By Peg Mcentee-
Mike Urrutia wrote his note in the car he had started in a closed garage. “I’m just tired. Please let me go.”He was Marilyn Smith’s firstborn, her only son. He was a tender boy, and she recognized early “that he wasn’t real boyish.”
But she’d grown up in a tiny Mormon community in Idaho where no one ever even thought about people being gay.
“I wasn’t exposed to national newspapers,” Marilyn said. “We had the Lincoln County Journal, you know? And I read that for the gossip around town.”
And she never developed much interest in the rest of the world until Mike grew up and introduced his mother to the often devastating complexities of growing up gay in a highly conservative state and faith.
Mike died by suicide on Oct. 21, 2001. He was 38. Marilyn’s anguish was renewed earlier this month when LDS Church apostle Boyd K. Packer gave a conference talk on same-sex attraction and gay marriage. Gay-rights advocates cried foul and staged protests; Packer later made substantive changes to the speech to soften and correct it.
Marilyn was anything but mollified, so a few days later we sat down at her kitchen table to talk.
Thirty years ago, the family moved to Sandy, where Mike had a tough time in high school. He skipped classes and hated P.E., but her only response was that he absolutely had to go to school.
“I never asked the right questions. I never tried to understand what was going on with him,” she says. “When he got a little older, he started being angry.” He couldn’t express what was going on inside, and didn’t feel like anyone would understand if he did.
But Mike decided to go on an LDS mission, and got a job to earn the money. At 17, he came home and announced he’d told their bishop he thought he was gay.
Mike’s dad went to see the bishop; it never occurred to either parent that Marilyn should go, too.
“Because I’m this dutiful little Mormon wife,” she said. “That’s how you did things.”
So the bishop and Mike’s father arranged to get him “treatment.” They could get things right, and Mike could go on his mission.
As Mike wrote in his suicide note, “The Mormon Church sent a 17-yr-old boy into electroshock therapy.” Marilyn said Mike was shown pornography with electrodes attached to his penis.
“Perhaps they don’t use that same technique anymore but they did it then and it contributed to my son’s depression and consequent suicide,” she said.
By the time Mike finished his mission, his parents had split up. “When he came back, he was just a tortured young man,” Marilyn said.
He got into drugs — “a really horrible time,” she said. She still had three daughters to raise, and was working all hours as a personal assistant to an abusive businessman.
There just was no time to worry about Mike, she said as her tears fell. “I was trying to survive.”
Mike lived at home for a while, then stayed with friends. Finally, he got an apartment in downtown Salt Lake City.
“He was so proud of that. He had a job as a cook. He wanted to be a chef,” Marilyn said. “He developed relationships, friendships.”
The lonely boy had found some semblance of balance — right until some public figure would say something demeaning about gays, Marilyn says. Then he’d go into a dark funk.
He talked about moving to Oregon or California, but never did.
As the years went by, Marilyn’s daughters married, had children. In 2000, Mike cooked a beautiful Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family, “which I think was part of his farewell,” Marilyn says.
As is often the case with suicide, Mike had given up on therapy for his severe depression and stopped taking his medication. He self-isolated and wouldn’t return his mother’s phone calls. “He was pulling back,” she said.
In his note, Mike wrote: “Cremation and no Mormon religion at my funeral. Ashes scattered in the Mtns or along Oregon Wash. Coast.”
Marilyn still has his ashes.
She’s left the LDS Church and considers herself an atheist. She’s retired, and lives alone with a couple of friendly little dogs. On one wall is a photo of her little boy. On another, a portrait of a dark-haired, handsome man.
“You always think: ‘What should I have done? What could I have done?’ I have to keep telling myself, ‘You can’t change anything, and you have to move on.’ ”
But then someone like Packer, or the openly anti-gay state Sen. Chris Buttars, “says something totally stupid and it just brings it all back. I walk around the house talking to myself and just ranting.”
Mental health counselors were no help. She finds some of her relatives well-meaning but clueless. One told her, “I loved Mike, even if he was gay.”
Marilyn was aghast.
“What do you mean, ‘even if he was gay’? ” she said. “I loved Mike because he was my son, because he was a wonderful young man.”
Every now and then, Mike would come to his mother’s house and they’d cook together. He helped her understand there’s more to a meal than meat and potatoes.
“I think about him when I’m cooking, experimenting with herbs and things in my garden,” she said. “I feel like he’s here with me.”
-end-
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