Writing exercise 4

Speaking of suicide, I recall two of my friends committing suicide in the past.
They were both four or five years older than me but now I'm older than they were when they died, so now I find myself looking at them from a different angle than I did then, which makes me feel a bit strange. Being that older than me, they influenced me tremendously, both when they were alive and when they died.
Recently I read a scientific article that pointed out a close relationship between sleeping time and suicide rate: the less you sleep, the more you're likely to commit suicide, statistically speaking. This is quite understandable. My friends who committed suicide would say that they slept less than five hours a day on average. One of them even said that about three hours were the longest she could manage to get to sleep. I wish she had had the habit of taking more sleep then maybe I could see her even now. But let bygones be bygones. It's quite common to read news about people committing suicide after working harder than usual for an extended period of time, which seems to include a factor of sleep deprivation in many cases.
On the other hand, they say sleeping more than nine hours a day on average results in earlier death than if you sleep about seven to eight hours a day.