Part Two

The Boy Who Died

Problem Child

Summer 1958

They are best friends, the dog and her boy.

Duchess, a German shepherd puppy, is all soft edges and oversize paws.

Alden Barrett, three years old, has dark brown hair with eyes to match, and a knack for finding trouble. His parents aren’t neglectful, but Alden, as they say, is a handful. Blink and he’s gone, seeking adventure and/or disaster.

At this moment, Alden is crossing the yard, tottering toward the street. As he nears the sidewalk, Duchess takes hold of his bib overalls and tugs him back toward the lawn. Once released, Alden resumes his forward march, and Duchess repeats the action, this time pulling Alden down onto his backside. Alden tries to stand up, but Duchess is having none of it, and keeps him tethered to the lawn.

Alden, his merriment thwarted, scowls. “You dumb dog!” he shouts.

By now, the family has appeared, and Duchess lets go. She licks Alden’s face, and he giggles.

Fall 1959

Alden Barrett is five, and a few older children are teasing and prodding, trying to make him cry. It’s not difficult—Alden often seems on the brink of tears (or laughter).

This time, the kids aren’t getting the reaction they want, so they start closing in. Duchess, sitting nearby, watches for a few moments, then ambles over. She doesn’t growl or snap, but gently slides herself between Alden and the others. The message is clear: Time to stop.

It’s a pattern. Alden veers toward danger, only to be rescued at the last moment. Tricky enough when the dangers are visible. When they come from inside, there’s little anyone can do.

Fall 1960

Alden Barrett is six. He is sobbing, his whole body shaking in a hot, stricken rage. His stomach aches, but still, he can’t stop crying. He pulls at his own hair, hands clenched tight, like he’s trying to tear it out. His eyes are clamped shut, but the tears keep coming.

Alden is a difficult, frustrating child. His mood is like a cheap thermostat, switching back and forth.

He also bursts with questions, about everything, all the time. It’s fun for a while, then turns annoying. Sometimes his older siblings lie to him. The lies are punishment, a way to annoy him back. Alden will ask about a song on the radio, and his siblings will give a nonsense answer, something he knows is wrong. He’ll ask again, and they’ll say more nonsense, repeating the ploy until Alden throws a tantrum. It’s a mean thing to do, but sometimes they can’t help it. Alden can be a pain in the ass. It’s his emotions: he can’t control them. Instead, they yank him around, leaving him anxious and weary.

Saturday, March 13, 1971

Alden Barrett is sixteen years old.

Outside, a flat gray sky drenches everything.

Alden is downstairs, locked behind a bedroom door. He’s shouting at someone on the telephone. There’s a muffled clang, and when Alden emerges, his face is wet. His eyes are frantic and bloodshot. He looks like a trapped, injured animal.

The house is mostly empty, just Alden and his two younger siblings, plus a neighbor girl. Alden is frazzled, snapping at everyone, not really listening.

He tells the kids to feed Pete, the family’s new German shepherd. Duchess, Alden’s lifelong guardian, died a few weeks earlier, put down because of cancer.

Alden is exhausted, tired of life and all its disappointments. He’s tired of school, of his family, of living in Pleasant Grove. It’s a treadmill town, just training you for more of the same. Alden wants out. Anywhere. Anywhere but here.

The rain pelts the windows.

Alden feels sick, and sad, and lonely. His thoughts are like black screws, turning deeper and deeper, ruining everything good. He can’t stop them.

His parents have done their best. Friends and teachers have intervened, trying everything they can think of. Just last night, Alden and a close friend stayed up late, talking faith and belief and the strength to endure.

But Alden doesn’t have faith. Not anymore. “God, you bastard,” he writes in a green spiral notebook, “why me?”

Like nearly everyone in Pleasant Grove, Alden’s parents are Mormon, but they’re also pragmatic. They’ve sought medication, therapy—anything that might help their son. But it’s 1971, and psychiatry, especially for young people, is still on training wheels. The first real study of teenage mental health is only a few months old.

The rain keeps pouring.

Alden’s father has a pistol. Small and silver, .22 caliber. He keeps it locked up, but not well enough.

Alden is crying again.

He sends the children to their rooms.

The Happiest Days of Our Lives

Alden’s parents, Doyle and Marcella Barrett, had met at Brigham Young University. Marcella’s first husband had died in a car wreck, and she was raising three kids while putting herself through college. She hadn’t expected to marry again, but Doyle was a gift, and things fell into place.

The Barrett family home under construction, circa 1960 (Courtesy of Utah County Recorder’s Office).

Even remarried, Marcella pushed herself. Doyle was pre-med, and that took money, so Marcella ran a day care and rented out a spare bedroom, all while raising the children, who soon numbered six: three from her first marriage, and three with Doyle. Alden arrived in 1954, Scott in 1959, and Elaine in 1961.

Eight-year-old Alden Barrett (right) picks flowers with little brother Scott, 1962 (Courtesy of Scott Barrett).

From the start, Alden was a wild card, sweet and funny one moment, withdrawn or sobbing the next. He couldn’t make it stop, even when the tears knotted his insides and choked off his breathing.

By age twelve, he seemed to be leveling off. Maybe, his parents hoped, it’s some kind of reverse puberty—the cranky child becomes a settled young man.

At school, Alden latched onto science, tutoring older kids and talking about a career in medicine. Doyle, by then the chief of staff at nearby American Fork Hospital, glowed at the idea of Alden following in his footsteps.

For Alden Barrett, the draw of science was twofold. There was wonder—the bright, sharp rush of discovery—and there was order. Chemistry was precise, provable, and consistent. It was, in short, the opposite of religion.

Pleasant Grove was just down the road from Provo, and had the same demographics: White and Mormon, Mormon and White. The only real difference was size. Provo had forty-four thousand people, and Pleasant Grove hovered at five thousand.

Pleasant Grove, Utah. To the east, the Wasatch Mountain Range fills the horizon (Photo by Don LaVange).

Since early childhood, Alden’s life had followed the tick-tock of Mormon routine, a structure that increased with age.

Each weekday, teens attended seminary, an hour-long class on scripture and Church history. Monday was Family Home Evening, a night of parent/child religious instruction and wholesome entertainment. Tuesday nights were for Mutual (short for “Mutual Improvement Association”) meetings, which taught young men and women—usually in separate classes—about spiritual strength and preserving their virtue.

The Church had a long-standing partnership with the Boy Scouts of America, so most young Mormons were also Scouts, which meant an additional weekly meeting.

Fridays and Saturdays were all about housework, finishing errands and leftover chores. (The Church even had a song on this subject. Sample lyrics: “Saturday is a special day / It’s the day we get ready for Sunday / We brush our clothes, and we shine our shoes / And we call it our get-the-work-done day.”)

Sundays were a marathon: up at 7:00 AM for a priesthood meeting (a male-only spiritual lesson, grouped by age), then home to gather the rest of the family and return to church for Sunday School, an immersive, single-topic sermon that ran until noon or so. Then back home again, but only for a few hours; then back to church for Sacrament Meeting—a ninety-minute service featuring prayers, hymns, personal testimonies, and the sharing of consecrated bread and water.^*

On many Sunday evenings, teens attended a fireside: another ninety-minute lecture, usually on a specific subject. Sexual purity, for instance, or the need to follow authority.

