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EDGEWOOD, Iowa — Long before her son died, Jolene Niehaus started decorating her family’s Christmas tree with miniature American flags and lights of red, white and blue. But once Marine Sgt. Eric Ausborn was gone, it just made sense to honor the tradition.
In early December, the 10-foot white spruce stood in the Niehaus family’s sunroom, overlooking more than 100 acres of snow-covered farm and timberland in northeastern Iowa. Jolene placed a large red ornament with the Marine Corps emblem and Eric’s name written at the top. His stocking hung next to those of his three sisters and stepfather.
Eric’s presence could be felt, and that seemed right to Jolene. But this will be only the family’s third Christmas since Eric, a combat veteran, died by suicide at the age of 22, and it’s not always clear how to acknowledge both his life and his death on occasions like these.
Jolene, 56, and her husband, Jeff, 55, want to remember and tell the story of Eric, a young man far from perfect but so beloved by his neighbors and friends that, when they attended his funeral, the church filled to capacity. The Niehauses, like many families grieving the suicide of a loved one, also want to find meaning in their unfathomable loss.
That is why when Jeff and Jolene received a call earlier this year to see if they would participate in a psychological autopsy of Eric’s death for Marine Corps research, they quickly agreed.
It would mean answering questions about Eric and his life so that researchers might find some commonality between him and other Marines who died by suicide. As much as his mother and stepfather wanted to talk about their boy, this might be hard. Yet they felt it needed to be done.
“I would love it if someday nobody else has to walk in our shoes,” Jolene said.
In May of this year, the Niehauses became part of the study along with more than a dozen other families. The project is part of the Marine Corps’ suicide-prevention efforts. By turning a statistic into a story, the study is designed to give the military answers about what went wrong in the lives of these Marines and how to stop others from following them down the same final path. For families like the Niehauses, the experience gave purpose to their grief.
When the Niehauses sat down at their wooden kitchen table with a researcher in May, they were anxious. “I think I was afraid that it would bring up a lot of emotions,” said Jolene.
The researcher was a behavioral scientist trained to conduct psychological autopsies, a decades-old technique that uses records and interviews to gather information from friends and family about a person’s behavior, health and experiences.
The researcher brought a thick stack of papers and more than 100 questions. They asked for statements of fact, such as, “Had his parents known Eric to abuse drugs and alcohol?” (no) and “Did he experience mental illness as a child?” (no). Some open-ended questions prompted details about Eric’s childhood and personality.
They answered these questions, but the family’s house could also tell parts of Eric’s story. There were framed photos of his two young children. Hunting trophies, including four bucks and a large trout, hung in the sunroom. His bedroom was decorated as he left it. Camouflage valances framed the windows. A large Marine Corps flag was affixed to the wall. His sweatshirts and high school football jersey hung in the closet.
Now, Jolene said, it is time to put some of his things away.
Making that decision has been hard because Eric yearned to be a Marine — and not just any Marine, but a member of the elite Special Forces reconnaissance team.
As a child, he admired a young man in town who became a Marine, and at the age of 13, Eric was further motivated by the Sept. 11 attacks. On his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and eventually became a reconnaissance radio operator. He deployed twice from 2008 to 2011 for missions in Afghanistan.
Eric married before leaving. Like many Marines who say they want someone to carry on their legacy, he also started a family.
“Eric lived the dream he wanted to live,” Jeff said of his son’s military career. That’s partly why his suicide came as a shock. “We would have never, ever thought this is what Eric would have done.”
This was not just a gut feeling. Eric’s biological father died by suicide in 2008, and Eric’s reaction was unequivocal. He called his father’s death selfish. “He was so disappointed,” Jeff said.
Though a family history of suicide is a risk factor, those around Eric considered him stronger than most. He was a stalwart on the football field as a left offensive guard. Jeff, who worked as an assistant coach, said he never had to tend to Eric on the field, even if he went down in a nasty tackle. Eric always got back up again.
But in the short time between Eric’s enlistment and his death, he took on responsibilities with enormous stakes, and his parents rarely knew how it affected him. The Niehauses’ relationship with Eric and his wife strained as he became a husband, father and Marine — a common experience for military families. The distance between his old and new lives grew.
The last time the family met, a month before his death, Eric seemed upbeat.
Yet Eric was grieving for three men killed during his deployment and for a close friend in his unit who had recently been paralyzed in combat. To provide his family with stability, Eric left reconnaissance to become an instructor at Fort Benning, an Army base in Georgia. He moved from Camp Lejeune for the position. Soon after arriving, he drove to a wooded area and shot himself.
The military investigation into the death noted that Eric attended a suicide-prevention class in Afghanistan prior to returning home. Days before shooting himself, he wrote in a journal about dreaming of gunfire and grenade explosions. Eric and his wife had a history of arguing, and they fought in the hours preceding his death, the report said. He left a handwritten note on the seat of his truck declaring his love for her and their two children.
