Stuart Matis couldn't either. But the despair of knowing "I'll never be right with God no matter what I do," as he told his parents in the suicide note, was pulling on him. No matter how much he polished it with abiding prayers, firm faith and regular temple attendance, his mother said recently, Stuart always saw rust on his armor.

"I am now free," he wrote in his note. "I am no longer in pain, and I no longer hate myself. As it turns out, God never intended for me to be straight. Perhaps my death might be the catalyst for some good."

His parents, now retired and living in a quiet neighborhood in northern Utah County, are doing their stalwart-LDS best to build a foundation of understanding from what so many regard their millstone.

"We just hope that his story — how he lived and what he lived with — will help people know who he was," his mother said recently looking at her son's picture. "And to understand — understand that we all have challenges, that we don't ask for them, and we don't choose what they'll be."

In February 2000, California voters were a month away from deciding whether to place a prohibition on recognizing same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. Despite agreeing with the LDS Church's organized support for Proposition 22, political heat was touching Fred and Marilyn Matis personally in a way not felt by most of their fellow ward members — particularly those who used Sunday meetings as a platform to promote more drastic measures: all homosexuals should be loaded onto a ship, sailed out to the Pacific Ocean and sunk, a member said one Sunday standing among the congregation.

The political rhetoric stung the Matis family, particularly 32-year-old Stuart. As they suffered in silence, another panic attack hit Stuart, and his mother returned home from another church meeting in tears.

She told her husband they needed a break, and the couple decided to visit their daughter in Colorado for a week. They invited Stuart, but he said he couldn't go. They returned home on a Monday, and the following day were preparing to go to the temple when Stuart told them he had a gun hidden away in a safe place. He knew about hiding, and after 20 years of hiding his feelings, and another year of talking with parents, church leaders and friends, Stuart's hope of changing his orientation through prayer and religious devotion had evaporated.

After a sacred experience Fred says he had in the temple in the hours following their conversation with Stuart, he and his wife prayed together there and "turned Stuart over to Heavenly Father." The details are too personal to recount, but a certain peace came to them, they said.