Female Saints had their own assigned meetings and organizations, plus ad hoc duties galore (e.g., getting a houseful of children bathed, fed, and ready for church while fathers and older boys went off to priesthood meetings).

Monday morning, it all started over again.

In addition to the above (and more), you had to go to school every day. And get into college. And go on a mission. And pick the right spouse. And get the right job. And raise your children to be “noble and useful citizens of the state and of the Church.” And never, ever wonder why you felt so drained and exhausted.

For boys and girls alike, turning twelve in the Mormon Church meant the beginning of another ritual: the worthiness interview.

Awkward by any standard, the worthiness interview was like Catholic confession by way of an HR grilling.

Your local bishop, a pink-faced man with too many teeth, calls you into his office, a nice, slightly sterile room with plenty of light. He smiles and thanks you for coming, then starts with the questions.

Some are basic, designed to weed out laggards:

“Do you have faith in and a testimony of God the Eternal Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost?”

(Translation: Do you believe in God?)

“Do you have a testimony of the restoration of the gospel in these, the latter days?”

(Translation: Do you believe in our God?)

Some carry the whisper of blacklist:

“Do you support, affiliate with, or agree with any group or individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or oppose those accepted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?”

(Translation: Are you going to cause trouble?)

There are questions about money (“Are you in debt? If so, to whom? Do you tithe at least 10 percent of your income to the Church?”), and questions about diet (“Do you keep the Word of Wisdom, avoiding coffee, tea, liquor, etc.?”).

Then come the other questions. The kind that only cops and clerics can ask without getting smacked.

“Have you ever committed murder?”

“Have you ever committed a homosexual act?”

“Have you ever engaged in bestiality?”

“Do you masturbate?”

Some of these questions come later, prior to marriage, or before serving a mission. But bishops have broad authority in what they ask and how they ask it. They might push for graphic details or provide their own seamy examples. Stories abound of long, awkward sessions filled with seemingly pointless detours. Did you touch yourself? What were you thinking of when you touched yourself? Did you orgasm? Were you wearing immodest underwear?

If you give the wrong answers (or you’re too embarrassed to reply), they can bar you from the temple. And if you stop attending temple rites, your friends and family will have a hunch as to why. After all, they went through the same degrading process.

Worthiness interviews begin at age twelve and happen every two years. More frequently if the bishop deems it necessary. As long as you remain an active Church member, the interviews continue.

Growing up, Alden had his own questions, about music, and animals, and what made the clouds move. It was cute, if sometimes wearing. As he entered adolescence, however, the questions grew sharper.

Do you really believe the Church is true? Why? How do you know?

Why can’t Black men join the priesthood?

Why can’t women join the priesthood?

Those questions weren’t cute or funny. They embarrassed people or made them angry. The standard responses (“I just do,” or “It’s Heavenly Father’s will,” or sometimes “What’s gotten into you?”) all meant the same thing: Don’t ask that.

To occupy his ever-buzzing brain, Alden found diversions: drama club, debate club, and books by the stack. Rock music blaring from his bedroom radio.

Debate was the real lifesaver. In debate, you had to prove it, or at least make a convincing case. You couldn’t just point at the sky and say, “God did it.”

Even better, debate required you to argue both sides of an issue, no matter your own beliefs. Gun control, yes or no? Affirmative action, good or bad? The Vietnam War, fight or fold? A few minutes before the match, they’d assign you a position, and then it was time. If you didn’t go all out, the other debater would whip you senseless in front of a crowd. The process made you smarter; it taught you to think. And the more you did it, the more you saw the holes in everything.

The PGHS 1969–1970 debate team (led by instructor Carol Anderson, left) wraps a season of eight wins and two losses. The following year, Alden Barrett (right) would become team president (Courtesy of Pleasant Grove High School).

Alden’s growing skepticism didn’t go over so well with his parents, and especially not with Doyle, an old-school social conservative.

“Alden’s problems at home were common knowledge,” says Carol Anderson, Alden’s sophomore-year debate instructor. “He was a typical high school student in that he had problems with his family, but in Alden’s case . . . it was a war at home. With his father in particular. It was a war.”

* Mormon men twelve and older were expected to join the priesthood (an all-purpose term for Church-related work). This didn’t apply to Black men, who—like women—could join the Church but were barred from the priesthood. The rule against Black priests was lifted in 1978; the ban on female priests remains.

The Home Front

Like countless young Americans, Alden loathed both Nixon and his party—an unpopular view in Pleasant Grove, where patriotism was nearly its own religion.

It was a stark turnaround for Mormon culture, which had literally battled against the government a century earlier, part of a long fight over polygamy. Facing eradication, the Church had finally renounced “plural marriage” for a chance at mainstream power. By the 1960s, the wild-eyed speeches and underage harems were (mostly) gone, replaced by a vague, loyalist fervor. Like Ronald Reagan a decade later, Mormons were long on flags and short on specifics, and the exceptions were always negative: No on gambling, No on gay rights, No on the ERA.

Alden Barrett, barely fifteen, had his own fervors, and his own specifics. Nixon? Bullshit. Vietnam? Monstrous bullshit. The Church? Well, its leaders supported both Nixon and the war, so you do the math.

A young man with a young man’s certitude, Alden could be terse and obnoxious, dismissing people and their views as stupid or backward. Fights with his father got ugly. Doyle was progressive on certain issues, like medicine and mental health, but a hard right-winger on everything else. To Doyle, the hippies and Yippies were just spoiled brats. All that “kill your parents” crap that the radicals spouted—it was infantile nonsense.

Marcella would sometimes intervene, trying to calm things down. Alden would give her an earful: What do you know? You’re in the John Birch Society. Then the shouting would start. Eventually, Alden would storm out or get sent to his room, where he’d stew.

Even if he won the arguments, it didn’t make a difference. He was fifteen, so he was stuck in Pleasant Grove. But there were temporary escapes.

Since entering high school, Alden had stayed on the straight, but starting in 1969, he got fucked up on a regular basis, usually with a few close friends. Pot, acid, downers, speed—whatever was available. It made his brain feel different, which was good, or shut things off entirely, which was better.

His grades began to slip. Alden had always been able to coast, but now, he simply stopped caring. Sometimes he went to class; sometimes he didn’t. When he went, he just heard establishment prattle, the party line from party hacks. America the Beautiful, ready to send him to the slaughter overseas.

His clothes got ratty and wrinkled: patched-up jeans and rumpled shirts. You could look so handsome, his mother, Marcella, would tell him, but your clothes . . .

Doyle Barrett was blunter. You look like a hobo. Is that what you want?

Worst of all was Alden’s hair. In 1969, long hair on men was no joke; it could bring a beating or worse. In Easy Rider, it got Dennis Hopper blown to bits by a shotgun.

By sixties standards, Alden’s hair was modest—barely at his collar—but Utah County was another world, with “sir” and “ma’am,” and frozen Archie smiles. And long hair wasn’t just different, it was defiant, and that was far worse.

What about Jesus? He had long hair.

That’s different, Alden, and you know it.

Why?

It just is.

What about Brigham Young? He had—

Alden Niel Barrett!

Then he’d stop. For a while.

