Yodice: Suicide's battle cry is this — please, reach out for help

It’s the questions. Always the questions.

Mark and Kym Hilinski had them. Virtually everyone who has lost a friend, or a loved one, or a family member, to suicide, has those questions. They eat away from the inside, like acid. It is a wound that never heals.

The Hilinskis lost their beloved son, Tyler, a former quarterback for Washington State, in 2018, when he took his own life at age 21. The void is one that his parents and family can never fill.

What lingers are the questions.

Why did he do it? Could we have done anything to stop it? Why didn’t our son reach out to us for help and guidance? Why did he believe suicide was his only option?

“It was only after he died that we started piecing these things together,” Mark Hilinski said.

The Hilinskis came to Albuquerque earlier last week on what for them is a regular campus tour of America.

Roughly 400 times over the last seven years, Mark Hilinski said, and in front of tens of thousands of people, they have taken their story — headlined Tyler Talk — and their message to college-age and high school-age athletes, to tell Tyler’s story, and to stress the importance of mental health awareness. To emphasize that there is help available, even if you’re not entirely certain how to go about obtaining it.

You need only ask, they said.

Do not give up hope, Kym Hilinski said. That is the cornerstone of their presentation, given through the couple’s Hope Foundation (H3H), a nonprofit created and designed to promote mental health awareness and education for student-athletes. (Visit hilinskishope.org for information.)

The couple’s appearance in Albuquerque was sponsored in part by the Chris Eaton Foundation, named for the former Sandia High baseball coach, a popular man who died by suicide three years ago.

Several hundred University of New Mexico athletes, and a good number of high school athletes from the metro area, gathered inside the Pit to listen to the Hilinskis. The couple reflected on their middle son and his short life, reflected on the aftermath of his death. Kym Hilinski, in a terribly heart-rending moment, said she might even have more love for Tyler now than the last day she saw him alive.

To that end, they insisted that there is hope for those in crisis, and that they need only reach out. To a friend. A sibling. A parent. A teacher. A coach. A mental health expert.

Do not remain silent, they pleaded. There is a way out. Reaching out, Kym Hilinski said firmly, is NOT a weakness.

There is a flip side. It can be difficult and hugely complicated for many people to find the words that will penetrate with someone who is in mental distress.

But at all costs, the effort should be made. If you know someone beaten down because of difficult times, then we should eagerly extend our friendship and support to a human being who could dearly use a guiding light.

Full disclosure here. My father died by suicide. And though he was an older man when he took his life, that did not diminish, not at all, the overwhelming pain that came with hearing this news. It was a brutal shock to the system, and being told that he killed himself broke me completely. It haunts me still.

I mention this for one reason:

While the Hilinskis are targeting our youth for advice and guidance, and rightly so, it must not be forgotten that there are an abundance of fully grown men and women in this world who can and do feel such hopelessness, and we shouldn’t forget this.

This leads to an unspoken elephant in the room.

Often, you simply cannot know that someone you know may need help. Whether they are teenagers or young adults, or men and women who’ve been fully integrated into the world, many of us lack the insight to diagnose internal strife in others. And in fact, many people who take their own lives are highly skilled at concealing their pain. Sometimes, you don’t realize you’ve seen the signs until it is too late.

“You would never know,” Mark Hilinski said. He and his wife didn’t know, and now they invest so much of their time in a passionate attempt to spare other parents, and other families, from this unbearable and relentless grief.

The Hilinskis stressed repeatedly that a troubled individual should make an attempt to open doors, to begin the channels of communication. And from the other side, to let them know that no matter their conflict, there will be no judgment if they simply open their hearts and let us in.

“If you need help,” Mark Hilinski said, “get help.”

His audience was filled with young faces.

But in truth, he was speaking to us all.