When the phone rings at 1:00 am

It was 1:00 am when my phone rang and I knew as I reached for it to answer that it would not be good news. When the phone rings in the middle of the night it is never good news.

A woman was calling, crying, to tell me that her son had just committed suicide by taking a massive prescription drug overdose. Both the mother and her son work for us in the warehouse, third shift. So she was calling to let me know that they would not be at work this morning. The bad news was a shock – I had no idea her son was so depressed that he would ever do anything like that and now I feel guilty for not paying more attention to him. How could I not see that something was so terribly wrong in his life that he would do this? But then, it came as a complete surprise to his mother, too.

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