As Alden’s hair grew, his parents’ anger deepened. They would tell him to cut it, and he would ignore them. They’d tell him again, and Alden would pick a fight about religion or Nixon, and that would derail things for several hours.

Alden’s older siblings piled on.^*

Cut your hair.

No.

Cut your hair.

No.

One night, two of the older kids finally had enough. Waiting for Alden inside the front door, they grabbed him, pinned him to the floor, and got a pair of scissors. As one held Alden in place, the other went to work, cutting Alden’s hair in big, jagged whacks. Alden cursed and fought, and soon his scalp was bleeding. At last, he broke free, ran for the door, and vanished.

When he returned, he was seething and bent on revenge. Marcella—who had okayed the forced haircut—ordered a full-house truce.

The next morning, she took Alden to the barber. There was no fixing the damage, and before Alden could protest, the barber took everything off, leaving only a short buzz. For Alden, a high schooler and would-be hippie, it was a nightmare.

“Eventually,” said Marcella decades later, “I came to my senses and wasn’t so frightened and realized that this trend was going to be with us. We had to rethink a few things and not be so uptight about our kids.”

At the time, however, Doyle and Marcella just wanted Alden to conform. That was how society worked, and everyone had to learn it.

“I didn’t want to see his beautiful hair nicked up like that,” Marcella later recalled, “but I didn’t want it long. I wanted it cut the normal way that was normal for our town, and he refused to do that.”

Around the time of the hair-cutting debacle, some pills went missing from Doyle’s home office. When he asked Alden about it, Alden got indignant. Stealing from you? What kind of lowlife do you think I am?

Given Alden’s glassy demeanor and plummeting grades, it wasn’t very convincing, and the lingering suspicion only increased the tension.

When, midway through some other argument, Alden pulled the “school is a dictatorship, and so is this family” card, Doyle and Marcella finally snapped. Alden was going to obey, whatever it took.

They emptied his bedroom, moving everything—books, clothes, records, chairs, the bed itself—into the hallway. All that remained was the carpet and overhead light.

Doyle ordered Alden into the bedroom and made him strip to his underwear. Marcella took the clothing, then returned with a pillow and blanket. Doyle tossed the bedding to Alden, yanked the door shut, then went to find a dog chain. Soon, the doorknob was lashed to a nearby sink, meaning the bedroom door couldn’t be opened from the inside.

Doyle and Marcella slid a pencil and paper under the door.

You need to set some structured goals, they told him. And you need to understand what got you here. When you’ve done that, maybe you can have your things back. Maybe you can get dressed and rejoin the family. Until then . . .

Until then, Alden would sit in the empty bedroom, alone, almost naked, enraged and embarrassed. He had to ask permission to take a piss or get a drink of water. His meals came through the barely opened door, and when he was done, the dishes went out the same way.

He eventually scribbled a few sentences and shoved the paper under the door.

I started saying things without thinking. I said school and family rules are set up like a dictatorship. This is not so because opinions and suggestions can be freely expressed if done so in the proper manner.

Further down, he couldn’t resist a little bite:

What is actually wrong is trying to justify the actions of people I love.

Then, at the bottom, in a shakier hand:

I still have to work at staying straight. It doesn’t come naturally yet.

Next, they wanted a list of things—personal traits—that needed fixing. Alden sent back a full page.

What faults do I have that need eliminating?

I am not happy with myself because—

1.I am conceited.

2.Disrespectful

3.A liar

4.I give in to temptation of temporary pleasure

5.Too individualistic

6.I procrastinate

7.I’m lazy

It went on and on.

I’m wasteful . . . unorganized . . . self-centered . . . rebellious . . .

He slid the paper out. A mostly blank page came back. At the top, it said, “This is an outline only.” They wanted introspection, or at least some detail.

He tried again.

Why am I—

1.Conceited—Because I tend to be selfish, and let my life revolve around myself.

2.Disrespectful—Because I ignore the love and trust given to me by people I should respect.

He filled several pages, explaining nearly two dozen personal failings.

After three days of back-and-forth, Doyle and Marcella relented. The chain came off the door, and Alden got his things back.

When Alden’s friends learned about the lockup, they were shocked and angry. Fifty years later, Tim McCaffery—one of Alden’s fellow hell-raisers—practically spits when thinking about the forced confinement.

“When you shave a kid’s head, and strip him to his boxers, and put a chain on his door,” says McCaffery, “that’s abuse.”

In normal conversation, McCaffery speaks with hard-guy bravado—the residual swagger of long-ago youth. When discussing Alden’s home life, however, the machismo vanishes, replaced by angry bewilderment.

“That family,” says McCaffery with a harsh, bitter laugh. “I think Alden was the only sane one.”

* Technically, they were half siblings from Marcella’s first marriage.

Somebody Save Me

The bedroom detention might have seemed outrageous, but things weren’t so clear-cut. Alden had been stealing pills from his father’s office, stuffing his pockets with uppers (mostly Dexedrine), downers (mostly Seconal), and whatever else was handy. He’d call up some friends, and they’d gather in someone’s basement, where Alden would dump everything out. Hours later, he’d stagger home, doing his best to seem level.

Doyle and Marcella saw Alden heading for disaster, and were desperate to stop it. There was always jail, but calling the cops was a final resort—what you did when everything else had failed.

That was another problem. When it came to mental health, especially for teens, “everything else” was a pretty short list.

Doyle knew that better than most. As early as 1961, he’d given lectures on mental health, trying to lessen the stigma. “One in ten Americans,” he pointed out, “will, at some point in their lives, be subject to some type of mental illness.”

People found that overblown because they weren’t really listening. He wasn’t saying ten percent of people were crazy, but that brain health was just another kind of physical health. If you caught a cold, or broke a bone, you eventually recovered. Why was mental health any different? Most people got depressed or anxious at some point, but it usually passed. Yes, some issues were crippling, and some were incurable, but so were a lot of physical ailments. That was no reason to give up on treatment, and it was no reason to shun the afflicted.

But treatment was easier said than found. Doyle and Marcella had been trying to get a psychiatrist for Alden, but options were scarce. True, the state mental hospital was just down the road in Provo, but that was deceptive. Opened in 1885 as the Territorial Insane Asylum, the hospital initially served to keep the “mentally feeble” away from normal society, and was separated from town by a half mile of swamps, sewage-filled marshes, and (in case the point wasn’t clear) the city dump. Seven decades later, the hospital was little more than an overstuffed cage, with fifteen hundred patients in a space meant for three hundred.

By 1969, things had improved, but treatment was still mired in guesswork. There was never enough money for research, and when clinical theories did emerge, they were hard to test. Unlike a busted leg, depression couldn’t be x-rayed. For that matter, how did you know when someone was faking? Or when they were cured?

What breakthroughs came were typically for grown-ups. Young children had a hard time sitting still, much less explaining their symptoms. Teenagers, meanwhile, were human kaleidoscopes: shifting arrays of complex, sometimes baffling features.

So the focus on adults was understandable. It was also a slow-motion disaster.

When, after decades of exclusion, scientists finally examined the teenage brain, they found shocking rates of major-depressive disorders and persistent-depressive disorders. These weren’t mood swings or “off days,” but serious ailments closely linked to suicide, and nearly all were more common in teens than in grown-ups. The frightening peak came at age seventeen, when clinical depression rates hit 19 percent, and suicide surged as a cause of death.

