Christopher Dartt wasn’t exactly unworldly. He was an avid reader and did some traveling to visit friends and family around the U.S.
But he lived a circumscribed life, visiting and working with a familiar cast of friends and family among the woods and fields of the White River Valley.
Though he knew a lot of people, and many of them knew him well, Dartt was a singular figure. He did as he pleased, structuring his work-life around what he liked — hunting and fishing, the Tunbridge Fair, sugaring and haying.
People who knew him saw him as a bit of a throwback, out of step with the 21st century.
“He was an old Vermont soul,” his lifelong friend Tim Silovich said in an interview. “A classic old Vermonter.”
But his self-sufficiency was also a sign of isolation. A child of alcoholic and neglectful parents, he struggled with alcohol himself and lived a solitary life, despite the community of family and friends that surrounded him.
Christopher Dartt died by suicide in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2026, his family said. He was 38 years old.
Dartt’s family has deep roots in the White River Valley. Dartt Hill Road in Bethel is named for his forebears, and his parents lived in an old farmhouse on Gilman Road in Royalton, near the Bethel line.
As a child, much of Dartt’s home life took place in homes other than his own. His father, David Dartt, was “never in the picture,” Dartt’s sister, Tina Spaulding, said in an interview at the Spaulding family’s farm in Royalton. It’s just up the road from the drafty farmhouse where Dartt lived with his mother, Ethel Dartt.
Tina is one of three older siblings from Ethel Dartt’s first marriage. Tina was 14 years older than Christopher. She started dating Jimmy Spaulding, whose family farmed nearby, when Dartt was 4 years old, and he spent a lot of time in the Spaulding household.
“There’s always been just a lot of people around,” she added. “This is not a quiet house.”
In addition to his older siblings, there was a passel of kids to roam the sprawling farm fields and woods with, Spaulding said.
“They didn’t get into too much trouble, that they told us about,” she said.
Dartt also took comfort in spending time on the farm, helping with chores. He named a calf that had been born on his birthday Present, and he had a special fondness for going out into the field when cows were calving to help with the birth and to see the new calves.
His mother managed The Depot, a bar in Bethel at the former train station that now houses Babes Bar. From the time he was 5 or 6, Dartt had the run of Bethel village.
The Dartts were poor by any measure. Tina and Jimmy made sure her younger brother had a winter coat and clothes for school.
Home was a difficult place for Dartt as a child.
“It was the coldest house I ever slept in in my life,” Silovich, who was Dartt’s best friend from the age 4, said of staying over at his friend’s house.
“I tried to get him to come to the barn all the time, just to get him out of there,” Jimmy Spaulding said.
Ethel Dartt struggled with alcohol, and her youngest son was sometimes an afterthought. Silovich recalled one instance when Christopher was left behind at a party and brought home by friends’ parents.
Growing up, Dartt spent time at Silovich’s home. Silovich’s mother worked in the school system and encouraged Dartt to attend school, something he was reluctant to do, at best.
“He was always so good at school,” Silovich said. Dartt was a fluent reader and was good with numbers, but he kept careful track of how many days he could skip and not be held back a grade.
He graduated from South Royalton School in 2005. There were people who encouraged him to go to college, but he wasn’t interested.
“He was definitely smart enough to go to college,” Jimmy Spaulding said.
In particular, Dartt had a spacious memory for things that mattered to him.
“He remembered every date of everything,” Tina Spaulding said. The dates when family farm dairy herds were sold, for instance.
He read Westerns and history books and was a bit of a history buff. At Babes Bar, he didn’t participate in trivia nights, but people who did tried to sit close to him, because he often knew the answers and would utter them aloud.
“He could read something and it never left his head,” Jimmy Spaulding said.
He also pored over maps and knew back roads, both in the White River Valley and around the state. He hated driving main roads and often would go out of his way to stay on packed gravel on his way to visit with his aunts and uncles, Tina Spaulding said.
