Kevin Walsh said he received a random phone call from an old acquaintance just seconds before he planned to take his own life.
When Kevin Walsh received an unexpected phone call as a teenager that would prompt him to rethink suicide, he never imagined he would marry the woman at the other end of the call a decade later.
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"I was probably somewhere between 5 to 10 seconds away from taking my own life," Walsh, of Indianapolis, Ind., told InsideEdition.com. “Nobody but her could have spoken a word of reason to me.”
Kevin, 28, and his bride Blake Walsh, 28, will soon be celebrating their one year anniversary — 10 years after he received that fateful phone call that saved his life and15 years after they first met in camp.
The happy couple recalled meeting for the first time at Bair Lake Bible Camp in Michigan, when they were 13 years old.
They were both at the archery station when Blake approached Kevin and said, “Black is a good color on you.”
“I was like, ‘At least she’s talking to me; she’s the prettiest girl I had ever seen,'" Kevin said.
The pair stayed friends throughout camp and after the summer, they kept in touch once in a while through AOL Instant Messenger until they met again the following summer at the same camp.
After that summer, they exchanged phone numbers and texted once in a while but eventually lost touch as they outgrew the camp.
Toward the end of high school, Kevin recalled falling into depression and becoming suicidal. He said he contemplated ending his life for a month before he wrote a note and decided to slit his wrists.
Moments before he would take his own life, Kevin said he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.
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“I was basically staring down the barrel of my own mortality,” Kevin said, but he answered the phone anyway. “It was her. We hadn’t talked in a year and the one person I believed I would have opened up to called at that exact moment I had let everything go and was at peak vulnerability.”
When she asked what he was doing, Kevin admitted he was about to take his own life.
“Literally, all she said in that moment was, ‘What? Don’t do that,’” Kevin recalled.
But Blake remembers it differently. She recalled being on a school trip when she received a call from Kevin.
“I think it’s a true example of a force in the universe intervening and connecting us,” Blake said. “I get goosebumps every single time I talk about it.”
They got to chatting and catching up until Blake said she had to go back to her group and had Kevin promise he would call her back tomorrow.
“That kind of hit me weird because I wasn’t expecting to be around tomorrow,” Kevin said.
When he decided he wouldn’t kill himself, Kevin recalled writing down his thoughts in a journal, some of which thanked Blake for reappearing into his life at the right moment.
“Over the years, [the journal] grew a couple words at a time,” he said. “Eventually I had a pretty substantial amount of information I wanted to convey and then I realized, 'Holy crap, I think this is a proposal.'"
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After the life-saving phone call, Kevin and Blake stayed in touch and routinely visited one another despite living in different cities.
In 2015, Blake had tagged along on Kevin’s work trip to Switzerland when he popped the question using the words he penned the night she saved his life.
Five months later, they were married.
“I love you,” Kevin told Blake. “Also, thanks for saving my life.”
If you or anyone you know is contemplating suicide, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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