But true understanding was years away, and progress would come at a glacier’s pace.

In the absence of real, clinical treatment, Doyle and Marcella sent Alden to an outdoor “survival program” run by a BYU instructor. Part detox, part get-your-shit-together-and-find-some-firewood boot camp, the program was popular with local judges, who sentenced troublemakers to a few weeks in the forest. Doyle wanted a true rehab, but those barely existed for adults, let alone teenagers.

The outdoor program worked, but only in the short term. After repeated relapses, Alden asked his parents to send him to Wasatch Academy, an ultra-strict school in Sanpete County, seventy miles from Pleasant Grove.

At Wasatch Academy, a barrage of bells woke you for breakfast, and if you weren’t in the cafeteria by 7:00 AM, you got demerits. After breakfast, you did assigned chores, then went to the chapel for service, followed by schoolwork. At 6:00 PM, everyone went to dinner, then to study hall. Lights-out came at 10:00 PM, no exceptions. At meals, boys had to wear either a jacket or a sweater/tie combo.

The school’s rigid approach was misleading. Wasatch Academy emphasized individual education, and kept class sizes small, averaging one teacher for every ten students. Many of the teachers were PhDs, and nearly all had years of training in their given fields.

The results were impressive: more than 90 percent of Wasatch graduates went on to a four-year college, and a significant number enrolled in the Ivy League. For a student bored by public schooling, Wasatch Academy could be a sanctuary—a place where tough thinking was welcomed, even rewarded.

Alden Barrett—his dark hair colored red for a school play—at Wasatch Academy, 1970 (Courtesy of Wasatch Academy).

It also gave a glimpse of life outside the Mormon bubble.

Two years earlier, the Beatles had gone to India for a three-month course in Transcendental Meditation, and though they’d lasted only a few weeks, the trip had a global impact, introducing millions of Westerners to words like yoga and mantra. Guitarist George Harrison came home a convert and stayed one for life, punctuating his conversations (and even his angry outbursts) with “Hare Krishna.”

At Wasatch Academy, Alden met kids who meditated or who dabbled in Eastern and new-age religions. Even a teacher (a guitar instructor, of course) got in on the act, expounding on auras, astral projection, and the ill-defined power of “metaphysics.”

With the earnest zeal of youth, a handful of Academy students, including Alden, formed a group called KARMA, and held long, intense discussions about existence and the inner self. On occasion, someone would bring out a Ouija board, and the boys would take turns asking it questions. Alden, one friend later recalled, found the Ouija board “hokey as hell,” and preferred to talk about dream symbolism. Then they’d all sneak outside to get hammered or high before creeping back to their dorm rooms.

When the school year ended, Alden returned to Pleasant Grove, not quite clean, not quite sober, and talking about his mantra. Worse, his complaints about the Church—particularly its treatment of Black members—were louder and angrier than before.

Doyle was beyond exasperated and put his foot down: Alden was not going back to Wasatch Academy.

For Alden, this was the last straw. He’d already had enough of Utah; now even his new school was off-limits.

He was almost sixteen. In two years, Nixon would probably ship him to Vietnam. Why waste the little time he had left?

Fuck this place.

In June 1970, he packed a few things, got a one-way bus ticket, and disappeared.

Coming Down Fast

In 1934, a teenaged Beatrice Sparks arrived in San Francisco from the outskirts of northern Utah. Almost four decades later, Alden Barrett made a similar trip, hitching and busing his way from Pleasant Grove to California’s East Bay.

What he found was disappointing: a city of grime and glitter, with little in between. The weather was gray, even in the summer; at night, a damp chill clung to everything. And the people of San Francisco no longer found vagrants charming, if they ever had.

After sunset, police roamed the parks, writing tickets for illegal occupancy and shooing teens toward homeless shelters. Those who stayed on the streets faced an array of moonlight dangers, often at the hands of fellow drifters. Quests for enlightenment went by the wayside, replaced by more prosaic issues, like Where am I going to sleep tonight? Kids expecting Aquarius wound up hustling for crumpled dollars.

A week after arriving in San Francisco, Alden was sleeping in doorways, which put the vagabond life into perspective. He finally landed at Huckleberry House, a hostel for runaway teens in the Haight.

Running away from home, whatever the reason, was a crime in 1970, and so was harboring a runaway. A few years earlier, San Francisco cops had staged a midnight raid, arresting Huckleberry’s adult staff and sending the kids to a brick-and-barbed-wire jail. To prevent future arrests, Huckleberry’s directors found a legal workaround: if a teen was staying overnight, the parents got a phone call saying so. That defused the “harboring a runaway” charge, and also got kids and parents talking—sometimes.

Told of the notification requirement, Alden agreed, and dialed Pleasant Grove.

When Doyle answered, Alden’s voice rattled down the phone line, asking if he could come home.

His parents made the trip in one push, driving 750 miles to retrieve their wayward son. Before heading back to Utah, the trio shared one gloriously discordant evening in The City, taking in a production of Hair.

Back home, Alden was humbled and depressed, angry at his own lapses. He couldn’t get his shit together, couldn’t keep it together. Sobriety was like hypnosis: it was easier with something else to focus on. That’s how you relaxed and shut out the demons, or at least ignored them. School didn’t work. Religion didn’t work. Nothing worked. Even if he’d wanted to join the military, which he didn’t, that was two years away. How would he last that long?

A few weeks later, the pattern finally broke.

All of My Young Life

August 1970

Alden was nearly sixteen; in less than a month, he’d start his junior year at Pleasant Grove High School. Slowly but surely, he was approaching manhood.

Even better, Doyle and Marcella had found a psychiatrist who accepted teenage patients. Alden went to the sessions without complaint, and that by itself was progress.

So when his parents decided to leave town for a few days—a final chance to enjoy the warm weather—Alden wanted to stay behind. It was a terrible idea, but even at his most exasperating, Alden still could be persuasive. Against their better judgment, Doyle and Marcella left for a week and took the two younger kids with them.

On Monday, August 17, Alden called up some friends, and things got hazy. And loud. And that’s when the cops appeared, catching Alden with a bag of grass and a bunch of Seconal capsules.

If the bust had come three months later, it would have been even worse. Nixon’s War on Drugs increased the penalties for everything, including possession. As it was, the pills and weed were bad news—the kind of thing you could do real time for, even as a juvenile. Worst of all, Doyle and Marcella were out of town for another few days, so Alden sat in underage lockup, surrounded by dimwits and burnouts, thinking about his future.

Was this what he wanted? To piss away his promise and intellect? Was this his life going forward? Booze and dope and the cold snap of handcuffs?

He thought about his parents, who’d done all they could to help. His father, who’d driven all night to fetch him from a San Francisco shelter. His mother, who worried and prayed for him, hoping he’d find his way.

He thought about his friends, and former friends; people he’d lost or pushed away with his weird, erratic behavior. His current girlfriend, a sophomore named Pamela, would surely drop him when word of the arrest got around. Understandable, really—nobody wanted their daughter spending time with a criminal pothead.

By the time Doyle and Marcella returned, Alden had made a conscious decision.

I am going to change.

