[Part Two]
Most families of those who committed suicide around Stevensville in the last year declined to be interviewed. But relatives and friends of several people who died in previous years agreed, often reluctantly, to talk.
Mary Lee Rush, whose son committed suicide at 29 and who lives in Grantsdale, an unincorporated town in Ravalli County, said: "People here are very rural. They do for themselves. They won't go for help."
Suicide, she said, "is an acceptable way of dying if you feel desolate or you can't handle things anymore."
A Young Life Ended
Patrick Spaulding, a 6-foot-4-inch senior, was the leading scorer on his high school basketball team and had set a school record with 28 rebounds in a single game. "He lived for basketball," said his mother, Paulette Spaulding, who lives in the family house with her husband about five miles outside Stevensville. Patrick was consistently on the honor roll.
On a Friday night in January 1997, Patrick went out and drank a few beers, his friends said, and on the way home apparently fell asleep at the wheel, entangling his pickup truck in barbed wire. A sheriff's deputy gave Patrick a citation for illegal possession of alcohol.
"Under school rules, that would have meant he would be suspended from the team for the rest of the season," his mother said. "He was such a perfectionist, always harder on himself than on anyone else, he felt he had let his family and teammates down." He did not discuss the situation with his parents. The next morning, the day of a big game, alone in his bedroom, Patrick shot himself.
"Teenagers don't live for tomorrow, they live for today," Mrs. Spaulding said.
At Stevensville High School, the guidance counselor, Linda Mullan, was concerned about how other students would respond to Patrick's death and was worried about the possibility of copycats. Many students own guns and hunt, often starting in junior high school. "Guns and hunting are a rite of passage in Montana," Ms. Mullan said.
Two seniors in the same class as Patrick were so distraught by his death that they turned down appointments to the Air Force Academy, preferring to concentrate on trying to heal the wounds of grief among their classmates and prevent any further tragedy, Ms. Mullan said.
A few families of those who have taken their own lives have begun organizing themselves to better understand what happened. Pat Kendall, whose son, Josh, shot himself in the Blue Mountains in 2000, when he was 23, has opened a resource center with a lending library in a small house in Missoula, at the northern end of the valley. She has also helped get the Missoula County Health Department to start a suicide prevention program, the first of its kind in the area.
What Mrs. Kendall has come to believe is that her son probably had bipolar disorder. When he finally went to a doctor, not long before he killed himself, the doctor, who was not a trained psychiatrist, prescribed the antidepressant Prozac. But Prozac can make mood swings worse for some people with bipolar disorder. Mrs. Kendall believes that in a region with few mental health resources, Josh's problem was mistaken for depression.
'A Mercy Killing'
Bill Tipps and his wife, Louise, moved to Stevensville from a suburb of Las Vegas to be close to their adult son, Dennis Tipps, who was the high school football coach and onetime police chief.
Dennis Tipps found a site for a home for his parents nearby in an area of small farms and new houses. One of his sons, Dennis Jr., a contractor, built them a simple ranch-style home.
But Bill Tipps grew depressed. "My dad hated the cold and the winter," Dennis Tipps said.
He was also becoming increasingly concerned about the health of his wife, who was 80. She had undergone several heart surgeries, and the local doctor said her toes might have to be amputated because of diabetes.
Dennis Tipps now surmises that when the doctor pointed with a sweeping gesture to Louise Tipps's foot, and then her knee and hip, Bill Tipps assumed the doctor was suggesting that his wife's leg would also have to be taken off.
His father hated doctors and would not seek their advice, Dennis Tipps said. So his father never clarified his wife's prognosis or sought help for his apparent depression.
His father "never displayed his emotions," Dennis Tipps said. "He kept everything inside, and he was very stubborn. He wouldn't change his mind."
One morning in September 1999, at 8:05 a.m., Bill Tipps called his son at his home.
"I just shot and killed your mother so they can't take her leg off," said the elder Mr. Tipps, who was 83. "Now I'm going to shoot myself."
Dennis Tipps jumped in his truck, and as he approached his parents' house, he heard what he thought was his engine backfiring. It was his father shooting himself.
"In my dad's mind, this was a mercy killing," Dennis Tipps said. "He would never leave her side. He thought he was doing the right thing, but he overreacted."
'He Just Quit'
Debbie Miller describes the gentle side of her husband, Ron Malensek. "He called me Princess and treated me like a princess," she said.
But Mr. Malensek had been diagnosed with depression as a child, she said.
In early 2000, he called all his friends, told them goodbye and then tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. He survived, and she urged him to see a doctor, who prescribed Prozac.
In the summer of 2003, Mr. Malensek stopped taking the medication.
Mr. Malensek had always worked seven days a week at various jobs: he had owned two bars, a gas station and a bingo parlor, and then had a business installing rain gutters. That summer, he started neglecting customers who called for estimates, Ms. Miller said. He became angry and could not sleep, and he had no energy, she said. It was as if "he just quit," said Ms. Miller, a speech therapist at Stevensville High School.
On Aug. 5 last year, they went to a favorite bar, the Rustic Hut, in the town of Florence. It was the anniversary of his father's death.
When Ms. Miller left to go home, her husband stayed at the bar. Then he walked out back, retrieved a handgun that he had stashed there earlier, and shot himself.
After his death, Ms. Miller discovered that he had not shared other pressures with her.
"It turned out there were a lot of financial issues I didn't know about," she said. Bill collectors bombarded her and repossessed his pickup truck. She had to sell his business.
She also learned that he was a "gun freak," she said. "I'm still finding guns he had stashed all over the house."
Ms. Miller does not know the statistics about rural suicides, but she knows enough. Her father and her first husband also killed themselves.
Correction: February 20, 2005, Sunday:
Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about people who commit suicide with guns in rural areas referred imprecisely to psychiatrists, whom some are reluctant to consult. Like members of other specialties, to whom potential suicides may turn more readily, psychiatrists are in fact physicians.
Source: New York Times -- Sunday, February 20, 2005 |
