A YOUNG LIFE, A SENSELESS END

July 28th, 2010

Everybody liked Jesse Graham.

Easy with a smile, he was a prankster, a joker and a music lover with a taste so eclectic it stretched from hip hop to the geezer bands in his dad’s record collection.

He made friends easily and was unwaveringly loyal to those close to him.

At the Perth McDonald’s where he worked, he was invariably cheerful and friendly and could even muster a joke or two during the pre-dawn hours of the early shift. On the few occasions his supervisors came close to getting angry with him, he would melt them with a smile and say “Come on, you know you love me.”

It wasn’t easy to get mad at Jesse.

But behind the happy façade, he battled ferocious demons. He fought them alone — only he would have known for how long — until the early hours of Friday, June 18, when the demons won.

Just hours after attending a wake for 18-year-old Perth suicide victim Nick Fisher, Jesse hanged himself from a beam outside his basement bedroom at the Graham family home in rural Balderson. He was 17.

Before he took his life, Jesse wrote a note that began and ended with lyrics from songs by The Doors and Kansas. Police found it during a search of his room:

“When the music’s over turn off the lights.”

– Jim Morrison.

My music’s over, high school is done. They say high school is the best years of your life. Well, high school is over for me. My music is done. I’ve had a good time and now it’s over. I’ve lived my life to the fullest.

I’m sorry for those I’ve hurt. I love you all. But I can’t keep living like this. It’s all a lie. I hate myself and I want to die. Now I will. Thank you for the good times. Remember me with the fondest of memories.

“I close my eyes for a moment and the moment’s gone. All my dreams pass before my eyes of curiosity.”

– Dust in the Wind (Kansas).

It was a week before his graduation from high school — Perth District Collegiate Institute — and two weeks after his prom where he had dressed in a tux and sported the Ray-Bans he had bought for the occasion.

His friends and family agreed: Jesse had looked sharp, and in the photos from that evening, appeared nothing but happy.

Nobody — certainly not his parents, Jeff and Shelly, who are devastated and struggling to make some sense of the senseless — saw it coming.

“What looked like teen angst was really depression setting in,” Shelly told the packed congregation at her son’s funeral service. “We did not recognize the little pieces of the puzzle because we didn’t have the box lid to see the whole picture. As parents, we do our best, but we all make lots of mistakes along the way. Though he was surrounded by friends and family that loved him, he was unable to express what he was going through. We are deeply grieved his pain was so great that he felt there was only one way to make it go away.”

Jesse was the fourth of six children: Katie, 26, Zachary, 24 and Kelsie, 22, Jarred, 12, and five-year-old Lauren.

Jeff, 50, is a lineman for Ontario Hydro and Shelly, 47, is a nurse. The family is close-knit and churchgoing.

Jesse wasn’t perfect, but his imperfections were those of a typical teenager. Describing Jesse is to picture a person that the parents of most 17-year-olds would recognize. And all kids get sad sometimes.

But as much as he was a typical teenager, Jesse was also a typical teenage suicide victim.

He mentioned to a friend within the past year that he was feeling down and didn’t know how to deal with it, and some of his co-workers began seeing cracks in the happy façade. But he appears to have kept the true depth of his angst from almost everyone in his circle, especially his family.

Experts in juvenile suicide say that this is a common pattern, and although Jesse was apparently more closed about his problems than most victims, suicidal youths will usually share with their peers, often as a mutual secret.

“Unfortunately, the friends don’t realize that it’s more important to save the friend than save the friendship,” says Ian Manion, a specialist in child and youth mental health at CHEO.

As a youngster, Jesse enjoyed playing hockey while his dad watched. He played summer baseball, but quit sports during his first year of high school to focus on drama. He was a gifted actor and loved to take part in school plays.

“He was easygoing, obedient, polite and a prankster,” Shelly recalled. “And he was smart — really brilliant — but he had a problem with focusing and staying on task.”

When he was in fifth grade, the school tested him and confirmed that he was a gifted boy — among the highest percentile for his age in the country, according to his mother.

He did well through his early high school grades without doing a great deal of homework or studying. Then he hit Grade 12 where school, and life, started to get more difficult.

“He didn’t know how to study,” said Shelly. “He said ‘I don’t need to study. If I know it, I know it.’ I said ‘Well, if you know it, you should be getting good marks.’ He couldn’t focus to study and when Facebook came along, it got worse.”

