Christmas season 1949: Nineteen-year-old Sarah Arnold had given up all hope. She had convinced herself that the world would be better off without her. She went to the 23rd floor of Detroit’s Hudson’s Department store where she worked; there was a chute that ran the full height of the building. She had thrown boxes down this chute many times from various floors to the incinerator below.

She knew she could squeeze her anorexic 85-pound body into the chute and end it all. But then she stopped, thinking, “Wait! There could still be something you haven’t thought about! There may still be something you haven’t considered. What would it hurt to wait one more day?”

Today: Ninety-year-old Dr. Sarah Arnold, a Topsham resident, lives a life that belies her age. A psychotherapist for several decades in New York City and Maine, she still sees six clients once a week for an hour. She wrote a book published in 2012 entitled, “Faith and Madness: A Spiritual and Psychological Journey,” and she’s currently working on another memoir. She took up the violin again after her granddaughter Niko began playing 10 years ago in first grade. (Niko is currently a junior at Boston Arts Academy). And she remains active in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brunswick.

She’s close with her two sons and their families. Chris, a Colby graduate, lives in the Boston area and is a correspondent with NPR; he does a lot of investigative reporting, especially in the financial area. Jonathan, a graduate of Cornell’s School of Architecture, lives in Kansas City and is a builder of energy-efficient buildings.

What a difference seventy-one years make! How did a young woman on the brink of ending her life emerge from the slough of despond to go on to live a fulfilling and productive life?

Dr. Arnold gives great credit to Hudson’s Department store which paid for her therapy. “That would never happen today,” she notes. “In order to give back, I always kept two or three places in the practice for someone who couldn’t pay.”

She also credits her faith in God and Christ. “I was fortunate to have a mother who had a deep, mostly unspoken, faith in God. I saw how it supported her through the hard places in her life, especially my father’s illness (He was a manic depressive.) When I was 20, I had a religious experience in which Jesus became very real to me and still is. At that time I asked Jesus to show me what He wanted me to do with my life, and I believe He has. He led me to overcome the obstacles to a full life, fear of leaving my mother alone, fear of marriage. These fears were huge and came out of my growing up experiences, through no fault of my parents.”

Dr. Arnold acknowledges that there aren’t many therapists who work into their nineties. “”As long as you can hear and your memory is still good, it works well. One 84-year-old woman called me and said, ‘I want to see someone with a lot of life experience.’ I think life experience helps a lot; it informs the practice. I’m a better therapist now than I was 30 years ago. It helps to have had kids and grandkids.”

Dr. Arnold does, indeed, bring significant life experience to her practice. he holds degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. in Psychology), as well as from New York Theological Seminary and the University of Southern Maine. And she’s studied at the U. of Edinburgh and Oxford. She jokes that she turned down 13 marriage proposals — possibly a world record — before marrying her husband Charles, a psychiatrist, in 1972. They had a wonderful 45-year marriage until he died four years ago.

Arnold was reluctant to pass on the advice she might give to young people, noting that “psychotherapists aren’t supposed to give advice.”

Here’s what she might say, though, to people who aren’t her clients: Get as much education as possible and read good books for pleasure. Don’t marry too young Find a faith path that will give you a set of values to live by.

If you need help, seek it out.

Have all the adventures you can while you are still young so that when you have children you’ll be content to be with them and raise them well.

Learn about how your government works and take part in it because it affects your life more than you know.

Be kind and make the world a better place.

David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns. dtreadw575@aol.com

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