On a snowy January day, 24-year-old Eddie put a gun to his head in a field behind a mortuary. Police detectives later found a letter addressed to Mom and Dad typed on his computer. He wrote that he was tired. He expressed love for his daughter and parents. He decided to go home and be with his heavenly father.

"I think that has helped," Margaret Jackson said of the note. "I can't imagine him not even leaving nothing. Just to have those last words. . . . It didn't clarify anything, but it was just something."

In recent years, she's spoken to dozens of family members who've lost sons and daughters to suicides who ached for some explanation. "But they had nothing. No letter. Nothing."

Although the Jacksons knew their son was troubled, they were dumbfounded by his suicide.

"You kind of walk around out of it for months afterward," she said. "You're sort of in a suspended state."

But Margaret Jackson remembered Eddie parroting her own words: "Mom, you've always told me the truth about things."

She and her husband decided, "We are going to continue to tell the truth about things," she said. "That has been a big part of our healing . . . being proactive."

Eddie's story is told over and over in Utah homes where young people and their parents struggle to find a magic cure for depression and mental illness.

Margaret knew she might have something to offer others, and signing on as a suicide prevention volunteer helped her snap out of her daze. She works with the Mental Health Association of Utah and served on the state suicide prevention task force for four years. She participates in fund-raisers for mental health concerns and walks for suicide awareness. Now Elizabeth, Eddie's daughter, walks too.

During the past three years, Margaret Jackson has learned Eddie's suicide was nobody's fault. He made the decision.

"Maybe this is part of my mission," she said. "Even when you do everything, things are still going to happen, and I may never understand exactly why. It is a part of my journey."

And while she understands the complex feelings for families with mental illness among them, she offers straightforward advice.

"It's so easy to blame and point fingers. We think we have control over everything, and we just don't," she says. "If you think there's a problem, pursue it as best you can."

As difficult as it is to retell her family's story, Margaret Jackson believes work like hers is making a difference.

Doctors are becoming more aware of mental-health issues, she says. There is better awareness about mental illness generally, and efforts are in the works for more intense evaluations for young people who are struggling.

"People with mental illness are starting to reap the benefits of these things," Jackson said. "It's going to take some time."

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