What If?

 

In December 2001 the body of Big Country singer, songwriter and guitarist Stuart Adamson, was found in the Best Western Plaza Hotel, Honolulu. He had committed suicide after apparently consuming a substantial amount of alcohol. He had hung himself and was just forty-three years old.

 

What always saddens me about suicide is that there is a nagging thought amongst those friends and family who are left behind that maybe, just maybe, it had been preventable. If only someone had talked to the deceased person sooner. This is what lays behind my first ever short story, What If?

 

It was subsequently reported that shortly before he took his life Adamson had been seen in a local bar. So, what if someone there had spoken to him? And what if that conversation, albeit it in an innocent and probably unknowing way, had caused him to rethink, ?

 

So inspired by, rather than based on, this random meeting, I have penned a novella entitled What If?

 

The story is of a chance encounter in a bar between a celebrity on their way down, and a fellow drinker who has no idea who they are talking to.

 

The “celeb” is, as was Adamson, an alcoholic. They are also a depressive who is having what they have planned to be their last binge before taking their own life, and ending for what them has become a miserable and pointless existence. Surely everyone would be better off without them

 

Yet a stranger engages them in a conversation during the course of which things are said that will make the potential suicide be reconsidered.

 

So, what could a total stranger possibly say to create this sea change in that person’s life, and will it actually make a difference.

 

What if? is the story of that chance encounter, but more it is a story about just how much difference a conversation unencumbered by familiarity can have, and the message is simple, take time to talk.