themarginalian.org · 11 hours ago

Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline...

Poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman spent time as a volunteer crisis counselor at a suicide prevention hotline, and what she discovered there reaches far beyond the mechanics of talking someone back from the edge. Drawing on her 1998 book *A Slender Thread*, she traces the fragile, high-stakes relationship between counselor and caller - particularly with a woman named Louise, whose survival one desperate night required Ackerman to break a promise, send in the police, and then sit alone with the uncertainty of whether she had done right. Ackerman writes that a counselor's task is to put "windows and doors" in the tunnel of suicidal thinking, restoring the one thing despair systematically destroys: the sense that choice exists. Weeks later, a postcard arrived from Louise - she had sought help, found work, begun volunteering again - and with it came a question Ackerman turns outward to all of us: "People take our lives in their hands all the time - parents, mentors, lovers, teachers, patrons. How often do they hear from us?" The story quietly insists that the thread connecting one human life to another is both more slender and more sustaining than we remember to acknowledge.