Lincoln and the abyss of suicide

I don't know about you, but I've never seriously considered suicide. But I would guess that anyone who looks into that abyss and then chooses consciously to step back, will see what the vast majority of us never consider: a reason to go on living. According to one source, a good 20 years before he became president Lincoln told his friend Josuah Speed, referring probably to his inclination to commit suicide, "That he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for." Years later Lincoln reminded Speed of this conversation at the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.