Doug Peterson remembers coming home from work and walking around to the back yard, drawn there by the joyful sound of teenage laughter, and finding that his son's friends had set up the family trampoline by the swimming pool.
With a combination of grin and grimace, he would watch the boys do flips and tricks into the cold, blue water.
“I'd be like, ‘Guys, you can't be doing that. Someone is going to get hurt.' And three days later, I'd come home and there was the trampoline again,” Doug recalled.
“We raised our kids to be free-thinkers. They could choose what they wanted in terms of religion or politics. And that's why I would beat myself up over, the fact that maybe we did too good of a job."
Doug's light laugh suddenly goes silent.
“Page was a free thinker,” he finally continues, “and he must have though, ‘I don’t want to be here.'"
It was January 2015 that 17-year-old Page Peterson, the carefree boy who pitched on the baseball field and tore down the slopes on his snowboard, took his own life. He was among more than 2,000 teenagers his age that would commit suicide in that year alone, a number that is both staggering and heartbreaking.
Most heartbroken may have been Doug, who was so wracked by survivor's guilt that it took him a year just to find the willpower to get moving. But once he did, the auctioneer from Oregon refused to stop, ultimately turning a rediscovered passion for cycling into a charity ride to raise money and awareness for National Suicide Prevention Month, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
Throughout September, he will be riding from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, a distance of 1,472 miles. His wife, Lori, will follow in a camper van and he'll be joined along the way by cycling clubs, high school groups and everyday people as he illustrates that “we are never alone on this journey in life.”
“I read a book about recovery,” Doug said, “and it talked about exercise, so I dusted off the bike, went out and rode one day. Thought, ‘This was good.’ Then I went out the next day, and I started doing some longer distances.”
It was during a talk with Alan Stuart, a longtime friend and one of the founders of apparel company Pair of Thieves, that Doug expressed the desire to do more than just ride. Pair of Thieves has long been active in philanthropy, using a one-for-one model in which the company provides socks to homeless shelters for each pair bought by a consumer, and Stuart saw in Doug's quest an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of people struggling with mental health.
So quite naturally, the company turned to its familiar socks, creating a special edition pair that includes the phone number for the suicide prevention hotline right on the sole. The brand also will donate $2 for each pair to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and it is planning “social media fireside chats” with special guests throughout the month.
“Doug and I were chatting about Page, and both of us are kind of fixers by nature. We hear something that bothers us or isn't right and we have to do something,” Stuart explained. “I know their family well. I know how amazing of parents they are, and this one hit me hard. I know they would have done anything for their kids.”
That includes Hayley, an emergency room nurse in New York, and Christian, a real estate agent in Oregon.
“The fact that kind of hopelessness could happen to anybody,” Stuart said, “and that there are people hurting out there and don't have the wherewithal or the initiative to take the first step — which is why they feel alone— how do they not feel alone? Or how do their friends make them not feel alone? A lot of times if somebody could reach out at the right moment, that taboo is broken. Somebody reaches out at the right moment could be the difference in surviving or not.”
According to AP, that is why Doug is riding. He wants people everywhere to know they are not alone.
