U.S. Senator and Former Mormon Bishop Pours Out Lessons of Son’s Suicide

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Garrett Lee Smith, the son of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., killed himself in his college apartment in Utah on Sept. 8, 2003. It was the day before his 22nd birthday. “Put me in the ground and forget about me,” Garrett had written in his suicide note. “Remembering Garrett: One […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Garrett Lee Smith, the son of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., killed himself in his college apartment in Utah on Sept. 8, 2003. It was the day before his 22nd birthday.

“Put me in the ground and forget about me,” Garrett had written in his suicide note.


“Remembering Garrett: One Family’s Battle With a Child’s Depression” (Carroll & Graf, $23.95, 208 pages) is his father’s loving rebuttal to that plea.

The book opens with a version of every parent’s worst nightmare: the after-hours knock at the door of Gordon and Sharon Smith’s home in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., police bringing unthinkable news from the other side of the country.

“Success in business, service in church, election to the United States Senate _ in an instant, it all seemed meaningless, even vain,” recalls Smith, a former Mormon bishop and missionary. “I had failed to save my own son.”

Smith blamed himself for what he calls “a perdition of my own making.” He staggered upstairs to his son’s room, fell on the bed, “clutched his old teddy bears to me and spent a night in hell, crying out to him, screaming at myself, pleading with God for understanding, for forgiveness, for mercy, for the strength to go on.”

Writing the book “kind of helped Gordon walk through this,” says Sharon Smith, who wrote the final chapter.

Gordon Smith sees the book as a road map for families who have lost someone to suicide, with an implicit message that life does go on. It includes a list of places where families dealing with depression or suicide can find help.

The book is as much about the father as the son. It describes Smith’s Mormon roots, his courtship of Sharon at Brigham Young University, their decision to adopt children, his dual career in business and politics.


The story is straightforward and moving _ a quick, absorbing read. It also contains the kinds of homespun aphorisms that Smith is known for in the Senate:

“Home is always where my heart is, even when my body is somewhere else.”

“Pain and loss do not register as Republican or Democrat.”

“I had learned, both in peas and politics, that preparation and perspiration led to success.” That’s a reference to the family’s pea-processing business, now named Smith Frozen Foods, in Weston, Ore.

Smith describes his young family’s life as “straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.” But once Smith launched his political career, it got less Rockwellian.

The central tensions of the book are between life and work, family and politics, home obligation and senatorial protocol.

Smith is not above calling himself naive about depression, and the harrowing narrative he traces does little to contradict that judgment.

“I didn’t know any better,” he says. “I tried to be a good dad, but I was gone a lot. And even when I was home, I didn’t know the signs and the lethality of what we were watching.”


Garrett Smith had learning disabilities, including dyslexia. But he achieved three important goals: to become an Eagle Scout, graduate from high school and serve a church mission.

“Had we known of Garrett’s illness earlier,” Smith writes, “I believe our son’s story would have had a very different ending.”

There were signals the Smiths see clearly now.

Police caught Garrett drinking with teenage friends. His admission that “the only way he could cope with all his anxiety was through drinking” shocked his parents. He was downing vodka before school and before bed _ “self-medicating,” in his father’s words.

The Smiths got Garrett help through a youth drug and alcohol program and moved the family back to Pendleton, Ore., for Garrett’s senior year in high school.

A few pages later comes a revelation: Garrett had checked “yes” to a question about depression on his church mission application.

“I was stunned by his self-diagnosis of depression,” Smith writes. “I didn’t want to believe it and, like so many in our society, I didn’t understand it.”


Smith was elected to the Senate in 1996, and won re-election handily in 2002. By then, Garrett’s mood and behavior were “disturbingly erratic,” but he rejected counseling and assured his parents he was fine.

“We so desperately wanted him to be happy that we believed him,” Smith writes. “He would be better when he got into the routine of college life, we hoped.”

Antidepressant drugs seemed to help for a while, but then came more scary signals. Garrett’s best friend found him drunk and overdosed on pain pills _ a failed try at suicide. He put on weight and slept much of the day. A scar on his arm, which Garrett attributed publicly to a mountain bike spill, betrayed another suicide attempt.

A hastily arranged family vacation trip to Britain ended with another bombshell: Garrett broke down and told his parents that he had been depressed since age 10.

Garrett’s parents were no longer clueless about his dire condition. But what to do?

“I felt hopeless as to how to help,” Smith writes. “Sharon and I were desperate, but he was beyond reach, beyond reason, beyond rationality.”

Smith describes his son’s suicide in considerable detail. Otherwise, he says, the account would not do justice to Garrett’s own honesty.


Clearly, Smith is haunted by the sense that his Senate career, with long days and its bicoastal demands, contributed to his inability to reach his son in time.

“Why hadn’t I been there more for him?” he writes. “Why had I been away from home so much? … The answers did not come.”

Smith considered resigning from the Senate to spend more time with his two other children, and even e-mailed that intention to his chief of staff.

“But even as I did this, I knew deep down _ something that Sharon kept reminding me _ that to resign my seat was the last thing Garrett, or Brittany and Morgan, would want.”

The book’s genesis came two years ago, in handwritten notes for Smith’s testimony at a Senate committee hearing on suicide-prevention legislation. His deeply personal account moved onlookers, some to tears.

Kerry Tymchuk, head of Smith’s Oregon office, suggested “there’s a book in there” and introduced the senator to an agent who brought offers from two publishers. The Smiths chose Carroll & Graf for an undisclosed advance.


Smith wrote the first draft in ballpoint longhand on the back of daily news summaries he gets from his staff. He wrote mostly in the late evenings, in his Senate office or at home. He’d fax drafted sections to Tymchuk, who typed them into a computer and sent back edited printouts. Smith finished the draft in August at the family cabin in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, calling Sharon at home from time to time to read fresh passages.

“The hardest part was writing about his death, revisiting the horror of the struggle just to get beyond it,” Smith says, his voice cracking.

The Smiths established the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Fund at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Pendleton, which helped pay for a mental health center, a library and reading room and screening for depression among students.

A Senate bill bearing Garrett’s name, signed into law by President Bush in 2004, has led to 37 federal grants, totaling about $10 million, for suicide prevention programs around the country.

Smith has an obvious love-hate relationship with Washington politics. The book contains a preface by Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and blurbs on the back cover by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Kennedy. The text mentions 18 Senate colleagues by name.

But debate about the bill was “torture,” Smith writes. He is unsparing in his criticism of fellow Republicans who opposed the bill out of “ignorance or ideological hard-heartedness.” Advisers and editors persuaded him to take the names out.


“I was angry and embarrassed that members of my own party could be so callous and counterproductive,” Smith writes.

The book’s first printing is 20,000 copies. Any sales royalties will go toward the Boy Scouts of America and the Latter-day Saints mission program.

Sharon Smith gets the final word in the book. “I have 22 years of happy times filling my treasure chest of loving memories,” she writes.

She sees the book aimed at anyone who knows a child struggling with depression. “It could be the boy next door, or the girl next door,” she says. “It’s not as abnormal as you think.”

MO/RB/ END COLBURN

(Don Colburn is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Gordon Smith at his son’s grave and of book cover go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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