There are some who consider suicide,
You can see it in their eyes,
They forget the hurt of their loved ones
When they fail to say goodbyes,
They see no point in the gift of life,
Say it doesn’t work for them,
But we walk on by, and we let them die
By some careless theorem.

I noticed the girl in the local church
She was down upon her knees,
Her shoulders shaking with silent sobs
As she stared at the altarpiece,
Her eyes were glazed as she walked on by
It was then that I knew, for sure,
She’d be walking off to an awful fate
If she walked alone through the door.

I caught her up and I walked with her
And I said, ‘I know what you think,
But this will pass, it’s a half full glass,
What you have to do is drink.’
She turned a tear-stained eye to me
And she said, ‘But what would you know?
Your life is a bed of roses now,
But mine is a horror show!’

I tried to draw her out from herself
And she seemed to want to talk,
We wandered down to the Esplanade
And went for a long, slow walk,
Her parents, they were divorced, she said,
Her father had disappeared,
Her mother was mired in drugs and drink,
It was DNA she feared.

‘I don’t want to end like her,’ she said,
‘I don’t want to go like him,
My older brother just hanged himself,
I don’t want to go like Tim.
There’s pain and heartache each way I turn,
I shouldn’t be here at all,’
I put my arm round her shoulders then,
And leant on the old seawall.

‘The life you have is a gift from God,
You can’t just throw it away,
We all have the choice to soldier on
To a brighter, better day.’
I thought that my words had helped her then
When I left her, shaking her head,
That was at three in the afternoon,
By six o’clock, she was dead!

David Lewis Paget