He got off with probation and house arrest. Certain outside activities, like debate and drama, were fine, but no vanishing for hours on end, and no hanging out with his old drug buddies. Everything he did, apart from school and church, had to be approved. And if he fucked up again, he’d go to jail, no debate. (Ha ha.)

On September 5, 1970—one day after turning sixteen—Alden Barrett vowed to stay clean.

He also started a diary.

Somebody to Love

Saturday, September 5, 1970

I live in a world of filthy air and water, war, revolution (violent and non-violent) (hear, hear) . . . people who are beautiful and real, people who are not so beautiful and not so real; silence and, more often, senseless babble; wondering to what degree I’m sane . . . trying to be liberal in an ultra-conservative atmosphere, extremism. Wishing I could have coffee for breakfast every morning, and wishing my hair was a little longer. Also school, which is really a lot of fun.

—Alden Barrett journal entry

It was a green spiral notebook from the Smith Rexall drugstore. He covered the front with graffiti-style blurbs: “Groovy,” “Bitchin,” “Outta Sight.” On the inside cover, a giant, pop-art “FLASH!”

At first, there was nothing special. Like a lot of teens, Alden wasn’t quite sure what to put in a journal, so it was mostly chronology: getting up, going to school, and coming home again. There wasn’t much else—house arrest saw to that. Still, it was a start.

Over time, he stretched out, adding poetry and drawings—big, sprawling, pen-and-ink designs that filled whole pages. And there was a lot of venting. When his older sister relayed a private conversation to Doyle and Marcella, Alden felt betrayed, and dubbed her “Benedict Arnold II”:

I really thought she was cool, and had my best interests in mind. What a bunch of B.S. She hates my guts.

Then, a moment later:

After writing that, I feel a heck of a lot better. That’s what this is for, I guess. To get the hassles out of my system. It would be so cool if we could get along, but they just don’t understand. At any rate, I do feel less hostile, and I suppose that’s constructive.

It wasn’t a cure-all, and Alden Barrett wasn’t a great philosopher. He was a teenager trying to figure things out.

Within a few days of the arrest, Alden’s girlfriend dumped him. He’d seen it coming and couldn’t really blame her. Still, it stung. Forced separation from two close friends, Mike Waid and John Lundgren, was harder. They were drug pals, which meant they were off-limits until Alden’s probation elapsed. Just as well, maybe. He was trying to stay clean, and together, the three of them always seemed to find trouble.

I am extremely self-conscious. In the past, I had the help of people who, in some ways, were very similar to me. Unfortunately, this had side effects. Not only were our good points reinforced, but our bad points were reinforced—our vices were fed. All of that is out of my hands now. I am alone.

I am so lonely. I am so tired and so afraid. I am in need . . .

He tried to make the best of it, reading about other places and cultures, and dreaming of a life outside Pleasant Grove. The Beatles had just broken up, coming apart in a flurry of lawsuits, but they’d shown the way to something bigger and bolder. Even John Lennon, who spit nails at everything, was on the peace train, sitting in bed with Yoko and growing his hair to the floor.

Alden read about meditation and tried to make it work, reciting his mantra and striving to relax. Struggling to relax. Forcing himself to relax—

Shit. All right. Start again.

It was slow going, and a bit of a hodgepodge. He was a skinny white kid (and not just regular white, but Mormon white) trying to grope his way to . . . something. There was a larger world out there, if only he could get to it.

I am very, very lonely. I’ve got myself and that’s all, besides the burden I’m carrying . . . the burden of change. The burden of being myself (my only possession). If I lose myself by conforming to be exactly what they want me to be, I lose the only thing I’ve got. I need somebody to tell me some of my ideas are right. I know dope is bad, no argument, but shit, what about everything else?

I need somebody to believe in me!

Angel Dressed in Black

Monday, August 24, 1970

At Pleasant Grove High School, the carpets were clean, and the windows were spotless. Textbooks were ready for brown-paper covers; chalkboards for names and assignments. Out in the hallway, locker doors clanged, blending with chatter and rustle.

Teresa Blain should have been excited, or even nostalgic. It was her final year; in nine months, she’d be done with school and on to whatever came next.

Instead, she just felt lonely. She’d had a bad breakup, and didn’t have many friends. Lots of people knew her—sort of—and they all assumed she was popular. How could she not be? She was gorgeous. Even decades later, that was the word everyone used: gorgeous. Dark-eyed and willowy, with long, chestnut hair, Teresa stood out at Pleasant Grove High, where everyone seemed blond, even if they weren’t.

But as the students flowed past, everyone shoving and making plans for later, Teresa felt isolated. It had been that way for a long time, and nobody seemed to notice.

She didn’t have an easy way with people, and small talk was a mystery. When she tried it, everything came out sideways. It was easier to just hold back, to keep some distance.

And what happened then?

Teresa’s a little stuck on herself.

She couldn’t win.

“Teresa!”

Someone was yelling her name, really shouting it.

There were people all around, so she couldn’t quite see.

“Hey, Teresa!”

It was Alden Barrett, slipping through the crowd. Alden, with his big smile and his big bright eyes.

They’d met before; Teresa had dated a friend of Alden’s, so their paths crossed now and then. They’d never discussed anything real or deep. Just fluff talk—the kind of thing Teresa failed at. And now, here he was, bounding toward her like a rabbit on springs.

Alden Barrett and Teresa Blain, from the Pleasant Grove High School yearbook (Courtesy of Pleasant Grove High School).

“Hi,” he said, sort of landing in place. “How ya doing?”

It all went by in a blur. He was happy to see her, almost bouncing as they spoke. That was what stood out to her, even years later. He was so excited to see her.

Alden said he was ready for school, eager to get back in class and really make a go of it. It was infectious, that smile of his. Even Teresa, who was glum as glum could be, began to perk up.

Then it was class time, and everyone scattered.

Standing in the hallway, Teresa Blain had no idea that things had just taken a very sharp turn—or that someday, far in the future, students in the very same hallway would say her name in a dark, thrilled whisper.

Friday, August 28, 1970

On the first Friday of every school year, Pleasant Grove High School held its “Hi Dance,” a badly named opportunity for awkward teenage courtship. There was a live band, decorative streamers, the obligatory fruit punch (sans spiking), and adults lurking everywhere.

Alden was still under house arrest, but the dance was a school function, and his parents gave permission. He found a clean shirt, brushed his hair, and headed to PGHS.

Over on Locust Avenue, Teresa Blain got dressed and made the same trip. She didn’t have a date, but it was her senior year, her last chance for most of this.

Inside the school gymnasium, local band Call ‘n’ Jeff was thumping away, the echo swallowing everything. Teresa looked around, saw the decorations and paired-off silhouettes, and gave herself a mini pep talk. It’s a dance, she thought. So I’ll dance. It’ll be fun. Trying to believe it.

Time went by. No one approached. After a while, she walked over to a boy from her class and said hello.

Nothing happened.

“Do you want to dance?” she asked. It can’t be this hard. Here she was, making the first move, and this guy was just letting her flail.

Out in the murky distance, she saw Alden dancing with someone. A moment later, he glanced over and saw Teresa.

Meanwhile, Teresa’s would-be dance partner still hadn’t answered. Then the song ended, and she didn’t know what to do. How do other people manage this?

