Survivors share pain of suicides

Grieving Iowans hope their personal stories will help two recent victims' families cope

The survivors have a message.

They all have different stories with the same tragic theme: Their children took their own lives.

They come from all over Iowa — Cedar Rapids, Urbandale and Sioux City. For some, their loss was a few months ago. For others, it has been years.

A pair of Johnston 15-year-olds died in unrelated suicides last weekend. These earlier survivors want the teens’ families, friends and others left behind to know one thing above all else: You are not alone.

“There are others who have had to deal with the same grief, the same heartbreak and tears and pain,” said Paul Wilton, who lost his son, Jonathan, to suicide more than six years ago. “Find them. Don’t try to handle this grief and pain by yourself. You will lose. You have to lean on your friends and family and faith and lean hard. It will always hurt, but you will find a way, one day at a time, to keep moving forward.”

Survivors of suicide from across Iowa shared their stories with The Des Moines Register this week, in part to help those carrying the grief of lost loved ones in Johnston, but also to help their community and state understand the complex pain and confusion mixed into the heartache of losing children to their own hands.

Their fervent prayer is that by sharing, they can help ease the suffering and show there is hope in even the darkest moments.

Chandler Gouchee

‘It would never make sense’

The one-year anniversary of the day Chandler Gouchee took his own life is Feb. 21.

His mother, Jill Hockaday, still does not fully understand why her 16-year-old ended his life. She read the police report. She read the autopsy report. She read and re-read the note he left and watched the video he recorded on his iPod. None of it made sense.

“I was looking for a reason for it — something to pin it on — an excuse,” Hockaday said. “I finally had to come to grips with the fact that I would never know why. It would never make sense.”

Her son played drums and golf. Chandler tinkered with gadgets and loved music and camping. He skipped some school. He drank alcohol. He smoked marijuana. His parents disciplined him. They kept their eye on him. But they didn’t suspect severe depression.

“Chandler would say he didn’t want to go to school because there was ‘too much drama,’ ” Hockaday said. “You think about high school and the kinds of things that go on with friends and social groups. I didn’t know that the drama was inside him.”

Hockaday and the rest of Chandler’s family in Cedar Rapids visit his grave regularly. When the school year ended, they gathered at the school to release balloons with his classmates.

Anniversaries hit Hockaday hard: birthdays, holidays and now the coming anniversary of the suicide. She attends a suicide survivor support group in the city. The conversations with others who have shared experiences has helped ground her.

“My short-term memory is shot,” she said. “I feel like I’m going crazy. I told the group, and they said, ‘Oh, no. That’s a part of it.’ It just touches you in so many ways.”

Neil Linquist

‘He was a loved child. We told him’

Neil Linquist was a 17-year-old junior at Valley High School in West Des Moines when he took his own life Sept. 22, 2005. He was an honor student with a lot of friends.

He showed no signs of clinical depression, said his mother, Janis Linquist of Urbandale. One of the few things Neil ever did out of line was smoke marijuana.

His parents caught him. They punished him. They made him submit to random drug tests. The discipline seemed to be working.

A month before Neil died, Linquist noticed a change in her son. She thought he was smoking pot again. She told him he had 30 days to clean up his act. Then there would be a drug test. If he flunked it, he would lose his car.

Neil gave up pot and instead turned to abusing an over-the-counter cough syrup. His parents believe an overdose put their son in a frame of mind to kill himself without really knowing what he was doing.

“For the longest time, I didn’t believe it was a suicide,” Linquist said. “But after a while, I started to understand that drug abuse is a form of killing yourself. He was not depressed. He was a loved child. We told him. We showed him.”

Linquist waited two years to clean out Neil’s room. She felt a rage come over her. She tore posters off the wall and stuffed them into the trash. “If they meant so much to you, you should have stayed,” she said.

A friend invited Neil’s parents — Janis and her husband, Phillip — to participate in a suicide survivors walk. The first year she tried it, she could barely handle it. The second year, she joined the committee. Now she leads the event from her Urbandale home. She talks regularly to schools, church groups and other groups about her son’s death. This is how she keeps his memory alive.

“After every event, I sit in my car, take a deep breath and say, ‘Neil, you helped someone else today,’ ” Linquist said.

Jennifer Anspach

‘Depression is like emotional cancer’

Larry Anspach worried about sending his daughter Jennifer off to Drake University. She had struggled with major depression her entire life.