He had a steady girlfriend but the relationship ended, as teenage relationships usually do. Shelly says Jesse eventually got over the breakup and moved on.

But his behaviour changed. He became disillusioned with his church youth group, questioning God, and started partying, drinking alcohol and smoking pot.

“He was smoking it here, at home, outside,” said Shelly. “I found it in his school bag and took all his stuff and a pipe. We talked about it. He was smoking it in the morning. I told him that ‘if you have to smoke pot in the morning, it isn’t a good thing. It’s not like smoking it at a party.’ I said ‘I’m sorry but we’re not going to allow this.’ He said ‘You can’t stop me.’ He was really mad that I looked in his school bag because he thought that was really dishonouring him, but I don’t think he smoked it much after that.”

But he did take to smoking cigarettes — a habit his father tried to break him of by giving him relative freedom to use the family truck in exchange for a promise that he would quit.

His school marks got worse, though, and last March, shortly before the family was to leave for a vacation in Florida — Jesse didn’t want to go — his chemistry and drama teachers called to say he was headed for failure because he hadn’t handed in his assignments.

His parents threatened to take the keys to the truck if he didn’t buckle down and get the assignments done. He did the work, but after March break fell back into his former ways.

This spring, out of the blue, Jesse told his mother he thought he had attention deficit disorder.

“He asked me to take him to the doctor to get him something that might help him,” said Shelly. “I looked it up in a medical book and he had seven out of the nine symptoms.”

The doctor agreed and put him on Concerta, a psychostimulant similar to Ritalin. “He started Jesse off on a low dose. Once he started taking it he could sit on the couch for 20 minutes without moving and do his homework, instead of sitting for five minutes and starting to talk about something else — something usually very interesting but nothing to do with his homework.”

The time-release drug helped him focus through the school day, but petered out by the evening when it was time to do homework. The doctor increased the dosage in May.

“I felt bad that we never picked up on the ADD before,” said Shelly. “All of his reports cards were ‘Jesse needs to stay in his seat, Jesse needs to quit talking in class, Jesse needs to quit distracting people.’ I guess we thought ‘that’s just Jesse.’”

Jesse’s teachers, she added, never mentioned the possibility he might have ADD.

On the day before he killed himself, Jesse told friends he was having a good day. He watched the movie The Book of Eli with his friend Randy, and the two of them went to the wake of Nick Fisher, a Perth teen who had apparently committed suicide four days earlier. Randy was a friend of Nick’s, but Jesse hardly knew him.

After the wake, they went to the church youth group and then Jesse went to McDonald’s for dinner.

When Jesse walked into McDonald’s on Thursday, June 17, he was not his usual jovial self. When one of his colleagues remarked on this, Jesse replied, “I have a lot on my mind right now.”

Jesse spent his last hours with his old friend Derek. They chatted for an hour or so until around midnight, when Jesse asked his friend if he would like to stay the night. Jesse produced a bottle of liquor and began drinking. Derek, a non-drinker, said he had to get home.

“I have to work tomorrow, man,” he said.

Jesse followed him outside and, as Derek was walking to his car, shouted: “I love you, man.”

“Yeah, I love you, too.”

Jesse communicated on Facebook with a cousin in Carleton Place and at around 1 a.m. began texting friends.

He sent a text to Derek, who by then was home in bed. He looked at the message that read “will you be my pola bearer?” He didn’t understand it.

Jesse’s sister Kelsie arrived home at 4.30 a.m. after visiting friends after work. She saw the basement lights on and thought it was strange that Jesse was still up. She went to her room, switched on Facebook and saw a status message from him that read: “Goodbye I’ll miss you all.” She considered it a strange thing to say but thought no more about it and went to sleep.

Jesse’s father, up at shortly after five and getting ready for work, saw the basement lights and went down to switch them off. He saw his son, got him down from the beam and began administering CPR while simultaneously shouting for help. Kelsie hurried dowstairs. They called 911 and continued with the CPR.

Kelsie rushed back upstairs: “Mother,” she said, “get up and pray like you’ve never prayed before. Jesse has hanged himself.”

Paramedics came and took over with more CPR and paddles but it was too late.

It wasn’t until police went to Derek’s house to tell him that Jesse was dead that he read the message again. Jesse had misspelled pallbearer.

There was another message from Jesse that Derek hadn’t seen.