Alden and the girl were leaving the dance floor, heading for the room’s far side. As Teresa watched, Alden escorted the girl to her seat—then turned, and walked over to Teresa.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Would you like to dance?”

Yes. Very much.

They swayed through several songs, the dark-haired boy and the dark-haired girl. After a while, they wanted to talk without the music and chatter, so they went outside, to a patio off the main building.

The night was warm, with just a slight breeze, and they talked for a long, long time.

Somehow, the conversation came around to suicide.

Later, Teresa called the discussion “offhand”—a minor part of a much longer talk. But it was shadowy ground, especially coming so early.

“If you were going to commit suicide, how would you do it?” she asked Alden.

“How would you do it?” he asked back.

It was hypothetical, but not really—a twist on the push-and-pull game of seduction. Lovers who haven’t yet kissed throwing similar feints, discussing all the ways in which something might happen.

If it happened.

Which it won’t.

Of course not.

Because it’s a bad idea.

The worst.

It’s all just talk, until it isn’t.

A year earlier, Teresa’s parents had made her break up with a boyfriend, and she’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin. It knocked her unconscious for more than a day and scared the hell out of everyone. Luckily, word hadn’t spread.

Now she was standing outside, swapping death talk with a boy she hardly knew. Alden’s dramatic side, sharpened by adolescence, was instantly attached. They could save each other.

They talked and laughed, and the warm breeze tickled past. Far above, clouds moved over a star-filled sky, and if you looked at just the right moment, you could see the soft glow of Saturn.

Bad Reputation

When school resumed on Monday, Alden grew nervous. What if Teresa didn’t like him? Maybe she’d just been killing time during the dance. It seemed unlikely, but what if?

Alden knew a girl who sat near Teresa in the mornings. With strained casualness, he asked her to gauge Teresa’s interest, then report back ASAP.

The news was mostly good. Teresa had been thinking a lot about their Friday night talk, and Alden had made an impression. But, warned the friend, Teresa didn’t date “younger guys.”

No problem. Alden Barrett, sixteen-year-old, rechristened himself Alden Barrett, seventeen-year-old. It was goofy and totally unconvincing, which made it kind of charming, and when Alden asked Teresa to a debate-club party, she said yes.

“That first date,” Teresa said later, “is when everything clicked. That’s when we fell in love.”

That’s when we fell in love.

No one takes that seriously from a teenager. Ask a dozen adults, and you’ll get the same answer twelve times: That’s not love; it’s a crush. (Or just hormones, they think, but rarely say.)

But consider love. Real and true, like the poets describe it. The twist in your stomach, the dizzy brightness in your chest. How it gives you strength while sapping your will. How it fills you up and hollows you out. The agonizing joy. The terrible hurt you can’t live without.

No one—no one—feels those things like a teenager. It’s the first pure rush of a cold-fire drug, and it’s something we chase, with mixed results, for the rest of our fading lives.

Alden’s first significant mention of Teresa. Alden illustrated many entries with abstract or playful drawings; this cat appears to be wearing Alden’s own patched jeans/army jacket ensemble. (Courtesy of Scott Barrett).

From their first dance, Alden and Teresa were locked in a mutual orbit, oblivious to the rest of creation. For Alden, every thought of the future now included Teresa. She was the only constant.

Whatever lay ahead, leaving Pleasant Grove would be a good start. The whole town felt like Autopia, Disneyland’s car-on-rails exhibit. You could steer left or right, but the wheels only moved a few inches, and sooner or later, everyone made the same slow turns, passed the same markers, and ended up in the same old place.

Alden didn’t want that, and he didn’t understand how anyone could. There was a whole world out there, ready to be seen. And with Teresa by his side, he could go anywhere, do anything.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Alden was a junior, and Teresa was a senior. Come June, there would be choices, temptations, and maybe distance.

But that was nine months away—a lifetime. The bigger issue was Alden’s past, especially his recent drug bust. He’d managed to stay clean, but the arrest was out there, lurking, threatening to spoil everything. Teresa knew about the lockup, about the probation and house arrest, but her parents didn’t, and that was for the best.

In Utah County, dating wasn’t just social. The goals were marriage and children, in that order. As a result, young Mormon life could resemble triage, with teens (or their parents) quick to discard non-marriage material.^*

Why can’t Alden come over? Why don’t we see more of him? Where is he always hiding? Teresa couldn’t explain to her parents without telling them everything, and Alden didn’t want to lie, so they just dodged the issue, which worked for a while.

But social pressure made things tricky. The whispers were bad enough. It seemed like most of Pleasant Grove knew about Alden’s drug bust, and combined with the ragged hair and the scruffy clothes, people felt free to judge.

“Condemnation was so heavy at that time because the drug situation was so prevalent,” says Jeri Craner, Alden’s English teacher at PGHS. “I think a lot of people were using Alden for an example. He was very well known, and everyone knew he’d done drugs.”

Craner, an exacting teacher beloved by her students, was fond of Alden, and thought he could really go places. But the fixation on Teresa seemed premature, even unhealthy.

“From the time he met Teresa,” says Craner, “Alden felt like he’d met his future. His whole existence revolved around her.”

At Teresa’s house, a similar cloud was looming. Her parents worried about the obsessive focus on a boy Teresa barely knew. What would happen if (and probably when) things fell apart?

They had to be careful. The last time they’d ordered a breakup, Teresa had swallowed enough aspirin to scorch her nervous system. Apart from a serious ulcer, she’d come out all right, but what about next time?

So they wouldn’t step in. Not yet. Instead, they counseled perspective. You’re seventeen, with a whole future ahead. Don’t limit yourself.

Teresa was firm. She didn’t want to date other people; she wanted to date Alden, and only Alden. (And by the way, hadn’t Teresa’s own mother gotten married at eighteen, barely older than Teresa was now?)

The Blains eased up but made their feelings clear. Alden Barrett is not a long-term prospect.

Like Teresa’s parents, Doyle and Marcella Barrett were wary of the light-speed courtship, but for different reasons. They’d met Teresa and liked her at once. She was charming and smart, and she made Alden happy; that last part alone was enough to win them over. But it was still early, and the first glow of love could hide a lot of problems. Just take it slow, they told him. Make sure it’s what you both want, and be ready for some hard times.

Teresa would finish school a year ahead of Alden, and what would happen then? Was she going to college? Or would she just sit around, waiting? What did Alden want to do after graduation? Had they even discussed it?

There was also Alden’s sobriety to think of. He was six weeks clean and staying straight. What would happen if things went south with Teresa? It might push him back toward drugs, and that would be a disaster.

Still, there was only so much Doyle and Marcella could control, so they gritted their teeth and hoped for the best.

For Alden and Teresa, “long term” had no real meaning. What mattered was today. Now. The way everything else went quiet when they locked eyes. The electric surge when their hands touched.

Seeing each other at school wasn’t enough; the phone calls and letters and million little notes weren’t enough. There could never be enough, not of the person who made you whole.

Writing in his journal, Alden was direct and painfully wide-eyed:

What can I say? We communicate, we express, we interact, we feel, we happen. We Happen! We lean on each other. It doesn’t need a reminder, or force of lies, or encouragement, it just happens.

I am joyful.

