In late winter of 1966, my high school friend John, who was just 18, drove his car into a bridge abutment and died instantly.

Something had gone terribly wrong.  John had gone off to a good Midwestern college, been elected president of his class, and excelled in his studies, but then he went home at the end of his first semester and refused to return to school.  John was a young man with a slight build and an effeminate and tentative manner, and I wondered if his sexuality had something to do with his decision to drop out of college and then end his life on that winter day.  Whatever it was, I felt very sorry about what happened and have never forgotten my friend John.

By ending his life at 18, John missed so much.  Whatever his sexual proclivity, he would presumably have found love and friendship, established himself in a career, earned the respect of colleagues, and witnessed the landmark historical events of the next 60 years, including the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, the Reagan revolution, the end of the Cold War, the dot-com crash of 2000 and the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  He would probably be alive today, enjoying his retirement.  All of that was lost in a moment of desperation.

When I think about John, I realize how precious life is.  And the more I think about it, the more aghast I am at John’s decision to end his life.  He was very young, and young for his age, when he could not have fully realized what he was doing.  But the longer one lives, the more one realizes how important every year, every month and day, is.  For millions who are facing heart disease or cancer, just to be granted a few more years would be a blessed gift.

Every morning, I spend a few minutes just gazing at the sky, even when the sky is overcast and not particularly attractive.  The day is beginning, and so much of life will occur on this day.  I will spend time with my wife, speak with friends at the gym or the store, read books (like Robert Merry’s biography of President McKinley, which I am reading now — another soul who left us before his time), meditate for an hour, and live a largely ascetic lifestyle, which demands little from others and returns as much as I am able.

John had a lot to give as well.  He was an intelligent, fastidious young man who might have been successful in many occupations.  In high school, he stuck with a half-dozen friends with whom he ate lunch every day and spent time between classes.  I was not a member of that group, but several of them were friends of mine.  Two of them went on to become physicians (both still practicing), one a principal in a successful law firm, others probably equally successful — and then there was John.

Every life is precious beyond measure.  The estimated 50 million who have been aborted over the past half-century would have contributed just as John’s circle of friends did.  From among that 50 million, there would have arisen remarkable ideas, creativity, productivity, and leadership — maybe even another Churchill or Einstein or Faulkner.  It is shocking to see these millions of lives thoughtlessly aborted.  Like my friend John, each of these aborted children might have lived for many decades and savored countless moments of happiness and joy, along with the inevitable pain and disappointment.  (Even Einstein suffered at the end —  he died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, for which he refused treatment.)

There are also those millions dying of drug overdoses, today more than ever before (more than one million each decade in the U.S. alone) — and one must ask why it is that those numbers are increasing so rapidly.  Most of these deaths, I suspect, are simply foolish and naïve young people addicted to drugs and dependent on the good faith of their suppliers.  Each of these lives is also precious despite the bad decisions anyone might make.  These millions of deaths also deprive society of the potential for good, as did the 11 million who were killed in the Holocaust and the millions who continue to suffer from persecution today.

I’m haunted by the images of Auschwitz and Dachau, by the piles of bodies stacked like cord-wood, by the video of inmates digging their own graves, by the point-blank executions and the showers raining down Zyklon B.  And by the little children at train stations, still in their parents’ arms but soon to die with them.  Each of these lives was immeasurably precious, and it was taken from the world in the most brutal and vicious manner, as are those who are aborted today in sterile, unfeeling facilities in which religious expression is forbidden even on the public sidewalk outside and killing is represented as a “procedure.”

Not all of those 50 million aborted or 11 million Holocaust victims would have become famous or been brilliant or even good, but nearly all would have experienced moments of happiness and affection.  (There are exceptions: Hitler, of course, and Charles Manson, who, according to Helter Skelter, never received a moment’s kindness or affirmation as a child.)  Some would have become homemakers, some store clerks, some laborers, some teachers, some musicians, some warehouse workers, but all would have had their moments of happiness and made their contribution — for good or ill, but mostly for good.

My heart aches for my friend John, whose decision to commit suicide deprived him of so much and deprived the world of him.  Whatever his reasons, they did not justify his action.  However desperate he may have been, he should not have taken his life.  Life is precious, and it should be protected and preserved.

We are living through an age in which life is cheap and is being callously discarded and disregarded.  We cannot spend every moment focused on what has been lost, but neither can we ignore it.  What we can do is speak out, intervene when appropriate and in a lawful manner, and vote our consciences on November 5.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Image: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.