Hungry Horse mom chooses advocacy after son's suicide

Denise MacDonald got a text message from her youngest son at 2 p.m. Aug. 12, 2011, that confirmed her worst fear.

The message said simply, “I love you. I sorry.”

Twenty minutes later a final text reiterated, “I love you.”

Her 31-year-old son, Trevor Mead, took his own life minutes after that final message. MacDonald, of Hungry Horse, and her family have struggled with the tragic loss ever since, but MacDonald has channeled her grief into action.

She is the facilitator for the local Surviving Our Loss After Suicide support group and serves on the board of the Montana chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

On Sunday she will walk with other suicide survivors during an Out of the Darkness community walk at Rebecca Farm near Kalispell.

“This helps me,” she said about her advocacy work.

Trevor’s struggle with drug addiction, a precursor to his troubled life, is a story that is all too familiar to so many families.

“Trevor was well-liked. He’d tell jokes. He loved sports and played soccer,” his mother said. He completed his schooling at the Eagle alternative school in Coram.

Summers were spent camping with Trevor’s grandparents. There were plenty of good times.

The trouble started when Trevor began using methamphetamine when he was 16. He quickly became addicted. MacDonald tried to intervene, even going so far as to ask Columbia Falls City Judge Tina Gordon for the stiffest sentence when Trevor was arrested for forging checks. The judge obliged by putting him in the county jail for three months.

After that Trevor went to a state-run residential treatment program in Butte for six weeks — not nearly long enough to overcome his addiction. MacDonald, who was divorced with custody of Trevor and his older brother (her oldest son lived with her ex-husband), couldn’t afford the cost of private residential care.

He beat his drug habit on his own — for a while.

“Trevor was clean for quite a few years,” MacDonald recalled. “He got a job setting explosives at a coal mine in Wyoming.”

At the time Trevor was the father of two young sons. He secured housing in Wyoming, expecting his girlfriend to move there with the two boys.

They never came.

“That’s when he went downhill,” his mother said.

Before long Trevor reverted to drug use, lost his job at the mine and moved to Bozeman. He had a couple of jobs but never worked for long because of his drug addiction.

Trevor was a gifted artist, but during the last years his artwork had taken a dark turn, his personal demons manifesting themselves in his sketches.

MacDonald said one drawing showed the Libra scales drastically tipped, with a notation: “I can’t be the person everyone thinks I am.”

“He was fighting demons in his head,” MacDonald said. “Trevor was a peacemaker; he hated conflict.”

The profound internal conflict between good and evil continued to rage.

“I think he just felt hopeless,” she said.

On that lovely summer day in August 2011, Trevor waited until his two older brothers were out of town. He took his oldest brother’s truck, his other brother’s rifle and headed to scenic Hyalite Canyon, a popular recreation area that perhaps reminded him of his family home along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.

Trevor shot himself, but didn’t succumb immediately to his injuries.

What happened next would give MacDonald a measure of comfort in the years to come.

A bicyclist who is an emergency medical technician found Trevor collapsed on a narrow road. She intubated his airway and asked him during those last few moments of his life if she could say a prayer for him. He agreed.

“She said a prayer and then he died,” MacDonald said, describing the intervenor as a guardian angel. “It has given me peace. He’s in a better place.”

MacDonald has kept in contact with the EMT and has even stayed at her home in Bozeman.

“I started going back to church,” she added.

MacDonald, a paraeducator who works with the Boys and Girls Club in Columbia Falls, now strives to prevent other families from experiencing what she went through. Her remaining two sons still struggle with Trevor’s death.

“It’s tore the family apart,” she said. “I tell them it’s not their fault.”

MacDonald has dedicated a 2-mile stretch of U.S. 2 between Martin City and Coram to Trevor through the Adopt A Highway program. It’s one more tangible way of keeping his memory alive.

SOLAS, Surviving Our Loss After Suicide meets at 7 p.m. the first Tuesday of every month at The Summit fitness center, 205 Sunnyview lane in Kalispell. The group is free, nonreligious and open to all survivors of suicide loss. For more information call MacDonald at 406-407-4110 or email xicalanco3@gmail.com.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.