* Because unmarried Mormon adults are (in some interpretations) barred from the highest level of heaven (and thus, from reuniting with devout relatives), even nonbelievers can feel compelled to marry young. Nobody wants to ruin a dying mother’s dreams of the afterlife.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice

From Improvement Era, the official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Volume 70, Number 6:

The achievement of a happy marriage begins in childhood and youth. The opportunity of marriage begins in the early days of school. The young girl who plays the violin is more likely to find a good mate than one who sits at home . . . the boy who participates in athletics is more likely to find a mate than one who sits by the radio.

The October air was cool, with only the barest hint of winter. Overhead, the sky was a vast Persian expanse, slivered with faraway jewels of tiny, frozen light.

Alden and Teresa held hands, walking and talking, cutting a slow arc through Pleasant Grove.

WHERE: Clean places, decent places, proper places. No “adventuring” or “slumming” in dives or questionable surroundings. No place where the Spirit of the Lord will not likely be present.

Alden was still under house arrest, and just slipping outside was risky, but it was worth it. You couldn’t see someone over the phone, couldn’t inhale them or feel the warmth of their hand. Most of all, you couldn’t feel the stillness—that moment when all the frantic buzzing fell silent and you were at peace. Nights like this, when they could both get away for a while, made the rest of it bearable.

WHAT: Fun things, wholesome things. Church-going dates, work parties, service projects. Cultural and educational activities, close-to-the-beauties-of-nature experiences, hospital and shut-in visits. Things pleasing to you, to parents, to God.

They passed the high school, then curved left, looping back toward Teresa’s house. Finally, they kissed and said goodnight, already thinking of next time.

HOW: With others, in groups, appropriately dressed, cheerfully, courteously, modestly, wisely, prayerfully.

Have a happy time!

“One night,” Teresa later said, “we drank some coffee and smoked a cigarette. But that was just to be cool.”

Purgatory

Wednesday, October 7, 1970

Alden arrived at the Provo Courthouse, a giant stone building with tree-sized pillars. His probation ran until mid-March, but he hoped to get the house arrest lifted. That would make everything easier, especially with Teresa’s parents.

His feelings about authority notwithstanding, Alden could make a good impression when he wanted. It was easy: wear a suit, make eye contact, and speak with feeling. Show respect, but don’t grovel.

Sure enough, the judge ended the house arrest, which left only probation. Another five months, thought Alden. Come March 15, it will all be over. Just stay clean.

He couldn’t afford to get busted again. Not for anything. Another bust would mean jail time, and that would kill things with Teresa, one way or another. Ducking out to see her had been dangerous, but now they wouldn’t have to hide. Now they could do things like a real, actual couple. It was enough to make his heart race.

Another five months. That’s all.

Alden was eight weeks sober, and he kicked himself over past mistakes. All those wasted months, and for what? So he could go to court and appease some gavel-wielding fascist? No thanks. Drugs might free your mind, but they could put your ass in jail, and that’s a risk he wouldn’t take. Not anymore. Not since Teresa.

Besides, he had enough to worry about.

Goddamned LSD. What was I thinking?

Even in Pleasant Grove, the stories floated around.

. . . that stuff stays in your system forever . . .

. . . in the spinal cord . . . in the fluid . . .

. . . little crystals of acid, they lodge there . . .

. . . seven years . . .

. . . and cause flashbacks . . .

Some of the whispers were specific, with the heavy ring of authority:

If you’ve taken LSD more than seven times (or maybe nine?), you’re legally insane.

No, it’s the number of hits in a month. Take it more than four times in one month, and you’re legally crazy. After that, they won’t even let you testify in court.

It was all hogwash, but nobody rushed to correct the rumors. If the kids had a little fear, that was fine. Whatever kept them straight.

The worst lie of all wasn’t even a rumor; it was bullshit from an official source.

According to doctors at the State University of New York, LSD actually broke your chromosomes, causing all sorts of problems, like cancer and heart failure. And if you eventually had children? That’s right: you’d pass along your mangled genes, spreading the pain to a new generation.

By 1970, the LSD/birth defect link was accepted wisdom, the price that you (and your unborn offspring) would pay for a moment of heedless indulgence.

But it wasn’t true. The study was flawed, and its conclusions were false. LSD wasn’t necessarily good for you, and if you bought it on the street, it might be contaminated, but it didn’t break your chromosomes, and it didn’t cause birth defects; claims that it did were simply wrong. But nobody knew that part—and wouldn’t know it for another two years, when science finally debunked itself.

In the meantime, Alden worried, and wondered, and rued his past behavior. Harming his own body was one thing, but he wanted to have kids someday. How could he face himself—or his children—if they were born damaged?

How could he face Teresa?

It wasn’t a theoretical concern. Alden and Teresa hadn’t slept together, but they’d taken an even bigger step. In mid-October, just a month after their very first dance, Alden proposed. And Teresa said yes.

From Here to Eternity

Tuesday, October 20, 1970

I proposed to Teresa today and she accepted. We’ll be married on the night of the Sweater Swing—Nov. 6th. I know it’s just pretend, but it does have significance. We’re getting there—at least we’re headed in that direction.

—Alden Barrett, journal entry

Things were looking up. The juvenile court had lifted Alden’s house arrest, and his probation would end on March 15. At school, his grades were improving, and he’d joined both the choir and the drama club, landing roles in Oklahoma! and The Mouse That Roared.

Debate, though, that kept him sane. In debate, nobody won by being the loudest or the shrillest, or by having the biggest platform. In debate, you had to make sense. It was one place where logic—where facts—still mattered, and for Alden Barrett, stuck in a world of “John-Birch fascism, Mormonism, and other assorted bullshit,” it was the perfect outlet.

By the fall of 1970, he was the team’s president.

All of this circled Teresa. Thanks to her, a maddening, confusing world was suddenly bearable, even joyful. Who would hesitate to make that official?

True, Alden was barely sixteen, and Teresa just a year older, but in Utah, you could marry (with parental approval) at fourteen. At Pleasant Grove High, a few students were already married, and even more were engaged. It was the same across America, with most states allowing marriage at fifteen or younger. Some, like Pennsylvania, had no minimum age; find the right judge in Pittsburgh, and you could marry a third grader.^*

The real hang-up was familial. As minors, Alden and Teresa would need their parents’ permission. Alden made the case to Doyle and Marcella: he loved Teresa, and she loved him. She was nearly done with school, and he only had another year to go. They wanted to be together and wanted to make it official.

Marcella and Doyle weren’t crazy about the idea, but they also weren’t blind. Alden adored Teresa, and the feeling seemed mutual. If they stood in the way, Teresa might get pregnant out of wedlock, and in Pleasant Grove, that would be a nightmare.

Marcella had a long talk with Alden about marriage, what it meant and what it required. It wasn’t just daisies and splendor—it was hard work, and sometimes, you had to put your own wishes aside. It was a compromise. Was he ready for that?

Alden said all the right things, and Marcella could see the recent changes in him. The anguished boy who pulled at his own hair and cried himself to sleep—he was gone. In his place was a young man; still troubled, perhaps, but getting better.

Maybe this—the connection with Teresa—was the final missing piece.

“After talking with Alden about the feelings he had for Teresa,” Marcella said later, “I was willing to go along with it, even if it meant the two of them getting married younger than they should. I thought that with lots of understanding, and maybe some marriage counseling, they could make it.”