“I can’t imagine the pain he was in,” Jolene said. “All I kept thinking was at least he’s out of the pain. That was the only thing I could hang onto.”
Jeff and Jolene’s memories of their son will be broken down into data points and themes. The information will be coded and analyzed. That is when the stories will turn into something more — information that might prevent future suicides.
The Marine Corps ordered the psychological autopsy study in 2010 when the number of military suicides had just peaked; 52 Marines took their own lives in 2009. Since then, that number has fluctuated. This year, the suicide rate is on pace with last year, when 48 Marines died. As of Oct. 31, there had been 40 probable and confirmed suicides.
There are things we know about these Marines, according to the most recent Defense Department data from 2011. Nearly three-quarters of them were barely grown men, having died at age 25 or younger. The majority were junior enlisted Marines and never graduated from college. Many of them had found love and married. More than half used a gun to die.
While these facts are important, they don’t explain why each Marine felt so burdened that he turned to suicide, said Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, a research organization.
The Marine Corps hired the organization to conduct the psychological autopsies, and since then, it has tried to contact dozens of families of Marines who died from 2010 to 2012. Phone numbers and addresses have changed, though. When reached, some parents or loved ones are angry at the military or overcome by despair and don’t want to talk, Berman said.
Those who do participate give the study something of immeasurable value: “The psychological autopsy allows us to learn about these individuals in the aggregate and what the last days of their life were about,” he said. This kind of information is relatively rare in suicide research. Much of what is known about risk factors is based on studies of people who attempted suicide but survived. Yet there may be something distinct about the experiences of those who die by suicide that we don’t understand.
The central question for many surviving military families is if and how service — and combat deployment in particular — drove a loved one to suicide. Recent studies show that this relationship is more complicated than it appears. In some cases, combat experience may act as a trigger that worsens existing emotional pain.
Berman said anecdotes from the psychological autopsies indicate that the end of a deployment might weaken a Marine’s ability to cope with stress at home. As these young men leave the intense camaraderie of the battlefield and try to rediscover an identity apart from being a Marine, they may feel hopelessly lost.
Sometimes they can’t articulate these emotions to those they love most and don’t know how to solve everyday problems in their families, said Kim Ruocco, director of “postvention” programs for Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), a nonprofit based in Arlington, Va.
Ruocco, who contacted the Niehauses and other families on behalf of the study to ask for their participation, said that it is common for service members to become despondent without their parents’ knowledge. When the parents have a fragile relationship with their son’s wife or girlfriend — as in Eric’s case — a suicide death can deepen the rift for everyone.
Ruocco hoped that participating in the study might release survivors from feelings of blame and guilt. “Psychological autopsies help families understand that it wasn’t that last argument or something that happened in childhood,” she said. “It’s a perfect storm of events.”
When Eric returned home for the last time, he and his best friend, Tyler Hackbarth, took a long nighttime walk in the timberland. Hackbarth, 24, was not only Eric’s confidant but also an Air Force firefighter who had deployed to Afghanistan. As children, they dreamed of joining the military together.
That evening, Eric shared his anguish, confessing that he felt guilty for surviving when three men he knew and served with died. At home, he struggled to step back into his role as a father. He hadn’t wanted to leave his job in reconnaissance, but it seemed the right choice to make for his family. Eric, Hackbarth said, cried silently.
Hackbarth told this story to the researcher who interviewed the Niehauses. At the time, he said recently, Eric did not seem on the verge of suicide.
“He was the stable one, the rock, the one who dealt with everybody else’s stuff,” Hackbarth told Al Jazeera. “His coping mechanisms for everything seemed so excellent that you would never think that his stress would lead to something like that.”
When it did, Hackbarth was devastated. Like the Niehauses, he wanted to give whatever he could to the study.
The researchers will finish collecting data by the middle of 2014, according to Berman. The Marine Corps will review the findings and look for ways to enhance its prevention efforts. In the past few years, the service has instituted prevention training for more than 1,000 professionals in its ranks, including lawyers, family counselors and chaplains.
It also adopted gatekeeper training that teaches Marines how to recognize warning signs in their comrades. Adam Walsh, who leads community counseling and prevention for the Marine Corps, said the service is eager to see the results of the study.
The Niehauses are as well. They hope Eric’s story will help another Marine in pain. And they keep sharing memories of him, recalling how Eric liked to buy MREs (meals ready to eat) at an Army surplus store or how he liked to sleep in the woods on their property. And they continue to answer questions about Eric’s death from friends and strangers alike.
“If there’s one little thing that we could do that would cause someone else not to do this,” Jolene said, “I would do anything for that.”
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