He built bridges for years.
He could barely sell them.

“I knew Paul for about an hour and fifteen minutes total. It changed the direction of my life.”

It started with a wheelchair. Last October a woman named Pat posted on Facebook that she needed one. She had muscular dystrophy, and getting around her own house safely was getting harder. My wife Amber saw the post. My mother had passed not long before, and her wheelchair was still in our garage. So we gave it to Pat, no strings. One chair, from my mother who was gone, to Pat, who was a mother too. Amber, the mother of my two boys, carried it to her door. I couldn't see it at the time, but three mothers were already standing in this story, and a thing meant to help one woman get out of her house turned out to be the doorway to everything that came after.

The next day Pat's husband Paul brought two of his rainbow bridges to our door to say thank you. Wooden bridges, hand-painted, the kind you set in your yard where a pet is buried so you can stand at the edge and remember. They were beautiful. There was something in them I still can't fully put into words.

Paul was a welder his whole life. When his hands retired they wouldn't sit still, so he started building these bridges. He made them for years, and every room in his house filled up. He could build one in a day. What he couldn't do was sell them consistently. Selling meant facing people, and Paul's social anxiety was so heavy his wife had to speak for him. People came to the house, looked at the bridges, and left without one, and over the months it wore him down. He sold a few, even six the day before he died. Never many. The making was effortless. The ten feet between his workbench and a stranger's hands was a wall he couldn't climb.

I know that gap from the inside. My whole life my mind has handed me a finished plan at two in the morning that I couldn't make myself act on by nine. That's what trauma does to the wiring; it leaves you gifted at the work and frozen at the part where you have to stand up and sell it. I've spent twenty-five years as an acupuncturist and an artist, and I've watched my own best work sit unsold for the same reason Paul's bridges sat in his garage. When I looked at Paul I wasn't looking at a stranger. I was looking at the same wall that has cost me years. That recognition, more than grief for a man I barely knew, is what broke me open.

I called Paul on the eighth of March and told him I'd build him a website for free, no catch. We talked for about an hour. He was going to send me the sizes and the pricing. His last words to me were, “Sounds good. Okay, bye-bye.” The pricing never came. A few weeks before that, Pat had told Amber she was worried about him. Her words were, “I think he's falling into depression too. He seems lost.”

Twenty-two days after that phone call, Paul died by suicide in his workshop. Pat found him. The morning Amber got the text, something in me came apart, and I knew exactly why. When my mother was eleven years old, her own father died by suicide, and she was in the house. Nobody ever talked about it. The silence of it followed her the rest of her life and reached all the way down to me. So when I heard about Paul, I knew this didn't have to stay only a tragedy. If you're reading this and the weight is on you tonight, stop here and call or text 988. A real person answers. Paul never made that call. I would give anything for him to have made it.

Pat carried Paul's bridges after he was gone. She tried to finish what he couldn't. Then, about ten weeks later, on the thirteenth of June, Pat passed too, at home. That left their son Aaron. In the space of two months Aaron lost both of his parents. He lives with a traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle accident, and his mother was the center his days were built around. With her gone he can't safely be on his own, so his brother is taking him north to be near family. Their three cats had to be re-homed. A local pastor and his men's group were going to build a ramp so Pat could get out of her house; she died before they could start, and the ramp was never built. I tell you all of this because it's true, and because the family Paul and Pat left behind is who every bridge now stands with.

Here's what I actually know how to do. I can't weld or carve. I know how to build things on the internet and put a story in front of the people who need to hear it. So I built this. The first thing to understand is that this isn't a charity asking you for nothing in return. We're selling Paul's bridges. Real wood, one of a kind, made by a real craftsman who's gone. Buy one and you take home something a man made with his hands, and the money supports the family Paul and Pat left behind. About forty were left when he died, and six are held back for giveaways. When they're gone, they're gone.

This is bigger than one family and one stack of bridges. There are people all over this country making beautiful things in garages and workshops who can't cross the same gap Paul couldn't. Veterans, tradesmen, makers who are gifted with their hands and cut off from the world that would have valued the work. We're going to find the next Paul and carry his work the way Paul's is being carried now. I believe the way through is that nobody crosses the fire alone. In the old story, three men were thrown into the furnace and a fourth was seen walking with them, and they didn't burn. The maker brings the craft and the wound. We bring the building. The Holy Spirit is the One in the fire with us.

Down the street from Paul, a veterinarian named Dr. Ginger already has his largest bridge standing at her clinic. She'll tell you her own profession loses more of its people to suicide than almost any other. The same gap. The same number, 988. The same mission. Paul's name stays on this forever, and so does Pat's. The bridges are just where it starts.

I'm not going to pretend I have this all figured out. The site went live on Easter Sunday. I built it on three and four hours of sleep, and it still has rough edges. Amber wears a semicolon tattoo for a friend she lost. The truth is that if suicide hasn't touched your life yet, it will, because it reaches further than almost anyone says out loud. Maybe the rainbow doesn't have to belong to the storm anymore. Maybe it can belong to the Rainbow Bridge of Hope.

My real goal, the one I can barely say without breaking, is for this to reach a million people.

Not so they buy a bridge. So that somewhere a person sitting alone at two in the morning sees the number 988 on a page about a man who didn't call it, and calls it instead. The bridges are the vehicle. The number is the destination.

Watch the video. Buy one of Paul's bridges. Share this with one person. And if you're the one carrying the weight tonight, please stay. Call or text 988. A real person answers.