My new friend, Timmy, was a skilled glider pilot. We met at work.

When I became friendly with him, I was in the process of getting divorced. On a Friday while having a beer at work he invited me to go gliding with him on the weekend.

I told him I had the kids. “Bring them along – I’ll give them a flip; it should be quite fun for them.”

So, on the Sunday, I found myself with two excited children at the Carletonville Airfield.

There Timmy and his lovely fiancé Juliet were marshalling the glider flights that were in full swing. “Give me half an hour and we will be finished, and I’ll take you all up.”

I was the first to go. I found it terrifying. The complete absence of sound was unnerving, and I couldn’t get my stomach to settle as we swooped around the sky at the whim of the air currents. As I was about to throw up, Timmy landed.

Getting out I tried to convince the kids it wasn’t as much fun as it looked, but to no avail. “Me first,” said 11-year-old Jamie, and jumped into the passenger seat.

While they were up in the air, I chatted to Juliet, whom I had met a couple of times. She was delightful.

She told me she was learning to glide, and Timmy was her instructor. She mentioned she was hoping for a lesson later that afternoon.

After we had all been up, I left. I hugged Juliet, shook Timmy’s hand, and said I would see him at work.

On Monday, when I arrived at the office, I immediately sensed something was wrong. There were a few people in reception looking very upset. No one was talking.

“What’s up?” I asked Sandra, the boss’s PA.

“It’s Timmy,” she said, “he had a gliding accident yesterday. Apparently, Juliet is dead, and he is in intensive care. They don’t think he is going to survive.”

“That can’t be true,” I almost yelled at her, “I was with him yesterday. We … my kids and I … went gliding with him and Juliet.”

There was complete silence. As my brain absorbed her awful news, I couldn’t believe what she had said.

Apparently, after all the other gliders had packed up for the day and Timmy and Juliet were released from marshalling, he decided to give her a lesson. They both got into the glider, hooked up to the plane and the winch started pulling.

However, there was a problem that no one had ever really bothered about: for the first 50 metres or so the glider was out of the winch operator’s sight – the runway being on a hill.

As the glider started moving, a gust of wind flipped it over and suddenly they were upside down, bouncing on their heads in the canopy. Oblivious of his charges’ predicament, the winchman powered on until they appeared over the rise, upside down and in all sorts of trouble. As he grasped what was happening, he immediately shut down. Too late.

Juliet died and Timmy hovered between life and death for a couple of weeks. I must have bid him farewell in my head a dozen times, while regularly visiting his comatose form. However, fortunately he recovered.

Then the trouble started. He blamed himself for Juliet’s death. “I was in charge of the glider … I should have pulled the winch release … I killed her.”

No amount of reasoning could shake his conviction he was responsible. Nothing.

He went into a massive depression and could barely function at work.

At first, I let him be but soon realised that wasn’t helping. He wasn’t eating. And he was getting worse as the enormity of what he thought he had done to poor Juliet, kept hitting home.

At that time, I wasn’t in a particularly good frame of mind either. I also was distraught over Juliet’s death. And I kept having nightmares about what would have happened if the wind had flipped the glider with one of my kids in it.

My divorce wasn’t helping either. It just gave me an all-consuming sense of failure.

I had to find something to distract me as I started experiencing serious bouts of depression.

Without consciously deciding to, I started spending more time with Timmy. I made him come with me to pubs, restaurants, sporting events, movies … anything to get the two of us out and about, to be distracted from our morose dispositions.

Well after a few months of this, to my amazement, he suddenly started cheering up.

Slowly but surely his whole demeanour changed. He stopped blaming himself as much as he had and began exercising – something he hadn’t done since the accident.

A couple of years later, Timmy got married, while he was on assignment out of the country.

When he arrived back here, he introduced his wife to me at a dinner.

At one stage during the evening Timmy went to the toilet and she said to me, “I’ve been waiting to meet the person who saved his life. Such a lovely pleasure.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t me, it was the doctor at the airfield.”

“No, it was you. Timmy has told me on several occasions, if you hadn’t taken him in hand, he would have killed himself.”

So, interestingly, Timmy credits me for surviving his depression – although never to me, but he is an Englishman, and they don’t do personal stuff with mates. Yet for years, I have only taken out of that episode that I saved myself from depression by having Timmy to look after. By having a purpose. And an arbitrary one.

Nobody, not doctors, friends, family nor even Timmy, asked me to look after him. Maybe subconsciously I was searching for something to distract me from my own horrible thoughts, and an opportunity appeared at the right time.