Sometime last year at a house party, a handful of us talked away from the dancing around a keg downing whiskey shots, sharing stories of people who forever altered the course of everyone around them after they killed themselves. “If only people talked more about it?” my friend asked. His mom had taken her life weeks earlier. Yeah, we all nodded.

It’s easy to nod. It’s harder to make change.

I probably don’t have to tell you that each story is a different complicated mix of circumstances and motivations. And to be perfectly honest, that night I didn’t know the right thing to say either. Yet it’s not just me, lots of people fear saying the wrong thing so they say nothing. But if we don’t keep talking things through, whose death might we fail to prevent?

Not too long ago the same friend surrounded by all the same friends said he too now had suicidal thoughts.

So that night I said, “If ever again you find yourself alone in a place where you feel there’s no way out. No matter what time it is, midnight, 4 AM or whatever, you call me.” I paused for a moment; the whole room breathed. Then I looked straight into him and said, “And I will come over there and shoot you myself” — nervous laughter percolated around the group — “because then no one will wonder what we could have done to stop you. No one will struggle with being angry at you, then sad for you, then upset with ourselves, and all that crap.”

And that is what this scene from The NW is about. It looks twenty years into the future at two characters who had that same conversation. He tries to kill himself. And she does something amazing to stop him. So amazing in fact, that a lot of people might call it the wrong thing.