It’s too easy to glamorize the death of Hunter S. Thompson. The
talented, charismatic man was an entertaining original. He was a
provocative, audacious, funny, sometimes bitingly accurate seeker
of truth.
His flamboyant suicide has been portrayed by family members and
friends as a rational choice, a fitting end to the life of an
anti-hero, a legend.
So be it.
It wasn’t at all glamorous to me.
A few days before Thompson shot himself, Fritz Gunkel, a beautiful,
accomplished, beloved 47-year-old man who happened to be my cousin,
shot himself to death in Anchorage, Alaska.
It was in every way excruciating, engulfing my family in a torrent
of tears wept in uncontrollable sobs from Alaska to Florida,
Wisconsin and California.
Trained as a mining engineer, Fritz had been an enormously
successful manager of drilling operations on the North Slope of
Alaska for BP-Amoco. He was married to his high-school sweetheart.
They had three great kids.
He also had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and debilitating depression that only his
family and closest friends truly understood. For decades, he masked
his condition with an easy laugh and a self-deprecating wit.
He was treated aggressively, but he relapsed again and again.
His illness was devastating. His pain was relentless.
For Fritz, maybe the most agonizing part of his disease was
witnessing the effect it was having on those he loved.
So in a final act of utter despair, he disappeared. He bought a
shotgun and drove out of Anchorage along Turnagain Arm to a remote
spot at the edge of a snow-covered forest. He listened to the
messages his frantic family had left on his cellphone, which
ultimately helped the police locate his car.
But it was too late. His friends found his lifeless body in the
desolate place where he chose to die all alone.
On Wednesday, the slanted light of the subarctic winter sun
bleached the color from the day. Shades of white from the snowy
mountain ranges, the icy streets and the clouds overhead washed the
city as hundreds of people packed the church for Fritz’s funeral.
As photos of the man who had scaled so many mountain peaks only to
slip into one last hopeless abyss flashed on the screen and
disappeared too quickly, waves of grief shuddered through the
crowd. We ached with loss.
The Thompson family is doing its best to cope, I’m sure, and so are
the Gunkels. But there is no joy, no triumph.
When we glorify the suicide of a celebrity, “the person seems like
a hero for making that choice,” said Shannon Breitzman, director
of the Colorado Injury and Suicide Prevention Program.
It’s such a dangerous mistake.
“If you’re a person in pain, especially a young person, it can
seem like a really great thing,” she said.
But the truly heroic thing to do is to fight the stigma of mental
illness that prevents us from funding treatment, helping those
afflicted and opening up about our own dark struggles.
Breitzman said study after study show that at least 90 percent of
suicides are the result of mental illness. Maybe Thompson’s wasn’t among them.
For the rest of us, the lesson in all this, said Ted Gunkel, who on
Thursday carried an urn of his son’s remains into the house that
once was filled with his laughter, is to break the terrible silence
once and for all.
“That’s about the truest thing you can say,” Breitzman said.
The mentally ill don’t have to feel so alone, she said. There are
good treatments. It’s not a perfect science. But there are many
success stories, and there could be so many more if only people
received the care and support they need.
“The message we need to deliver is that it’s not only OK to ask
for help, it’s courageous,” Breitzman said.
As I watched the sun set over the Alaska range in one last long,
slow goodbye kiss to Fritz Gunkel on Thursday evening, I vowed to
tell you this.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can
be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
