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What was the point?

As a doctor, Jos knew about depression. Postsurgical patients were often low after life-altering events, and, while he would send the seriously affected ones to minders, he had been trained to deal with the symptoms if there wasn’t proper backup available. But understanding depression didn’t make him immune to it. There was knowing, and then there was feeling.

The idea of leaving it all behind was tempting, oh, yes. He was capable of it, if it came to that. He knew just where a slight nick with a vibroscalpel would bleed the most. Take a little anticoagulant, open a major blood vessel, then slowly fall asleep—and not wake up. Death would be painless that way, or with any of a dozen drugs he could take off the shelf that would do the trick just as well. A final salute, and then the Big Jump…

Suicide was rare among his people—few Corellians took that route, and none of Jos’s family had ever done so, as far as he knew.

At the moment, it didn’t feel like the worst thing that could happen to him. He could easily make it look like an accident, thus sparing his family the shame, and at least some of the grief.

Jos shook his head again. How had he come here? This was a place he had never dreamed he could be, thinking in detail about how to end his own life.

He remembered what he had been trained to tell those patients who had fallen so low: wait. Don’t do something that can’t be reversed. Life is long; things change. A month, a year, five years from now, your situation could reverse—look at how many people came from nothing, grew rich, lost it all, and then rebuilt their fortunes. Look at those who were afflicted with a debilitating or even fatal illness, who stayed around long enough for a cure. Even those who lost a spouse, or a child or a parent, and later found happiness. The bottom line was: alive, you have a chance. There are no possibilities for the dead.

Jos sighed, a deep and ragged breath. Yes. Those were the things he told his patients, and they were all true.

An old memory rose up from his days at Coruscant Med. The instructor, a grizzled and gray human named Leig Duwan, who must have been well over a hundred standard years old, had spoken of his days on Alderaan. The old man smiled a lot, and he was grinning as he told the story.

There had been a bad time in Duwan’s life—his father had died, his mother had been hospitalized, and his sister had gone missing on a frontier expedition. Duwan had failed an exam, and it looked as if he might be dropped from medical school. He had, he’d told the class, seriously considered suicide. Instead, he’d muddled through somehow, and eventually things did get better.

One day, he met a man on the street. The man stopped him and said, “I want to thank you, Doctor Duwan, for saving my life.”

Duwan had heard this many times, of course, and he had deflected the praise with practiced ease: “It’s my job, citizen. No thanks are—”

“No,” the man interrupted. “I wasn’t your patient. I was undergoing a period of deep depression and was suicidal. I had decided to end it—I’d already obtained the means—and was on my way to a private place where I would do it. But I gave myself one out: if, on my journey, any person I passed was to smile at me—just one—I would not go through with it.

“I was on the street, outside the hospital, and you were on your way in. You smiled and nodded at me. And here I am.”

The point of his story, Duwan said, was not whether his medical expertise had saved someone. The point was that, because he had gone through his own darkness, and had kept going long enough to be able to smile at a stranger, he had saved that man’s life. There were thousands more over the years whom he had, with some skill and much luck, also managed to keep alive. Being useful to others was not an unworthy thing, even if you had nothing else.

Jos looked at the chrono. He had rounds to make, postop patients to check. If he killed himself, somebody else would have to take over his rounds. That would be an imposition, causing somebody to have