"Sitting by the Side of a Pond... with a .357 Magnum"

Note: The person described in the following story as Curt is not named Curt.  Everything else is accurate.

September 2002

To say that my path from the military world to the civian world was bumpy puts in mildly.  The medical discharge was followed by a flurry of resume send-outs then an empty mailbox.  I limped around a construction site for a few months before Shane's accident, then I worked at a residential treatment center for seriously emotionally disturbed children.

A well-placed donkey kick from a ninety pound, thirteen year old female patient while I was helping stop a mini-riot on our wing led me to the emergency room and another career path.  Unfortunately this one was with an environmental subcontractor with huge ambitions and no capitol.  The work was steady though the paychecks were not.

By September I was happy to head down to Utah to help a subcontractor get their equipment ready for a water treatment pilot project.  Curt was the president of the company and we hit it off well.  The company only had one other employee and a few contractors.    They were a small rag-tag outfit that more than made up in gumption what they lacked in polish.  In short, my kind of crew.  They'd developed a pretty wild electric water treatment technology and we had to get their trailer finished up to drag  up to Montana to pull of the pilot before the cold hit.

It was random work and we weren't well equipped.  I spent one hot afternoon fourteen feet above the ground unloading a 6oo lb. bag of zeolite into massive canisters with a cooking pot.  Something about that display of both stupidity and fortitude moved Curt to offer me a job.  A man with better options and more foresight would have said no.  I shook his hand.

After the project finished up in Montana, I moved back down to Utah to a little trailer in the desert.  Each day I helped work on a technology that I thought would change the world.  I'd developed a major concern about upcoming water shortages while I was at West Point and this seemed like developing Curt's water treatment technology was tangible way to help minimize the impact of that future scarcity.  It's cheesy, but I thought I'd found my life's mission.

Curt's mind amazed me and I felt honored to be involved with trying to bring his ideas to life.  He was a wild-haired Mormon visionary and I was the Copenhagen chewing second man trying to figure out how to bring the vision into reality.  Every week brought a new challenge and we were short of just about everything but creativity and ambition.

Somewhere over the course of the next year, our progress on the technology slowed.  We were close never quite ready for prime-time.  We'd prep and then test, rework and then test again.  It was exactly what we needed to do, but I was worried that it wasn't happening fast enough for our investors and my love affair with the Utah desert was over.

One June afternoon in 2003, I found myself hotwashing out used septic tanks in 114 degree heat for our next test.  I blasted the scalding water against the grimy plastic for five or six hours before coming to the conclusion that it was time to go back to school.

August 2008

Five years later, I'd completed with law school and spent two years as an associate in a law firm before taking a part-time job as the Executive Director of NAMI Montana.  Once again thinking I was going to change the world, but it couldn't have been much different than trying to develop new technology under the desert sun.

It had taken a while, but Curt and his company had finally flourished.  They used the water treatment technology as a path to transition into plastics recycling.  The company was opening a plant in Burbank and the cash flow projections were jaw-dropping.

Curt and I had stayed in touch over the years and he'd even offered me a position with the company the previous fall.  We talked every couple of months and he'd update me on the company that we'd brought out of infancy together.

I hadn't thought about Curt in a while, but images of him kept coming into my head one August day as I worked in the NAMI office.  I tried to focus on prepping for our upcoming Walk fundraiser, but I just couldn't get him out of my head.  Eventually it was just too much, I wrapped up my half-day and walked home intent to work on some other projects.

But still I couldn't get Curt out of my head.  Finally I broke down and called him.

"Hello?" I heard his startled voice answer on the other end of the line.  "Matt?  That's weird we never get reception up here."

I said hi and tried to strike up a conversation.  I had no intention of telling Curt that I'd been dwelling on him all day and finally called just to get him out of my head.

Something was wrong.  "Curt, what's going on I asked."

He sighed.  "I'm sitting by the side of the pond up at our ranch with a .357 Magnum in my hand.  It's all falling apart.  I'm going to lose everything: my business, my family, everything.  I'm trying to think of a reason not to kill myself."

I spent the next hour talking him down.  I was in way over my head and knew that I was doing everything wrong, but somehow a combination of mindfulness exercises to shortcircuit the anxiety/depression and telling him for the first time about my near brush with suicide a decade before was enough to get him to put down away the gun. 

