By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Thursday night, David Schramm, a nationally known speaker and Hays native, was the first guest of the John C. Thorns Jr. Memorial Lecture Series.
Schramm, a faculty member at Stanford University, and Thorns, a longtime FHSU professor and artist, were friends.
Thorns founded the Healing After Loss of Suicide group in Hays where he sought help after losing his own wife to suicide. The Center for Life Experience, which is the umbrella organization for the HALOS, is one of the sponsors of what organizers hope will be an annual lecture series.
Schramm gave a TED Talk in 2011 about his own suicide attempt and shared Thursday night about his journey of recovery from addiction and depression. That TED Talk has now been shared almost 1.9 million times and translated into more than 30 languages. He also shared personal experiences about his friendship with Thorns on Thursday night.
The Schramm and Thorns families were friends. When David was in the second or third grade, he used to push John's father, who had been disabled by a stroke, around the mall on his daily trips to socialize and get coffee. David's mother was manager there.
He said he likely first heard the word suicide in connection with John's wife's death, although he said he doesn't remember the particulars of his mother explaining this to him.
Schramm said Thorns was a mentor and advocate for him as he grew up and through his years in college. When Schramm finished his doctorate in education, he dedicated it in part to Thorns.
Thorns' daughter, Jenny, died in a car accident in 1983, and Schramm said he watched Thorns' crumbling and rebuilding as he dealt with that loss.
When Schramm was preparing to marry his husband, Ken, he brought him to meet Thorns.
"He took our wedding invitation in 2007 that was done by an artist friend of mine and he did a collage on top of the invitation, so I have a work of art that mirrors both the importance of my marriage and my life with my husband and John's art and Javier's art. I just treasure that. It was John's way of showing his support for our marriage when I wasn't experiencing that support from all corners of my life in 2007."
Schramm's lecture was titled "Finding Healing and Hope in Western Kansas." He shared some examples of Thorns' work during his lecture and noted that others see what is missing from the Kansas landscape, but Thorns saw what was here.
"Getting ready for tonight's talk, I can see beauty in Kansas, that I don't remember seeing as a kid growing up in Hays," he said.
Schramm shared some of what he saw as advantages and disadvantages of living in western Kansas.
Benefits of growing up in western Kansas
- Relatively simple, safe, slow lifestyle across generations
- Very little violent crime
- Lots of family
- Lifelong friendships
- Shared history and sense of community
- Everybody knows you
Schramm said he still has friends in Hays who he grew up with. He met a person on the plane coming into Hays who said all of his children and grandchildren live within 10 miles of him.
"There is an embracement and encouragement and joy around family," he said.
Challenges of growing up in western Kansas
- Relatively simple, safe, slow lifestyle across generations
- It can be repressive if you are different from the norm
- We don't see possibilities outside of Ellis County
- We have tolerated a conspiracy of silence
- Too many of our best and brightest leave
- Way too much alcohol
- Easy access to firearms
"As a gay kid growing up in a Catholic high school and a Catholic family wanting to be true to my faith and understanding the orientation that was coming out in me, that was really difficult," Schramm said. "There was not a lot of embrace of that which was different."
Scrhamm said the conspiracy of silence around mental illness in Ellis County has gone far too long.
"I was meeting with survivors in the HALOS group, people who have lost somebody to suicide, today," he said. "I said, 'What do you want me to say tonight?' They said, 'Let us say the names of the people we have lost. Ask us about the loss that we've had. Let us tell you the story, saying Tim or TJ or Calista or Glen or David.' Let us not brush under the rug the struggles that people have."
When Schramm was growing up in Ellis County, it was the No. 1 per capita consumer of alcohol in he world.
"There was a pride in the fact. We had bumper stickers that said 'Get drunk in Hays. Keep us No. 1.' It's kind of funny, but it's kind of scary. As someone who is now in recovery, I would worry about that amount of alcohol ... if my children were growing up here, that they would be exposed to that," he said.
Schramm said he debated including easy access to firearms on his list, but he related a personal story of why he did.
Schramm first tried to kill himself when he was in the seventh grade. He wrote a note and was going to shoot himself. When he took the handgun out of his family's closet, the gun went off and shot a hole in the floor. He was so startled by the gun going off that he ripped up the note and put the gun away. No one ever found the bullet hole in the thick shag carpet and no one new that Schramm had intended to kill himself.
"That could have gone really differently in 1977, and it has gone really differently for too many young people in our community," he said.
Between 1999 and 2016 in Kansas, the suicide rate went up 45 percent. Between 2016 and 2017, youth suicide went up 50 percent.
Schramm said he was almost one of those statistics and that is why he willing to do presentations like the one in Hays.
In June 2003, Schramm had just completed temporary duty in Hays working for Thomas More-Prep Marian, his alma mater, where he helped raised $250,000 for the school. He had just sold his apartment in New York for a six-figure profit and he had been offered a job at NYU, where he had just received his master's degree.
On the outside, it looked like things were going well, but it was a facade. He had just received his third DUI, this time in a vehicle that had been secured for him by TMP. He was battling addiction to alcohol and drugs. The sale of the apartment came only in time to keep it from foreclosure. He was deeply depressed.
After a bout of drinking in a New York bar, he left all his luggage behind in the bar, walked out onto the streets of New York. He wrote a suicide note and inserted it into an ATM. He made his way to the Manhattan bridge and jumped 200 feet into the water below.
He shattered his arm and broke all his ribs. He struggled to stay afloat with his one uninjured arm as he drifted in the East River before the passengers on the Staten Island Ferry heard his screams and alerted rescue crews.
Schramm's family rallied around him. His father and sister came to be by his side during his initial recovery at Bellevue Hospital.
"I slowly began the rebuilding of my life from that dreadful mistake," he said.
After 23 days in Bellevue, he checked into Halstead's Valley Hope addiction treatment program. Then he had to come back to Ellis County to serve jail time for his DUI. He then spent a month in a retreat house in Colorado to work on his spiritual life.
"And yet I was able to step back into recovery," he said. "It took a long journey — a long walk."
He said he learned what surrender is, which in recovery is not giving up, but going over to the winning side.
Schramm used an analogy from a fellow professor — water your flowers and cut your weeds.
"What are the actions we can take to keep that dry grass moist that keep the precipitating factors at bay so a lightning strike like a loss of a job or a crop not going well or not getting on a traveling team or not getting a part in a show or not getting a job you were going for—that those don't become lightning strikes that lead us to do something more deliberate or that could be more deadly?"
Resources
High Plains Mental Health has a 24-hour crisis line that can be reached at 1-800-432-0333.
FHSU Kelly Center: 785-628-4401
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
The National Suicide Crisis Text Line: 741741.
The local National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) group meets on the first Monday of the month at 6 p.m. at the Hadley Center. For more information contact Ann Leiker, coordinator at 785-259-6859 or email her at [email protected].
Healing After Loss of Suicide: For more information contact Ann Leiker, coordinator at 785-259-6859 or email her at [email protected].