I knew someone once who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

No one knows why she took her life. We never will. She left no note. We only know that she stretched out on the couch one Sunday afternoon, lifted a pistol to her right temple, and pulled the trigger.

The gun she used was a 22 caliber revolver. She had never owned a gun in her life. She had borrowed the gun she used to kill herself on the pretext that she lived in a high crime neighborhood and was afraid.

I knew the neighborhood of that time. It was a low-crime community of individuals and families who had lived there for years.

The relative safety of the area should have been a tip-off but no one connected that and her request to borrow a gun. No one connected the other times she had tried to take her life with her request to borrow a gun, either.

No one thought about these things until later. Then, the person who loaned her the gun thought about them so intensely that we worried about her. We are lucky she permitted the police to keep the gun.

But the gun didn’t kill our loved one. A deeply depressed woman killed herself with a gun.

Would she have killed herself if she had not had a gun? Who knows? We could conjecture but we’ll never know.

Her death was no one’s fault. Not even she is to be blamed. Who are we to judge?

In the year she died, she became a statistic. Who can say which number she was of the total who also took their own lives that year? Number 10? Number 3,000?

Statistics are highly valued by bureaucrats and politicians. Bureaucrats use them to justify salary increases. Politicians use them to hide the horror of death and to argue against preventive actions.

Would it be otherwise if these nameless, faceless bureaucrats and distant politicians knew the names and faces of the humans who take their own lives every year, year after year?

I doubt it.

It’s sad that they didn’t know the beautiful young woman with red hair and green eyes who placed a gun to her temple one Sunday afternoon and pulled the trigger.

We knew her, though. We’ll always know her. She’s no statistic.