He built about fifty bridges.
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. Paul's wife Pat needed one for a cruise, and we had one sitting in our garage because my mom had passed the year before. We gave it to her. When she tried to bring it back, I told her to keep it. The next day Paul brought two of his rainbow bridges to our door as a thank you. Wooden bridges, the kind you put 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 can't fully explain.

Paul was a welder his whole life. When his hands retired, they wouldn't stop, so he started making these bridges. He made about forty-five or fifty of them. Every room in his house filled up. He sold a few, even six the day before he died, but he could never sell many, because selling meant facing people, and his social anxiety made that almost impossible. People would come to the house to look at the bridges and leave without one, and over time that wore him down. His wife had to speak for him. He could build a bridge in a day. He couldn't carry the part that came after.

I get that more than most people would guess. I've spent twenty years as an artist and an acupuncturist, and I know how hard it is to sell your own work. I told Paul I'd build him a website for free. He said, “Sounds good. Okay, bye-bye.” That was the last thing he ever said to me. He was supposed to send me the sizes and the pricing. It never came. Twenty-two days after that call, Paul died by suicide.

There's a reason this cut me as deep as it did. When my mother was eleven years old, her father died by suicide. She was hiding in the basement with her mom and her brother while he walked the outside of the house calling their names. Nobody talked about it. They swept it under the rug, and the weight of that silence followed my mother her whole life and landed on me too. So when I heard about Paul, something in me knew this tragedy didn't have to stay a tragedy.

Here's what I know how to do. I don't know how to weld or carve. I know how to build things on the internet. I know how to take a story nobody's telling and put it in front of the people who need to hear it. So I built this site, and the first thing I want you 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. When you buy one, the money goes to Pat, his widow. He only made about forty-five or fifty, and Pat's keeping five of them. When they're gone, they're gone. You're not getting a receipt for a donation. You're getting a bridge for your yard, made by a man's hands, and you're putting income straight into the hands of the woman he left behind.

The first goal is simple and it's now. Get Pat a safe way to walk out of her own house. Her husband was the carpenter, and he never got to build her the ramp she needs. Our church men's group will build it. It costs about a thousand dollars in lumber. That's the floor, not the ceiling.

Because this is bigger than one widow and one stack of bridges. My friend Chase was blown up in Afghanistan when his sergeant stepped on a forty-pound IED. He survived. He says the thing everybody in that valley actually needs is Jesus, and he's right. Veterinarians take their own lives more than almost any profession in America. Tradesmen and older men like Paul are some of the highest risk there is. Every one of them is good at something with their hands and can't find the bridge to the world that would've valued it.

So we're going to find the next Paul. The craftsman hiding in a garage somewhere, maybe a soldier who can't function in normal life but is gifted with wood, and we're going to carry his work the way Paul's work is being carried now. Paul's name stays on this forever. Pat stays on this forever. That's the movement. The bridges are how it starts.

I'm not going to pretend I've got this all figured out. The website went live on Easter Sunday. I've been up until three and four in the morning building it. It's not polished. My wife wears a semicolon tattoo for her friend Stephanie, and the truth is that if you haven't been touched by suicide, you will be, because it's a silent epidemic almost nobody wants to say 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 a bridge for Pat. 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.