Personal Loss Changes Business as Usual
May 30, 2005

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post

Republican leaders are fuming at Gordon Smith. The Oregon senator blocked this year's budget resolution until his GOP colleagues agreed to add billions of dollars to Medicaid, the health care program for the poor.

"There's been a lot of anger towards me," Smith says. "It's been rough." But Smith doesn't care. He didn't hold up the measure for political reasons. He acted out of personal grief. He was motivated by the suicide of his 21-year-old son and the conviction that he must do everything he can to prevent others from falling prey to mental illness. Usually this column chronicles the craven reasons lawmakers take up causes: money, lobbying pressure and hunger for power. But once in a while, they are also compelled by matters of the heart. This is the story of one legislator who turned his family's loss into a public crusade. It is also about the little-known "fraternity of sorrow" in the Senate that helped him to do so.

Like many members of Congress, Smith was a loving but distracted parent. He and his wife Sharon lavished as much attention as they could on their three adopted children. Their middle child, Garrett Lee Smith, was happy, easygoing and well liked. He was an Eagle Scout, a devout Mormon and an avid outdoorsman who liked to mountain-bike and snowboard.

But he was also troubled. He had dyslexia, a learning disability that made it difficult for him to read and write. At age 13, Sharon found him crying in his room, convinced that his struggles with schoolwork would prevent him from supporting a family of his own. In high school he got in trouble for drinking alcohol.

Gradually, Garrett's dark periods and drinking bouts began to eclipse his sunnier moments, including a successful two-year, post-high-school mission to England for his church. He had trouble getting out of bed. He stopped shaving. His weight ballooned. His friends knew there was something wrong and told his parents.

They did what they could. They made sure Garrett saw a doctor and took medication. At one point, his best friend took away his firearms out of fear that he might shoot himself. Finally, to shake him of his depression, his parents canceled other plans and went with him to England on vacation because that's where he wanted to go.

According to the Oregonian newspaper, the trip was harrowing. Garrett said he might take his life and his parents stayed up all night assuring him that they loved him and that his friends and his church loved him too. Gordon Smith told Garrett that there is "a good and happy place for him in this world."

When they parted, Garrett seemed like his old self again. He kissed his mother and made plans with them to get together soon. They were optimistic for the first time in a long time that Garrett was on the mend. But it didn't turn out that way. They would never see their son alive again. On Sept. 8, 2003, Garrett was found hanged in his apartment in Orem, Utah, where he was enrolled for college. He killed himself one day short of his 22nd birthday.

The Smiths were devastated. Gordon Smith, the prosperous businessman, church bishop and star politician, felt as though his life had been a failure. According to the Oregonian, he confided to friends: "I spent the last 10 years trying to save the world and I should have been trying to save my son."

He did not know if he could carry on. "It is hard to work with an anchor on your heart," he says.

"Garrett was always proud of me; we had a beautiful relationship," Smith says. "But I missed lots of ball games. I wasn't present at camping trips when he was trying to become an Eagle Scout. Those are things you can't take back."

To his surprise, however, he was not alone in his sadness and guilt. Many fellow senators flew to Garrett's funeral to comfort their colleague. And they began to tell their own stories. Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) lost his 22-year-old daughter in a car crash. The brother of Democrat Ron Wyden, the other senator from Oregon, had schizophrenia and died the year before. Another senator had a daughter who committed suicide, though he won't say so publicly.

With help from them and others, Smith converted his tragedy into a movement. He decided to devote himself to finding ways to help young people with mental illnesses avoid Garrett's fate. In March 2004, Smith testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing chaired by DeWine. "It's time to start trying to find more meaning in Garrett's life and help others who suffer like he did," Smith said.

Smith had good reason beyond his own mourning to bolster government assistance. More than 3,000 people ages 10 to 24 take their lives each year, which makes suicide the third-leading cause of death in that age group. And every time Congress cuts Medicaid, people with mental illnesses are among the first to lose their benefits.

So Smith launched a two-pronged effort. As a start, he became the moving force behind a three-year, $82 million program that offers suicide-prevention counseling to vulnerable students and others. The measure, which DeWine named the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, passed unanimously on what would have been Garrett's birthday in 2004. (Before that happened, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) revealed to a hushed chamber that their fathers had killed themselves.)

Smith has also transformed himself into the leading Republican champion for Medicaid. As hard as Republicans have tried to trim the program, he has fought back harder. As a swing member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, he also has had the clout to make his wishes stick.

"There's nobody we've worked with more closely on this than Sen. Smith," says Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a leading advocacy group for Medicaid. "He has been an extraordinarily tenacious advocate for expanding and retaining health care coverage. It's very evident that this is something that he believes in intellectually and emotionally." Lots of legislation has become law because of to the personal histories of senators. The best-known recent example was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), who was Senate majority leader at the time, spearheaded in large part because of the physical infirmities he has had since he was wounded in World War II.

The current debate on expanding federal funding for stem-cell research is another example. Lawmakers have lined up in the Senate and the House to tell about relatives who might have been saved had stem-cell research been given a looser rein.

Smith credits this congressional "fraternity of sorrow" for the progress he's made on his issues. He also understands that those policies have done far more than advance the public good. The legislative battles, he says, "in a lot of ways have saved my own life; it has given me a purpose for being here."

Jeffrey Birnbaum writes about the intersection of government and business every other Monday.

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