Larry and his first wife, Marsha, adopted Jennifer from South Korea. Then Marsha developed aggressive cancer and died.

Jennifer’s depression started to show when she was in elementary school. She attempted suicide once before. But Larry and his second wife, Sylvia, worked with Jennifer and got her into therapy and on a medicine regimen.

Jennifer seemed to be fitting in at Drake, where she was a sister in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. But her disease overcame the medicine and treatment. She took her own life on April 10, 2008.

“Depression is like emotional cancer,” said Anspach, an engineer in Cedar Rapids. “You do everything you can to beat cancer, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes the cancer wins.”

Anspach noticed that people struggled to talk to him. They wanted to say something. They wanted to be comforting.

“Suicide is the thing that people don’t talk about — they don’t have a vocabulary for it,” he said. “You hear people say something like, ‘Suicide is a selfish act.’ I’d get mad.”

Someone who commits suicide is “not even in your right mind,” he said. “How could it be selfish? I had to learn to not judge people for what they said or did, but what I believed was in their heart. That was a challenge.”

Anspach still feels the emptiness. He’ll be talking, and he’ll think about Jennifer, and it feels as if the world has been put on pause. He feels emptiness in his chest like a dull ache. Then it passes.

“That never leaves,” he said. “It just gets a little less sharp with time.”

Daniel Jasper

‘Sometimes

it’s OK to cry’

Kathy Jasper has replayed endlessly her last conversation with her 16-year-old son, Daniel, in August.

Daniel wept on the phone and begged his mother to come get him from Boys Town in Omaha. Kathy and Dave Jasper of Cedar Rapids enrolled Daniel there because of his struggles with mental health. Daniel’s depression first emerged when he was in fifth grade.

He was a charming boy who could make anyone laugh, his mother said. He was good at sports and popular. But Daniel tried marijuana. He told his mother he didn’t feel normal when he wasn’t using it. His parents, devout Catholics, turned to Boys Town, an internationally recognized residential educational and rehabilitation institution.

Things went well for a while, but eventually the depression returned with a vengeance. Desperate, he called his mother. She told him to stay at Boys Town and let people there help him. He ran away and hanged himself. His body was not found until October.

Jasper remembers one of Daniel’s classmates whispering at the funeral.

“He said something like, ‘What did Daniel have to be depressed about?’ ” Jasper said. “Daniel had good parents who had good jobs. We lived in a nice house. He was a good athlete. People just don’t understand depression. They don’t understand how it works.”

This is why Jasper talks to people about Daniel’s life and his death whenever she’s asked. She saw how Daniel suffered with depression.

“I would find him sometimes with his head in his hands, crying,” she said. “He would look at me and say, ‘Why does it have to be like this?’ ”

Jasper hasn’t found a good answer to that question. But she keeps talking. It’s the only way she can keep moving forward.

“There are days when I have a smile on my face, and it’s fake,” she said. “You do what you have to do … to get through the day. It is not all sadness all the time, but it hurts. I miss my son. Sometimes it’s OK to cry.”

Jonathan Wilton

‘You need people

to walk with you’

Paul Wilton of Sioux City knew about clinical depression. He worked as a pharmaceutical company representative and sold antidepressants to hospitals and doctors. Still, he never recognized any signs in his 30-year-old son, Jonathan Wilton, nearly seven years ago.

Jonathan worked as a chef in Sioux City. He rented a house with a good friend. He had been down recently after he broke up with his girlfriend, but Paul Wilton thought it was the normal grief after a relationship ends. Jonathan had juvenile onset diabetes. He lived with the disorder his entire life.

Maybe Jonathan never recovered from the breakup, or maybe he had tired of the ordeal of living as a diabetic.

“You look back and try to find clues, but you can drive yourself crazy doing that,” Wilton said. “The truth is you can do everything right and be the most sensitive person possible and still end up in this place.”

After Jonathan’s suicide, Wilton felt people avoid him. “People are scared to death of suicide,” he said. “They’re afraid they’re going to catch it like a cold.”

Paul and his wife, Janine, Jonathan’s stepmother, sought out the Broken Silence Suicide Support Group hosted at Christy Smith Funeral Home in Sioux City. There they found peers in their tragedy.

“You have to find people who understand what you’ve been through,” Wilton said. “You need people to walk with you and help you carry the burden. If we hadn’t done that, I don’t think we would have made it. It was all the help in the world to know we are not alone.”