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Jamie Turner lived 54 years before he decided that was enough.

During those five decades and then some, he’d raised two children into upstanding adults. He had an 18-year career as a nurse in the emergency room at the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie, Ont. — a job that had him see his fair share of trauma, of dead children and distress.

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And then, with retirement on the horizon, he received a layoff notice. Then his mother-in-law died of cancer and his own mother too, shortly thereafter.

It was something he couldn’t even understand himself

“That was the breaking point,” said his widow, Sue Turner. Until that time, he’d been the rock of the family — always shelving his own feelings for the good of everyone else.

“Something happened to Jamie,” she said. “And it was something he couldn’t even understand himself.”

For more than a year, he worked tirelessly to battle anxiety and depression that welled up within him. He tried twice in 2012 to kill himself — once just days after his daughter arrived to visit from Taiwan. But he also tried to live — making his wife lunch every day when she came home to be with him on her lunch hour.