No greater pain

Second in a series of articles dealing with suicide awareness and prevention

By NOREEN HYSLOP

Managing Editor

Mark Stidham thought he could know no worse pain than what he'd endured by the age of 31. He was mistaken.

Stidham, who has served as Dexter's city administrator for nearly 11 years, lost his mother at the age of 16. As a result, he played a major role, along with his pastor father, in raising his two younger siblings. He married in his early 20s, and at the age of 31, he and his wife, Velva, welcomed their second child, a son they named Brent, into the world. It was April 22, 1992. The following morning, with her newborn at her side and her husband and then five-year-old son, Jason, joining her for breakfast in her hospital room, Velva Stidham suffered a brain aneurysm. She never regained consciousness and died several days later.

At the time of his wife's death, Stidham was employed as production manager at what is now Tyson Foods, a job that demanded long hours away from home. Returning to work one week following his wife's death, he quickly realized his work schedule was not compatible with the demands of raising a newborn baby and a five-year-old.

"I approached management and was accommodated with a lateral move that allowed me more time at home," he recalls.

He eventually remarried. He and his wife, Debbie, raised the boys together. Brent Stidham knows no other mother than his stepmother. Jason, however, always had vivid memories of his mother. When he was eight years old, he wrote a story entitled, "The Most Wonderful Christmas Ever." In it he wrote about the last Christmas he had spent with his mother.

"We all sat around the fire," he wrote as a child, "talking, sharing laughs, and having a magnificent time. It was not the presents that we cared about, but it was each other. One of the reasons I loved this Christmas is because it was the last one I spent with my mom. I thought we would be together forever because of the Christmas spirit we had in us..."

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 27, 2006, Jason Stidham took his life. There was a gun, and an argument with a girl he'd known for only a short time. He was 19 years old with a promising future ahead of him. In an instant, it was all gone.

"I have to believe that the boy who took his life that night wasn't the Jason who we knew and loved," says his father more than five years later. "We'll never know what he was thinking at that moment. But I knew my son, and in his right mind, he would never have done what he did."

For the Stidhams, there were no warning signs that anything in their oldest son's life was amiss.

"Looking back," says his father, "you see all kinds of things. He never really accepted the death of his mother. When his mother first had the aneurysm, I thought she'd be all right, and I promised Jason over and over that she'd come home. Of course she never did. The hardest part of losing her was having to return to work and leave Jason. I couldn't convince my five-year-old that I'd be back home at the end of the day. He would actually run out of the house and hide in my vehicle when he knew I was headed to work. He kept telling me at first, 'But you told me she was coming home.' It was heartbreaking, and he lived with that memory, I suppose, every day. I knew it was always an issue with Jason, but maybe I just didn't know how much so. He always had a hard time dealing with death."

Stidham says he's found it's common to also question what he could have done better in raising his son.

"You go over in your mind - over and over - what you might have done differently and what sign you should have recognized that you didn't."

After the loss of Jason, friends would tell his father about things that had been bothering Jason - things of which his father was not aware - none of which one would think justified taking one's life. But every time a friend or acquaintance would come forward, he questioned himself as to whether he missed some signs that should have been apparent.

"If there's one thing I'd like to get across to kids," Stidham says, "and to adults as well who might be contemplating ending their life, it would be to talk to someone - if not a parent, an adult, maybe a pastor or another relative - just talk to someone to help sort things out. Nothing in life is so bad that it cannot be sorted through. Nothing."

The hardest part in trying to wrap his mind around the loss of his eldest son, Stidham explains, was knowing how easily any problem Jason might have had could have been handled. "We could have handled anything. We could have worked anything out," he says, "and yet I didn't have that chance."

The Stidhams were - and still are - a close knit family, admittedly even more so than most because of their loss in 1992.

"Jason never called or left the house without telling me he loved me, and I did the same. We talked alot. We went deer and dove hunting and to Gulf Shores in the summer. We rode four-wheelers together. He'd call if he was going to be late and I'd do the same."

The closeness between the two seemed to have made the reality of his death even more difficult to accept.

Mark Stidham made a promise to his late wife after she was gone that he would do his best to raise her boys. In doing so, he promised he would keep them in church, which he did. Some of the greatest comfort after Jason's death came from the Stidham's church family.

"I don't know where we'd be today if we hadn't had the church and community support that we received," he says of the local community.

Still, he attests, the loss of a child, especially to something so senseless as suicide, was almost more than he and his family could bear.

"I just couldn't imagine life without him," Stidham says. "I often wonder what he would have become. Would he have been married by now? Would he have started a family?" Jason would have turned 25 in 2012.

"When I lost my first wife, I asked God, 'Why are you frowning on me?' I thought life could get no worse than having to deal with the depths of that grief. But I was wrong. When you lose a child - there is nothing that can compare with that pain."

There is also the religious aspect of suicide to be dealt with when a person takes his or her own life. Mark and Debbie Stidham are a faith-filled couple, and that faith had told them over the years that when one takes one's own life, the gift of eternal life is forfeited. Mark Stidham has wrestled with that possibility and takes comfort in knowing that the son he knew and loved could not have taken his life had he been in his "right mind."

"I pray to God that He is looking beyond that final sin of Jason's and is accepting him."

The memory of Jason Stidham is honored each year with the granting of a memorial scholarship in his name to a local FFA student who is college bound. With a special love of agriculture, Jason was an active member and officer of the local FFA Chapter at Dexter High School. Each spring, Mark and Debbie, and Brent Stidham, attend the local FFA Annual Banquet where they grant a continuing scholarship to a senior whom they believe holds the same values and possesses the same love of the land as Jason did.

"It's a special way to honor Jason and to keep his memory alive. It's very important to Debbie and to Brent and myself, and it's our hope to keep that scholarship alive for years to come."

Mark Stidham has another hope that he expresses through a prayer he prays every night.

"For the past six years," he says, "my final words each night have been the same. I say to God, 'I hope you have him dancing with his mother.' Whether he is or not, it gives me the peace of mind that I need, and it gives me comfort to think that he is."