“You’ve always been a great friend,” it read. “Good bye.”

Between 1,200 and 1,500 people attended Jesse’s wake, including Nick Fisher’s parents, Rick and Susan, who arranged to spend time with the Grahams before others arrived.

The Fishers, still suffering from their loss, remarked how Jesse had engaged them at Nick’s wake and how he left an impression on them that other strangers had not.

Shelly and Jeff say they were deeply touched by the Fishers’ gesture and felt comforted by it.

At Jesse’s funeral, his pallbearers and siblings wore Ray-Bans in his honour, as did many schoolmates at the graduation ceremony a week later.

Jesse’s family also went to the ceremony, where a gowned Jarred sat among his big brother’s fellow graduates and received the diploma on his behalf

“It was all very hard,” said Shelly, “but we needed to be there.”

On the morning of Jesse’s funeral, June 22, his cellphone alarm buzzed to remind him that he had a chemistry exam that day. He had also noted his graduation coming up in a week.

On the day Jesse died, his drama teacher planned to surprise him by allowing a game of Bodyguard, an intense version of dodge ball in which Grade 12s acted like they were in kindergarten again.

Jesse played with such enthusiasm that he broke lights and threatened other school fixtures. Largely because of Jesse, the teacher had banned the game and hid the ball.

The ball arrived at Jesse’s funeral — the centrepiece of a plant display.

The Grahams say they are being helped through their grief by friends, family and regular visits from Jesse’s friends, and shortly after the funeral invited those closest to him to visit, hang out in Jesse’s room and each take a couple of his possessions.

“By being here together it helps all of us,” said Shelly. “It helps them and blesses us because we know how much each of them loved Jesse.

“I thought he was just trying his own thing,” she added. “You have to allow that. It’s part of becoming independent. If I had known he was struggling with those thoughts, I could have talked with him and prayed with him. But it comes out as anger and when they are angry they push you away. All I could see was the anger. I couldn’t see the pain. I think he had a lot of guilt because of the lifestyle he was living and who he’d become in the past year.”

She wants to get this message out to anyone who might be in the frame of mind Jesse was before he took his own life:

“Tell an adult. There is such a code of honour about keeping confidences. Young people need to know that you have to break confidences. You have to tell someone who will be able to intervene; We all do the best we can and look back and decide how we could have done things differently, but to tell a parent or someone who can help you.”

Jeff, who was planning to take Jesse to Bluesfest for the first time, said he realizes now that his son was obviously hurting and putting on a brave face to the world.

“There is a lot of pressure on kids today,” he said. “Parents should try as best they can to keep the lines of communication open no matter how hard that can be during the teenage years. Talk to them and pry, pry, pry. Try to get whatever you can out of them.

“And when you get home, give them a hug and tell them you love them.”

Some symptoms of depression in youth

- Feeling unusually sad

or irritable.

- Loss of enjoyment and

interest in activities that used to be enjoyable.

- Lack of energy and tiredness.

- Feeling hopeless.

- Feeling worthless or feeling unnecessarily guilty.

- Thinking about death or dying.

- Talking or writing about suicide.

- Difficulty concentrating and making decisions.

- Lethargy.

- Difficulty sleeping.

Warning signs of suicidal behavior

- Hopelessness or despair.

- Withdrawal from family.

- Withdrawal from friends and usual social activities.

- Neglect of personal

appearance.

- Persistent self-deprecating comments.

- Preoccupation with death or with people who have died from suicide.

- Suicide or death as the theme of conversation or artwork.

- Giving away valued possessions.

- Depression, also including loss of interest in usual activities, changes in sleep patterns, crying, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, hopelessness.

Where to get more information

- Canadian Red Cross Youth Suicide Prevention website

www.youthsuicide.ca

- Canadian Mental Health Association

www.cmha.ca

- Youth Beyond Blue: A Youth Depression Awareness website.

www.youthbeyondblue.com.

What to do if you feel suicidal

- Tell a relative, friend, clergy, counselor or any person you feel you can talk to and who will help you.

- Make an appointment with a doctor and, if necessary, get a referral to a psychiatrist or other health professional.

- If you feel you cannot talk to anyone, or if no one is available, phone a crisis line. Visit the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention website (www.suicideprevention.ca) for a link to distress centres across Canada.

Written by: Chris Cobb
Published by: The Ottawa Citizen
Photo by: iStock photo
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