Another victim at the Quechee Gorge

I have great empathy for Kim and Garrett Poirier, pictured on the front page of your Oct. 3 edition with the headline “Hope for the future.” Like them, and the others quoted in your article, I lost a loved one, my wife Stephanie, to suicide at Quechee Gorge, in 2021. Stephanie’s case was unlike those whose friends and relatives “never saw it coming.” She succumbed on that day to a lifelong battle with bipolar disorder, first evidenced when she tried to overdose as a freshman at Middlebury College in 1971.

Bipolar disorder often runs in the family. Stephanie’s mom was hospitalized for nine months in Concord after she was born, and Stephanie also suffered severe postpartum depression when our daughter Andrea was born in 1990. There were other rough times throughout our 46 years, but with help from the medication lithium, Stephanie thrived, including 20 years as a librarian at Canaan Elementary School from 1999 to 2018. There had been a dark occasion, however, shortly after I got to know Stephanie. One day, on an inexplicable hunch, I had driven to Quechee Gorge, and found her there, sitting in her green Pinto wagon, and accompanied her home. So that twin monster — bipolar disorder and the Quechee Gorge — was always there.

Then came the blazing hot summer of 2020, when the scourge of Covid was accompanied in our neighborhood by a massive, hugely noisy and disruptive daily logging operation, from 4:30 a.m. until after supper, resulting in nearly a dozen ECTs (shock treatments) for Stephanie. We were also the victims, that fall, of a terrifying home invasion by an irate next-door neighbor who showed up on our front porch, asserting we had been “staring him down” as he sped past our house. She had great difficulty getting both of these horrific things out of her mind, culminating on that terrible day at Quechee Gorge. By the time I found a note tucked under our bedspread, it was too late.

I much appreciate the new barriers and your front page article. Suicide awareness is always a good thing, and the article has allowed me to open up with many people about that — and about Stephanie — over the past many days. As Mary Perry stated in the article, it feels good to let it out.

Dick Nelson, Lebanon

Those experiencing a mental health crisis can call or text the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for immediate support.