At the risk of nauseating Rob Long, I offer a few words on suicide, about which I have learned more than I would have cared to.

I’ve seen many sorrows in more than 30 years as a cop, but the images that haunt me most are the suicides.  My first, when I was just weeks out of the police academy, happened on the beach.  A woman called the police to report her husband missing, and it was my partner and I who were assigned the call.  The woman greeted us at the door of a beautiful home near the beach, showing us inside to take in the trappings of what was – or had been – a prosperous life.  There had been financial setbacks, she told us, and she was worried that her husband would not be able to cope with the sudden change in the family’s fortunes.  They kept a gun in the house, and when her husband did not come home as expected she feared the worst.  When she found that the gun was not in its customary place, she called the police.

It was wintertime, or what passes for wintertime in Los Angeles: gray skies, a bit of drizzle, and a biting wind coming off the ocean.  My partner and I began to trudge across the sand of what appeared to be a deserted beach.  But there was someone out there, down near the water.  From a distance, he looked to be sleeping.  Or perhaps he was just gazing up at the passing clouds.  But as we got closer we could see the gun near his hand, and then the blood in the sand, and then the wound in the side of his head.