A Deadly Equation: Suicide in the West, Part III

A Glimmer of Hope, A Break in the Cycle

By Brian McDermott, 3-10-06

This is the third in a three-part series exploring suicide in Montana and the Rocky Mountain West. Click here for Part I and click here for Part II

	Photos by Brian McDermott Mary holds her son David, 9, on her lap as he plays video games. After his father died in May, his schoolmates made him cards saying how sorry they were.

Mary Borris and Maureen O'Malley met only once, at the Suicide Awareness Memorial Walk in October. But both women face the same question every day: how to confront suicide.

It begins, for O'Malley, with openness. She organized the walk and invited media, and the media came, cautiously.

Before the start of the vigil a local TV cameraman asked a woman to walk across Sacagawea Park so he could shoot video of her feet. He needed it early to make it back to the station in time for deadline. Another TV cameraman stood across the street, shooting the march to St. Anthony's from afar.

Confronting suicide requires education, too, O'Malley said. It requires mental health agencies putting aside their turf wars and working together, she said. And it requires time and money.

For Mary Borris, confronting suicide means talking openly about death with her children. When Mary got a copy of the coroner's report and of photos of Stephen's jail cell in December, David and Kodi sandwiched her on the couch as she looked at them. They asked her to explain how he hung himself, and she did: by kneeling into a noose tied with a sheet on the bunk bed above. Mary believes that the healthy way to confront suicide with her children is to be unwaveringly open. It is as if talking about the tragedies reasonably can lessen the emotional monstrosity of death.

David asks a lot of questions. Back in October in the same living room, with his Halloween reaper cloak on but the stuffy head on the floor, he asked his mother if she had ever attempted suicide.

"We'll talk about it later," she said. She has attempted suicide. Depression, she said, "weaves itself through our family."

David, a boy with a poster of Eminem and 50 Cent on his wall -- men inseparable from anger and violence -- shuffles uncomfortably. Despite the poster, Mary doesn't let him listen to rap. Mary got Ronan Elementary School to give him one-on-one counseling, and goes to group therapy herself.

She brought home the kittens. She took her children traveling: to Browning, Arlee, Billings, and Idaho. For David's tenth birthday, she had a limousine pick him and three friends up in the unpaved parking lot of his elementary school. It took him to Lucky Strike Lanes in Ronan. The limo cost $50 and the bowling $30 and the cake $14.95. This is no small sum for Mary, who lives on her single salary and what her husband's social security provides for her children. David was thrilled, though the bowling alley employee looked pained as bowling ball after bowling ball thudded on the lane as the kids threw them from waist level.

	Mary kisses Kodi goodbye before leaving for her 10 p.m. shift at a nearby nursing home. Mary hires a babysitter to take care of the kids overnight.

Like Mary loading up her kids in her beat-up 1984 Audi to travel, O'Malley is looking around the West for answers. Eight of the ten states with the highest suicide rate are in the West, but the success of programs in reducing the suicide rate in places like North Dakota and Washington encourage her.

For Mary, life is busy. As a nurse's aide she takes care of seniors who need her at work and she takes care of her children. She tries to take care of herself, too. That clear early October afternoon in Missoula at the suicide memorial walk resurrected difficult memories. "But it's not pain, it's healing," she said.

"I put one foot in front of the other and hope the next day brings me peace."

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