In 2002, when Mark Henick stood on the edge of a Cape Breton overpass and let go, a stranger reached out and saved him from taking his own life.

Last week, after launching a social media campaign to find the man, Henick received an email from Mike Richey, the man he remembered from that night at the overpass — fixated on Henick’s fingers, watching for the moment he feared was coming, when the teen let go and “leaned forward into nothing.”

In a moving video shared online, Henick, 27, and now a mental health advocate, reads the first email he received from Richey.

“That first message that I sent back to him, I’ve never felt more speechless . . . words just seemed inadequate, it’s not the type of thing — ‘Oh, thank you for pulling me off a bridge when I was about to kill myself.’ It’s so incongruent with the situation,” Henick says. “I told him something to the effect that I want to thank you but I don’t know how, because I don’t have the words for it. Maybe there are no words.”

Sometime around 2002 — he can’t remember the date exactly — a teenage Henick, who had a history of depression and anxiety and prior suicide attempts, was extremely upset. It was midnight, quiet and cold in his hometown of Sydney, Cape Breton.

“I don’t even know what was really triggering it at the time,” he says. “I thought that I knew that I had to kill myself in order to escape this.”

He went to an overpass on Victoria Road and paced back and forth, eventually climbing over the railing. Richey, 25 at the time, was on his way to an overnight shift at his job as a youth care worker when he noticed a figure on the ledge.

“I didn’t have a cellphone at the time, I ran into a convenience store and told the clerk to call the police.”

Then he drove back. The brand new youth worker didn’t have any experience in dealing with crisis or suicide intervention training.

He talked with Henick.

“I just wanted him to know that I was there,” he says. “I wasn’t there to try to fix things for him or anything like that, I wanted him to know that no matter what, I’m not going anywhere. I’m right behind you.”

“He didn’t try to give me the same old quick fixes or remedies that people are sometimes inclined to give — that tomorrow is another day or everything is going to be better,” Henick says.

A crowd gathered — including police. Richey and an officer asked if they could move closer to hear Henick better. He agreed.

“As he started to repeat, ‘I tried I tried,’ and ‘I can’t do it anymore,’ I felt like he was working himself up to let go,” Richey says.

Henick remembers another stranger telling him to jump.

As Henick let go, Richey reached out and grabbed his chest to keep him from falling forward, and along with the police officer, pulled him back to safety.

For Henick, years of recovery, struggles, and setbacks followed — “recovery is not a straight line upward, it never is” — but he found that talking about his struggle helped.

At his high school, he wanted to speak about suicide, but was told he couldn’t. He wrote a letter to the local paper, and television cameras showed up at school. It was his first foray into advocacy.

Now 27, he works for the Ontario division of the Canadian Mental Health Association. He has shared the story about the stranger many times, including in a TED Talk viewed almost one million times. On Let’s Talk Day — the mental-health awareness event sponsored by Bell Canada — he decided to share his quest to find the stranger on Canada AM and social media. A day later, he had two messages from people who knew Richey.

In a strange coincidence, Richey had seen the TED talk a couple of weeks ago, and had been writing a letter to Henick. Now, he decided to send it.

“He carried it for all those years,” says Richey’s mother Sharon from her home in Sydney, N.S. “I guess I couldn’t expect anything less of him that night. That’s something he would do automatically, he’s a very kind, intelligent young man.”

The two men have exchanged several emails and plan to meet sometime in the future. Henick calls that night on the overpass a “pivotal point” in his story.

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“I felt so alone, so isolated and secluded on that bridge, that the most powerful thing for me was that complete stranger reaching out — and I realized I can be that stranger, too, just by telling my story and just by saying that I’ve been there,” he says. “That breaks down that isolation for people, and lets them know its OK to talk.”

Richey, now 37, lives in Halifax, and works at a non-profit residential facility for at-risk youth. Admittedly shy, he says kind messages from people who have heard the story have been overwhelming and unexpected.

“It was something that just needed to be done,” he says. “He’s come so far, he looks great, healthy and happy. It’s the complete polar opposite of the face I saw that night on the bridge . . . he’s doing great things.”