March 2011

Over the course of the next two and a half years, Curt really did lose everything.  His business, his property, and eventually his family.  They all fell like horrible dominoes.  I know that he could have done some things differently, but the complete collapse was more than one man could ever bring on himself.  It's just a brutal mystery why some struggle so hard through so much. 

Curt's been tested in a way that I hope I never have to be.  The fact that he continues struggling forward is an incredible accomplishment.  Curt had a job interview last week with a water treatment company in Colorado.  It's too early to know whether he got it, but I pray that it's his time to keep moving forward again.

End Note: I had a family member commit suicide about a year and a half before I called Curt on that fateful day.  I've also had a family member try to commit suicide twice in the years following that call.  I can't begin to fathom why I was summoned to contact Curt and not the others.  It's too sad to even try, but that doesn't change the facts around the phonecall to Curt.  

A French Saint's Prayers for America's Heroes

Note: Catholic’s regularly ask saints to pray for them or others. While this practice isn’t followed by Protestants, it’s fundamentally no different than asking anyone else for their prayers. This is a story about how one of those prayers was answered.

In early March of 2007, our family lost my stepbrother to a PTSD suicide. Chris had been back home from Iraq for about a year and a half. He was a good kid that became a great man, but the traumatic stress injury he sustained in Iraq was too much for even the brave Humvee machine gunner to defeat.

The suicide was precipitated by an Other Than Honorable discharge that he received in the mail. Other Than Honorable discharges are typically given to service members convicted by a civilian criminal court and incarcerated or if the conduct leading to that civilian conviction brings discredit upon the military.

Chris’s only crime was that he didn’t attend his monthly National Guard drills, because of his debilitating PTSD. To this day, it’s still hard to imagine how that discharge ever went through. It was the most damning piece of evidence that our military didn’t have a process to effectively care for its heroes returning home with PTSD injuries.

The most basic question was why hadn’t Chris’s unit sat him and all the other returning soldiers down in front of a mental health professional for a PTSD screening? If they’d identified the injury, they could have directed him towards treatment. Instead, they left it up to his battalion who either missed or ignored the red flags for PTSD and flushed him out of the service.

A few days after Chris’s death, his family stood in his mother’s kitchen and decided to tell Chris’s story to try and prevent other families from having to go through the same tragedy. As a veteran and attorney, I took the lead.

The first week after a tragedy is critical to any effort to force a systemic change from that event. You either harness the wave of media attention that the tragedy inspires or you let it slip by and lose the opportunity.

I spent that week talking to staff of the politicians that could force the National Guard to implement changes in their systems of caring from returning service members. I also talked with the local media. I seemed cut and dry.

I was wrong. The papers came out at the end of the week mourning the tragic death. There was no mention of the discharge, that the military had failed in its duty to care for an injured soldier, or that the system of care could be improved. In short, I failed.

I met with a retired general and another seasoned member of the state government that Sunday. They drew the same conclusion. It was over. The attention would go back to the state’s budget or some other issue and nothing would be done.

I was dejected. I’d failed Chris while he was alive and then again after his death. On my way home, I stopped by the grocery store and picked up a dozen roses for St. Therese of Lisieoux. The little French saint had worked miracle after miracle for our family from curing my grandmother’s infant paralysis to helping me pass the bar exam after I’d spent a summer focusing on the wrong material.

St. Therese loves roses and the only thing I could think to do was to buy her some roses as a way of asking/thanking her for praying to God for a miracle to fix my failed attempt to make something good come out of Chris’s tragic death. I set the roses on the passenger seat of my car and began to drive home. By the time I pulled into the driveway, a barebones plan had popped into my head.

I put the roses on the table. Prayed again and began typing…

I couldn’t have imagined how powerfully that prayer was answered. Eighteen months later, the State of Montana was recognized as the best state for caring for its service members returning home from combat. The foundation for its program was multiple, staged face-to-face mental health screenings for every service member returning from combat. One year later, Congress required a similar screening mechanism be put in place across the military. The Department of Defense is currently working to implement it.

According to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the program has the potential to save more lives than armored Humvees.