He worked jobs that fit his life, often in the concrete trade, and would work for people he knew, and who knew that when the fairs he frequented, in Tunbridge and Rutland, or hunting season rolled around, work would take a back seat.
He was generous with his time and muscle. He helped with farm chores at the Spauldings’ and elsewhere. He helped family friends Gloria and Jimmy Kinnarney dig graves by hand, particularly for people he knew. At hunting camp, he kept the fire burning in the stove.
Dartt was known to family and friends as someone who hated to spend money and who lived a meager life. People assumed this meant that he didn’t spend much and had some savings, but he lived close to the bone.
Several years ago he was in a long-term relationship that was serious enough that Dartt’s family anticipated a wedding, but Dartt didn’t pop the question and the relationship ended. Subsequent to that, another woman defrauded him out of some money, which darkened his view of humanity, the Spauldings said.
Like his parents, Christopher Dartt struggled with alcohol. Both of his parents died in 2018. His father was only 62, his mother 65. Silovich helped Dartt with his mother’s grave.
“It was just me and him covering up his mom’s grave,” said Silovich, who recalled he shed tears but not to his friend. “He had no emotion when it came to that stuff.”
After his mother’s death, Dartt lived in a cabin on Gilman Road that had electricity but no running water. He cut firewood to heat it.
Dartt’s death seemed sudden to his family and friends, but they also said that there were signs he was struggling. He was drinking more, and he was more isolated than usual. And the prospect of getting help seemed impossible.
A couple of years ago, Dartt suffered a head injury at a softball game. People at the field told him he needed to go to the hospital, but he just sat for a while and then called Silovich for a ride.
At the hospital, Dartt was told he needed some scans, but rather than wait, he grew angry with hospital staff and left.
“He was so stubborn,” Silovich said. He was not the kind of person to whom loved ones would have suggested mental health counseling.
On New Year’s Eve, Dartt had been at Babes and family members who saw him there didn’t think he’d had much to drink. On the roundabout route he took to get home, Dartt slid his truck off the road and into a tree. He called his sister around 3 a.m. and she and Jimmy went to get him.
He had sounded composed on the phone, but by the time they got to him, 15 minutes later, he was dead. He kept a handgun in every vehicle he’d owned since his teens.
“I can’t get my head around it,” Silovich said.
While there are risk factors that can suggest that a person is at risk of suicide, “it’s not the least bit predictable,” Diane Roston, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, said in a phone interview.
One of the clearest signs a person is at risk for suicide is a previous suicide attempt. Substance use, mental illness and a family history of suicide are also known risk factors, Roston said. A history of trauma, including sexual abuse, emotional or physical abuse, and neglect, can also play a role.
A person who has lost a sense of belonging, has developed a feeling that they’re a burden on others and who has become desensitized to violence and possesses the technical means is most capable of dying by suicide, according to research by suicidologist Thomas Joiner.
“If somebody is fiercely independent, I wonder whether they’re not connected with other people,” Roston said.
Family and friends of suicide victims experience a particularly complicated form of grief, because they wonder about whether they could have done something to prevent it, Roston said. “Nobody can predict it,” she said.
A gathering for Dartt at Babes last month drew a crowd so thick that it spilled outside, his family and friends said.
“I don’t think he knew how many people he affected in life,” Silovich said.
There’s an angry paragraph in Dartt’s obituary, which his sister wrote: “My life is not better without Christopher, my family’s lives are not better, the community is not better, the world is not better. For as many kind words that are written here, I have just as many curse words. I am bitter. We all asked Christopher for help, Christopher asked for help in return and we were all there. We are not better without you! This is never an answer, it is a problem.”
If there’s a solution to the problem, maybe it’s this, which Spaulding sent in an email: “The answer is very simple — we just need to love each other more.”
If you or someone you know might be at risk for suicide, reach out to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline via text or phone at 988, or via chat at 988lifeline.org.