Under a Big Sky
Heading west, the vistas change as fast as I-90 will carry you. Fields of bright yellow sunflowers in Minnesota. The burnt rock Badlands and the evergreens of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Leaving 90, you dip down into Wyoming to see any number of wonders — sulfur springs, glacial lakes, sheer walls of rock, rivers and falls. Just a few days ago we sat at the foot of the Tetons on Jackson Lake and stared in awe. The snow-capped peaks seemed to rise directly out of the lake shimmering with silver. Hundreds of pictures later you couldn’t capture the moment no matter how hard you tried. It was an act of worship just to stand there.
Then Montana. Big Sky. Wyoming sky is beautiful, but Montana sky is different — and bigger. Maybe the way the mountains bookend the blue, holding it in as if it would overflow. My strongest memory of Montana is the sky; but not this trip. This trip through Montana I was thinking about my friend Katie.
Katie was living with her parents in Polson, Montana when she took her life earlier this year. She was sitting in her car overlooking Flathead Lake and she shot herself. I hadn’t seen or heard from Katie for six years when I received a strange email from her account. A friend of hers obviously. Saying she was gone. Not until months later did I discover what happened. Her mother wrote about the events preceding in the Missoulian.
It is terrible and tragic to hear that someone has committed suicide, but when it’s someone you know, it is nearly impossible to comprehend. If it is someone very close to you, I imagine it is that much more horrifying.
Katie was full of life when I knew her. Always a big thinker, she was on a life-long quest to answer the question of why are we here. She wrote a memoir called Searching for Meaning in SoCal about recovering her mental health as a teenager living in Orange County. I didn’t sell it — her writing was so raw that only one editor saw the potential that I did. But that was okay. Katie moved on to the next thing.
Katie had an ABD doctorate from Berkeley’s theological seminary. For her, the world was a series of potential relationships and connections, which she wanted to explore. She didn’t like that social media seemed to be cheapening those connections. But she was hopeful, not cynical. Or she put on a good show. Hard to say now. From what her mom described, her mental health had deteriorated and she was severely depressed. How is this the same person I knew — or was she just that good at masking the pain?
One thing I do know, Katie could talk herself in and out of anything. She was a great talker. Which would explain how, as her mom reported, in a disheveled state, she was able to buy a gun. I don’t blame the gun shop owner because he — or she — could very well have asked her very pointed questions. But Katie was too smart for that. She would have rehearsed everything she would say and would have delivered a really convincing argument for why she needed a gun. She was doggedly persistent when she wanted something.
If that gun shop owner had known that Katie had been committed by the state of California to a mental health facility a few months before, she probably wouldn’t have gotten the gun. She would have been turned away. But, according to Katie’s mom, “Montana doesn’t report the records of the adjudicated mentally ill” to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which would have prevented her from purchasing a gun for five years. There is no way the gun shop owner could have known about Katie’s history. And who is he or she to deny Katie her rights regardless of how she looks?
So this is what I was thinking about as I drove across the Big Sky state, still marveling at the sky despite my mood. I was wishing Katie had waited — maybe tomorrow would have felt more hopeful. I was wishing Montana had closed what is called a “fatal gap loophole.”
Scenery — no matter how otherworldly — can’t save you. But I found myself wishing my friend had looked at the glory of Flathead Lake and found a reason to live another day.
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