Some years ago, I was traveling to a job and along the way stopped to get some antacids from a small superstore as the meat and potato pie I had wolfed at lunchtime was causing me some gastric discomfort.
I parked up on the store car park and was making my way in, when I met a man on his hurried way out, who would have barged me out of the way had I not sidestepped – I stopped and looked back after him as he made his way to his vehicle.

I thought “there’s a man on a mission” and then continued my way inside and made my purchase of the much needed indigestion remedy.

On approaching the check out, there was a small queue and both cashiers were not at station but were stood nearby with a little girl, perhaps of 4 or 5 years of age and they were talking to her.
Long story short, it transpired that the man I had met leaving was the child’s father and he’d asked one of the cashiers to just watch the child while he went back to his car to ‘get his wallet’, which had probably been some ten minutes earlier, by the time I’d found what I wanted and then made it to the checkout.

Eventually I paid for my purchase and left as more members of staff gathered around the little girl, to continue my journey.
It was a strange incident to witness and it haunted me all day and I must have told everyone I met about it, including family later when I got home.

It was some good time later, well after the event had faded from my mind, that I was reading a local evening newspaper when I read of the case of a man who had, after leaving his young daughter in the care of a local shop, had then shortly after gone and driven his car deliberately  into a head on collision with another vehicle, killing himself and the other driver in the event.
The article went on to describe how the man had been suffering from severe depression after the breakdown of his marriage and the failure of his business.

At was at this stage I recollected and connected the events of the day in the shop, but then had been completely unaware until that very moment of the rest of it and for while it filled me with horror and  a whole range of strange thoughts of the irrationality of him ensuring that his own loved one was safe and then taking the life of someone else’s loved one in the deliberate ending of his own life.