this unfortunate cycle continued, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. There was the time that I tried to throw myself in front of the metro train but a stranger stopped me, and I didn't even realize I was doing it. I just felt completely hollowed out and sad. And like I couldn't begin to express that sadness. There was the time that I found out that someone I'd trusted had done the exact worst thing he could possibly do to someone with my history and I just said "f*ck it. You're pointless." and left, only to have another friend who witnessed the exchange call the cops, somehow knowing that the worst decision I could make at that moment was probably being made.
The thing that woke me up was my own uncles suicide. I walked out of my room early in the morning, during one of my rare goofy and happy moments, and my mom and dad are looking incredibly serious. I was roughly around 22 or 23. I honestly can't remember because the rest of the next two years went by in a very intense blur. The thing I remember most is my mom saying that my uncle was dead. That he had killed himself in MY CHILDHOOD HOME. The place where the only good memories I ever had, remained untainted. He had offed himself after YEARS of emotionally abusing me and adventurously abusing alcohol. Suddenly, this person who I lived constantly dreading visits from because all he could ever do was criticize, ostracize, and humiliate me was dead. And I looked at my dad and said "She's lying, right? She's lying. He's not dead. He's not dead, right, daddy?" and for the second time in my life my dad saw me crying in a broken down on the floor in utter disbelief.
Oh I cried often, I just never cried like that in front of him. My dad could never handle it. It made HIM break, too. So he looks at me and shakes his head very slowly and says "No, nena. She's not."
I don't know why I was so upset. Maybe it's because I never told him the truth. I never told him I was learning German because he loved Germany when he was stationed there in the Military and I wanted to be closer with him. I never told him that I loved him and wanted him to be the uncle I used to know, so "can you TRY to go to AA? Can you try to NOT let this vice take over everything you are?" I never asked him to try. I was pissed at him for everything he did, but I never had the guts to ask him what he could try to do.
I never let myself get angry with him honestly, either. Instead, I hurt myself. I hurt my family emotionally every time I tried to off myself, but I never once called him out on his shit.
I had lived dishonestly. And now he was dead and my mom was broken. My grandparents were broken. My little cousin had no idea what had happened to his dad and hell, he might never know. It's not my place to put that on his shoulders.
It woke ME up though. I got angry at him openly this time. When I went to my grandfathers funeral a few years later, I went to my uncles plot and told him everything. I told him I hated him. That he was selfish and let me down. That he abused everything around him and couldn't appreciate the good.
I told him I was never going to be like him. I'd never let the addiction trait that he and grandpa had conquer me and that I'd live on, just to spite him.
But then that decision to live on to spite him became a simple decision to live on. I saw the anime Noein and it made me feel a little bit better. As if maybe, somewhere in the distance, my uncle hadn't made all those horrible decisions and that rather than hoping that some distant me doesn't make the same ones, I'd be active in not making horrible decisions for myself, in the now, in this universe.
So here I am, almost 10 years later, still kicking it real and trying to be a positive within my society.
Sorry for such a long ramble. And thanks for asking a real question. People should do that more often. It's an amazing conversation waiting to happen.