I'm a bit melancholy today. One of the morning's stories from the front page of the paper was the story of a woman who committed suicide yesterday morning. Her name was Holly and she was an acquaintance of mine.

Holly was in my BSF Bible Study for the last 2 years that I was involved in that group -- before Christopher was born. Both years we had an exceptional group of young women and we had some pretty amazing bonding by having so many women of a similar age group and place in life -- one of the years we had about 5 of us pregnant. Holly was pregnant with her first child the first year that she was in BSF with me. The following year we were both pregnant -- she had become pregant with her second child almost immediately after having her first child.

Although we were little more than good acquaintances, I felt more connected to Holly because we had a lot in common -- being pregnant at the same time, being part of a wonderful group of young Christian women together at an important time of my life, and she was a local tennis star who had achieved greatness in high school and community tennis circles while I had also spent my youth playing tennis. We had talked about playing tennis together quite a bit because I hadn't found any local tennis partners, but young babies kept us from following through.

After having babies, I stopped attending BSF bible study and lost contact with Holly. We reconnected last summer when our children were on the same soccer team. We chatted and caught up, although we never followed through with trying to do more "friend" things together. We would see each other around town, though, including an impromptu lunch at Costco about a month ago where we would catch up.

We weren't really much more than good acquaintances, although I felt some kinship with her because of some of the parallels in our lives. I sensed in the last few years when I saw her that she had struggled, but was still surprised to read in the paper about her suicide. She apparently ran her car off a cliff near Earthquake park. She lived through that, and apparently then got our of the car and drowned herself in the bay.

Pray for Holly's parents, and especially for her two young children, ages 5 and 6.