The day Kevin Walsh decided he would commit suicide, he never could have imagined the girl who intervened would become his wife over a decade later.
Kevin met Blake at Bair Lake Bible Camp in Michigan when they were just 13 years old…but Kevin still recalls the moment he met the most beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on like it was yesterday.
They first crossed each other’s paths at the archery station when Blake came up to him 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,'” said Kevin.
But that was only the beginning of the blooming friendship that would one day save his life.
The two lived in different states, but they kept in touch between summer camps over the years through AOL Instant Messenger. They also texted each other from time to time, but a few years later, they lost touch as they grew too old for camp and their lives went separate ways.
At the age of 17, Kevin started to experience deep depression associated with suicidal thoughts. From a bad break-up to his dog dying on prom day, the teen encountered a series of unfortunate events that made life even grimmer.
“A bunch of regular life stuff happened that hit me harder than it should have,” he recalls.
After contemplating killing himself for about a month, he finally wrote a goodbye note and decided that he would slit his wrists and end it once and for all.
But just seconds before he was to complete the act, Kevin felt a vibration in his pocket. It was his cell phone.
“I was basically staring down the barrel of my own mortality,” said Kevin, but he picked up the call. “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.”
Kevin got open and honest with Blake for the first time. When she asked what he was doing, he told her he was about to commit suicide.
“Literally, all she said in that moment was, ‘What? Don’t do that,’” said Kevin.
They got to catching up and Kevin told Blake he’d call her tomorrow—which he felt was a strange promise to make considering he didn’t think he’d be alive tomorrow.
Blake’s words of encouragement and blunt wake-up call were exactly what Kevin needed to press through the darkest day of his life.
“I was probably somewhere between five to 10 seconds away from taking my own life,” Kevin told Inside Edition. “Nobody but her could have spoken a word of reason to me.”
But interestingly enough, Blake recalls the situation differently. She says she remembers receiving a call from Kevin while on a school trip. “We had very different experiences of the same event,” she said, adding, “I get goosebumps every single time I talk about it.”
Over the next 10 years, the two kept in touch more frequently between visits and phone calls. Slowly the bond between two best friends grew into a budding romance.
What Blake didn’t know is that Kevin had been recording his thoughts about their relationship in a journal ever since the day he got that phone call.
“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.'”
In 2015, Kevin invited Blake to come along on a work trip to Switzerland, where he proposed using the very words he wrote in his journal the night she stopped him from making the biggest mistake of his life:
