Mother in pain turns to action with Modesto event

Like so many others who have lost a loved one to suicide, Alice Quayle has endured a range of emotions.

"The anger ... the questions ... the 'what-ifs?' " she said.

Her son, Dustin Boardrow, took his life one year ago tomorrow. The 29-year-old Enochs High School math teacher and assistant freshman football coach had been diagnosed with depression. His dad died suddenly in 2005. Dustin was single and had ended a relationship a few months before.

"Most people look at him as being successful," Quayle said. "He had a good job. He was a nice-looking young man. He'd just purchased a home."

And even though he'd totaled his car the day before he died, Boardrow gave no indication he was about to do something so drastic and so, well, final. Later that day, when Quayle and her husband dropped off a pickup for Dustin to use, he seemed to be in good spirits.

"He planned to go to work the next day," said Quayle, supervisor of transportation for Modesto City Schools. "He'd packed a gym bag and put it into the pickup. He made his next day's lunch and put it into the refrigerator."

Instead, he killed himself the next morning.

Dustin left behind a grieving and numbed mother and stepfather, co-workers, friends and students. And the anger. And the questions. And the "what-ifs?"

In the year since he died, she has resolved to make sure his death — and his life — have some meaning for others. Quayle is organizing Modesto's first "Out of the Darkness Community Walk" to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The 2.5-mile walk is scheduled for Sept. 18, beginning at Davis Park. Already, 125 people have signed up online.

"My goal was to raise $5,000 for the first one," Quayle said. "We're already at $7,000, so I've upped my goal to $10,000. I expect we'll have several hundred people walking."

She's doing this in remembrance of her son. She's organizing it because it's therapeutic for her and because it could benefit some other person who is contemplating ending it all.

"I'm doing it for Dustin," she said. "And if I can help some other family from going through the hell I've gone through for the past year, that's all I can do. I have to help somebody."

She now understands why Ripon's Melinda Shaw, whose daughter Marissa McLeod took her own life in December 2009, immersed herself in creating "Marissa's Closet." It's a nonprofit that provides prom dresses and other clothing to girls who otherwise could not afford them. Marissa's Closet is a vehicle for Shaw to deal with her grief by helping others, motivated by the memory of her daughter.

They have many things in common, among them the way they hurt and grieve, and that none of them saw it coming. Suicide is always something that happens in someone else's family ... until it happens in your own.

"I didn't realize how much it goes on," Quayle said. "Nobody wants to talk about it."

Through her therapy group, Quayle learned that someone in the United States commits suicide every 16 minutes — 33,000 per year. And those represent only confirmed suicides. Deaths by drug overdose might be intentional but are ruled accidental based upon the concentration of the drug determined by the toxicology report.

"Suicide by cop" cases might not be counted, either, nor deaths in auto crashes in which investigators suspect, but cannot prove, a suicide motive.

Even when suicides are confirmed, the subject long has been a societal taboo. Out of consideration to the families, most media — The Bee included — don't routinely report deaths by suicide except in cases involving murder-suicides or standoffs that end in suicide.

So while information about suicide is available, most people won't seek it out until after the fact.

"I was ignorant about depression," Quayle said. "If you suffered from depression, get over it. I've gone through the realization that they can't just get over it."

Dustin went for help and was given anti-depression medications. But, like many, he didn't like the way they made him feel. At the time of his death, he was taking two prescribed drugs, she said — one for insomnia, the other for anxiety.

"Both can cause suicidal thoughts," Quayle said.

Again, something she didn't learn until after her son took his own life.

"I'll never get over this," Quayle said. "I'll never move on. Life has changed for me. You never get over losing a child."

Nothing will bring him back. Questions never will be answered and her heartache never will end.

The best she can do, she said, is to take a long walk for suicide prevention with hopes of keeping others from someday being in her shoes.

Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at jjardine@modbee.com or 578-2383.