These were the last “messages” between Zinia and me. 

I was working late, struggling to get the website for our new side hustle up and running, and she was watching TV, relaxing with the doggos. In between lapses of concentration, we’d send each other funny videos. When I had given up on work for the night, hearing the TV still sounding away with whatever show she was watching, I went to bed without checking in on her. A decision I will forever regret. 

A little over 2 hours after the last message I got from her, she had unalived herself.

I recall the video that Chester Bennington’s widow shared a few years earlier after he had done the same, about “what depression looked like to us”: 

In the same way, these then inconsequential messages between Zinia and I, following a day of swimming, eating, laughing, and playing with dogs, is what depression looked like to us. We never knew when that little dial inside her would crank itself all the way up. It wasn’t Zinia’s first time getting to such a low emotional state. The methods she used the previous two times allowed me to get to her in time for medical intervention. The last time, I had failed her.