Stephanie Hepburn is a writer in New Orleans. She is the editor in chief of #CrisisTalk. You can reach her at .
When Rebecca Howard sat down with her sons to write the lyrics to “Three Numbers Away,” it began as a way to process loss. One of her son’s friends had recently taken his life, devastating not only his family but all who cared for him.
“You hear about bullying or hardships at home, but this young boy felt monumental pressure at school, like he was failing in class and as an athlete — just the pressure of being a kid,” says Howard.
Her background is in project management, not mental health, so when, in 2023, she began working at Samaritans Southcoast, a designated 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline center in Massachusetts, the language and concepts were new to her. She was eager to learn and share with her children.
“Learning about mental health was so impactful for me that I brought it up a lot to my children.” Today, she’s the nonprofit’s program director.
Working at the Samaritans also helped she and her boys navigate the aftermath of tremendous losses. Biologically, her oldest two boys are her nephews but she makes clear all three boys are her sons. “Their mother and father both passed away and I’ve been raising them since they were younger.”
Less than a year after her sister died in 2020, Howard’s husband died of a heart attack.
Even before working at Samaritans, Howard consistently checked in with her sons, clocking if they seemed down or stressed. A common phrase in her household is, “Let’s talk about where you’re at.”
“I want to know where they are mentally, because they’ve been through a lot as children. The oldest two have lost parents not once, not twice but three times.”
The song started as conversations with her sons about suicide but evolved into a message she hoped they could bring into school. “I want to empower them to talk to their friends.”
Around the same time, Howard and her children had been playing around with AI-powered music creation software. They wrote songs about day-to-day life, like not wanting to put away the laundry.
“We made a couple of fun, little songs, silly songs. One of my kids was missing a front tooth, so we made a song about her being toothless with her best friend.”
She and the kids had been talking about how help is only three numbers away, a number they can call anytime they want. The lyrics began to write themselves. “We just started writing it down — how we all need a friend to talk to.”
Her youngest boys, 13 and 11, were most involved in the process. That’s the prime age to start introducing the conversation about suicide, says Howard. “People worry if you have the conversation, it creates ideation but what these talks actually do is make them aware that many kids have these feelings and they’re temporary.”
A 2023 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports episodes of elevated suicidal thinking, on average, last between 1 and 3 hours. However, the study focused exclusively on adults. Suicidal ideation among adolescents appears to have day-to-day variability, with one study stating episodes lasted 1 to 30 minutes.
After hearing the song, Samaritans Southcoast’s executive director Darcy H. Lee encouraged Howard to share the song. “I hadn’t thought about doing so at first because this was something the kids and I just did for fun, to spend time with one another,” says Howard.
What resonated with Lee was the emotional honesty in the lyrics. She says Howard and her sons “give voice to what so many people feel in moments of despair — that overwhelming sense of being alone,” while reminding people “hope and help,” through 988, “are never far away.”
Even more powerful, Lee says, is how the song normalizes reaching out for help, breaking down stigma for people of all ages — that people don’t have to “push through their struggles alone.”
The boys helped their mom make the music video, pulling from Semaritans’ social media and Massachusetts’ 988 toolkit. The images also feature the Semaritans team working in the field.
Howard hopes the message finds parents and children alike, noting that adults often don’t sufficiently acknowledge the pressures kids face. “They often think, ‘You’re a kid — you play, get fed. What’s hard about life?’
“We just don’t identify with what they’re going through because we’ve outgrown that stress into other stresses, so we minimize.”
She’s been surprised by how receptive people have been to the song and hopes the lyrics help open up the conversation, encouraging kids to talk about stresses their parents may not take seriously. “They can call 988 and speak anonymously with someone who won’t judge them,” says Howard.
“We’ve all got big stresses we feel are monumental in the moment.”
As far as her young co-songwriters are concerned, Howard laughs and shares they’ve gotten a bit sick of hearing the song, “But they think it’s cool people are listening and commenting on YouTube.”