January of 2009

I walked back into the caboose of the Inaugural Train. Soon-to-be President Obama introduced me to his wife Michelle and told her about some of the things we’d accomplished after Chris’s death.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out two religious medals. I gave a St. Michael medal to Michelle and told her to ask him to defend her family.

I handed President Obama a smaller medal with the image of St. Therese of Lisieoux, the little Carmelite nun that died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was her.”

End Note: I think it’s important to point out that praying for this does not always fix all of our issues in this damaged world. I know this too well tonight as this is the first night that I do not have my children due to an impending divorce. Prayers are not always answered how or when we want them to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that a miracle occurred after I asked St. Therese to pray for better care for our returning heroes.

Five Minutes

I haven’t shared this story with more than one or two people. I don’t know if I’d be sharing it today, if someone battling mental illness hadn’t challenged me for hiding my own struggles with depression.

End of November, 2000

I pulled the knot tight in the green rope and then secured it with an overhand hitch knot. I put my weight on the rope. It held strong around the rafter.

The white chair wobbled beneath me. I opened the noose and tested the length of the rope. It would be about an eighteen-inch drop. Perfect.

I shifted my leg brace down and stepped off the chair. I went downstairs to write a note.

A rational mind struggles to comprehend suicide. Those of us with depression or another mental illness struggle not to comprehend it. The sick brain self-destructs by sending out waves of overpowering chemical and electrical signals. It’s similar to how the bone marrow of someone with leukemia creates abnormal white blood cells bent on destroying the body.

My world had collapsed over the course of six months. An injury in Ranger School shattered my military career and left me crippled. My fiancée had betrayed me while I was at the Office Basic Course and Ranger School. It seemed that everyone I knew on the island had kept that betrayal from me.

I’d suffered from depression before and this combination of events more than set it off again. I couldn’t see how I could make it through another day. It felt like being trapped in a dark room where suicide was the only door. I fought not to open it, but eventually the darkness overcame me.

I stopped on my way down the stairs and prayed. “God, I love you, but I just can’t do this any more. If you have some reason that I should stay alive, I’ll give you five minutes to show me a sign.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I hobbled around the kitchen and pulled together a paper and pen. I wrote and then threw out two suicide notes. The final one just said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

That summed it up. I hung the paper on the wall and went back upstairs

I stepped up on the wobbling white and blue chair. I slipped the noose around my neck and had a few final thoughts. One thought wouldn’t go away.

I needed to pay the rent. It would probably take a week or two for my unit to send the police to my apartment. It would probably take two or three weeks to clean it up and get rid of my gear. There was no way that they could have it rented again before the first of the year. The least I could do was pay them for the month of December.

There was one problem. I didn’t have any checks. I’d ran out of checks the week before and was still waiting for the new ones to arrive. I’d tried to take the money out of my ATM the day before, but had hit the daily withdrawal limit well short of what I needed.

I’d looked through the checkbook multiple times for a spare check that I may have missed among the duplicates. There was nothing. My irrational mind was battling with my irrational mind. Go look again versus get on with it. Go look again won.

I took the noose off my neck and got down to look through the checkbook again. I flipped through the duplicate checks once, nothing. I flipped through them again, nothing. I flipped through them one last time and found a check.

I filled it out and then walked outside to drop it in the mail. The mailboxes were in the center of the complex. On my way there, I said hello to my neighbor Jeff who was sitting on his porch.

I said hi. Jeff said hi back. We were amicable, but hadn’t said more than a few words over the two months that I lived there. Jeff was a Hawaiian native and I was a lily white haole from the mainland. The insider and the outsider. A cultural barrier left over from the island’s colonization.

I dropped the envelope in the mail slot and turned back towards my apartment. I heard a soft whimper from across the street. Jeff was crying.

I walked over and sat down next to him. We began to talk and didn’t stop for the next two hours. Jeff thought he was about to be laid off. His marriage was already on the rocks and he was terrified about what that meant for his children.

I didn’t have any answers, but we talked until he felt better. Somewhere along the way I began to feel better too.

We hugged and I went back to my apartment.

I’d forgotten how much peace can be found through trying to help someone else. It was a lesson I’d learned as a child while trying to help Darcee battle her eating disorder.

It was another door out of the darkness. A door that I wouldn’t have found if something higher hadn’t planted the idea in my brain that I couldn’t say goodbye to this world without paying the rent.