Carolyn Holly Thomas

She took her eyes off Jesus and focused on her problems; a bad marriage and a daughter with an addiction to crack cocaine.

Carolyn was brilliant. She had worked all her life and to people on the outside, she had it all - a great career, a good marriage, and what seemed to be a happy life. At least that's how it looked. She worked hard to make it look that way. After all, she was raised in the 50s, and that's how things were supposed to look.

However, a truth had slipped out a year or so before her death, a truth that she could not life with. Very few people knew of this truth, but her family knew, and she couldn't live with it.

On top of that she was having tremendous back pain, a pain doctors could not find a reason for. After visiting many doctors and not receiving the help she needed she turned to her daughter for help and began doing something she would never have thought she would do, something too horrible for me to mention. I'll let you imagine.

When I went to visit her on Christmas Day, all she could tell me was that she had sold her soul to Satan. I just held her and told her that was impossible. She would receive no comfort from me. She was so frail, I just cried. She wasn't the Carolyn I had always known and loved. She was distant and angry.

Yes, the truth that had slipped out had slipped out through me one year earlier. We had not spoken for nine months. Yet, just three months before Christmas she had forgiven me and told me everything was okay. Now, here she was all wadded up in a knot.

Two years earlier when God had brought my other two siblings back into my life she was angry about that and then this Christmas the three of us were together and I thought maybe she was angry about that, but she said she wasn't. I wouldn't understand what she was going through until after her death, on March 1, 1994.

Oh, we talked off and on over the next two months, but nothing in depth. It was like she avoided talking to me as much as possible. As a matter of fact, I had left her a message the day before she died.

For about four years following her death I had dreams of being on cruise lines and finding her there having a grand ole time. When I would confront her she would just laugh and tell me that the only way she could get out of my life was to fake her death. I would awaken in tears, missing her so badly.

Being left behind by someone you love who commits suicide is horrible. Yes, being left behind by anyone who dies permaturely is bad, but suicide is worse. It is their choice and you are left wondering exactly what was so bad that made them need to leave and what could you have done to make it better.