One of the few adults Alden trusted, English teacher Jeri Craner, tried to slow things down, and did her best to paint a larger picture.

“I pointed out the age difference,” says Craner. “Teresa was a year older. I said he needed to take that year and really get some counseling to make things work.”

When Alden resisted, Craner pressed the point. “I’m not saying you won’t marry her,” she told Alden, “but give yourself some time.”

Even as she spoke, Craner could see her words falling away. Alden was smart but naive, in thrall to his own limited vision. To him, Teresa was the answer, the key to a glorious future. She would fix him. She would keep him sane.

You’ve known her six weeks, Craner wanted to scream. You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you just don’t.

It was a stalemate, and eventually, Craner gave up. Watching Alden leave the classroom, she worried about how things would end.

“He was so deeply, emotionally involved with Teresa by that time,” says Craner. “She was his whole reason for being.”

In the end, it was moot. Teresa’s parents weren’t approving any marriage, to anyone. Marcella paid the Blains a visit, and the three parents had a long talk. No dice.

It made sense. Teresa was mercurial, with a prior suicide attempt. And Alden, well, where to start? He was grubby and argumentative, always poking at the Church. Both were still in high school. Neither had a real job. Divorce was already rampant in America, and the younger you married, the harder it was to stay married. Mormon divorce rates were lower than average, but even so, success was a long shot.

So the answer was No.

It was frustrating, but there was nothing to do but wait. The timing was fortuitous: Teresa’s eighteenth birthday—March 17, 1971—was just two days after Alden’s probation ended. It all seemed fated.

With official marriage off the table until March, the couple planned a symbolic wedding, a placeholder for the real thing. Teresa knew just the spot.

As a child, she’d visited Timpanogos Memorial Gardens, a cemetery just south of Pleasant Grove. There, atop a large granite block, was a statue of Jesus carved from a single piece of white marble. From the base, lush green lawn stretched in every direction, and at night, the silence was almost physical—a heavy, natural quiet rustled only by crickets.

“I always remember that statue as a great comfort to me,” Teresa said later, “and as a little girl, I wanted to get married in front of it.”

Alden created a small invitation. On the front was a cluster of tiny red flowers. Inside, his descending, hand-lettered script:

Announcing

a

Marriage

Alden

and

Teresa

November the Sixth,

1970, yr. of our Lord

As Alden slipped the folded card to Teresa, neither teen had any idea how public this wedding would eventually be.

* In 2020, Pennsylvania made eighteen the minimum age for marriage.

Heaven Tonight

Friday, November 6, 1970

It was cold and cloudy, and maybe the happiest night of Alden Barrett’s life.

The 1970 Sweater Swing dance was themed “Out in the Country,” which translated to hay bales and plastic flowers bordering the gymnasium floor. Off in one corner, a local band called Five Deep played fake soul and mellow pop. Near the front door, a ballot box announced “Vote for PGHS Sweater King and Queen!”

A little after 8:00 PM, Alden and Teresa paid the three-dollar door fee and entered the PGHS gym. On the far side, a photographer was taking pictures for two dollars each. Alden and Teresa made their way over, waited in line, then got in place for a photo.

It was gothic by way of Lawrence Welk. Against a pleated white curtain and hanging plastic vines, Teresa—with a dark sweater, dark skirt, dark mid-calf boots, and long dark hair—sat on a low stool, her mouth a straight line.

Standing behind Teresa, hands on her shoulders, Alden wore a black dress shirt, pressed and close-fitting, with just the top button open. By Utah standards, his hair (think John Lennon, circa A Hard Day’s Night) was a travesty; by 1970 standards, it was almost square, barely touching his ears.

Teresa smoothed her skirt. Alden raised his chin and cocked his head to the left.

Did they want to smile? Maybe just a little?

Nope. They gave the camera their stoic best.

Click.

It was the only photo the couple ever took.

Alden and Teresa, November 6, 1970 (Courtesy of Pleasant Grove High School; Scott Barrett).

After the dance, Alden and Teresa made their way to Timpanogos Memorial Gardens, then to the marble statue, where they stood for a moment.

The autumn air had a bite, but things were crisp and dry. Alden had a small prayer rug, one of his gestures toward non-Mormon belief. He spread it out on the grass. Then he and Teresa knelt. They held hands and said their wedding vows, a mix of traditional and personal. Even with no minister and no binding law, it felt real enough for eternity.

After a few minutes, they kissed and stood up, then walked hand in hand through the darkness.

There was no honeymoon, even by teenage standards. Free love might have been sweeping the nation, but Utah County remained its own planet: a place where sexual misdeeds, from masturbation to same-sex relations, were literally worse than death.

“Sexual purity is youth’s most precious possession,” official Church doctrine declared. “Better dead and clean than alive and unclean.”

What the Church decreed, its members enforced. Mormon culture was communal and self-policing, and news of misconduct traveled fast. Even a whisper that you’d done it (or anything close to it), and your name would be dirt, forever. Hence the young marriages. Hence the high birth rate. Hence the shame and depression and keeping of secrets.

Alden and Teresa never slept together, but that night, they shared a long kiss on Teresa’s front porch. They were young and perfect, and ready to live forever.

Looking back, Teresa knows the midnight wedding might seem ridiculous, but it didn’t feel that way, and still doesn’t.

Of the young man she married that night, Teresa says simply, “I loved him so much.”

At-Risk

Wednesday, November 11, 1970

In a town of five thousand, nothing stays secret for long.

Just days after the midnight wedding, someone (Teresa never learned who) spilled the news to her parents. Worse, the same person filled them in on Alden’s summertime drug bust.

The Blains saw their daughter making compound mistakes, the kind you couldn’t reverse, and they acted accordingly. They told Teresa, in no uncertain terms, that it was time to drop Alden and start dating other boys.

Teresa was seventeen and still in high school; her parents were the final word. She broke the news to Alden, and tried to spin it for the best. They just need time to calm down. Once they cool off, we’ll be fine.

Alden was heartsick. More than that, he was angry, and vented in his journal:

Teresa’s parents have discovered my past.

They are looking for a prophet—someone to sell Teresa to, someone who will take Teresa to the ‘temple’ and give her eternal happiness. Mormonistic B.S. goals. I’d have nothing against [those goals] if they applied to Teresa, but they don’t apply, and they don’t apply to me, either.

Well, in March, Teresa will turn 18. The summer of my Junior year and my Senior year in high school will tell what we have for each other. But the situation is kinda bad at present.

Thank God for [English teacher] Mrs. Craner and her encouragement, and all the others who have faith in me. I am going to make it.

I love you, Teresa. Keep your cool and we’ll stick it out.

Then, out of nowhere, came another ugly shock.

Thursday, December 17, 1970

Outside the windows of Pleasant Grove High School, the temperature hovered at freezing, and cottony snow was falling.

With winter break just days away, students and teachers alike were feeling the pull of Christmas. Whatever lay ahead, it could wait a few weeks.

Morning classes had barely begun when word spread that Renee Amar Richards, a friend of Alden’s, was in the hospital. No one knew the details, just that Renee had gone to the emergency room and hadn’t come home yet.

Alden went to Jeri Craner and asked to be excused from class; he wanted to visit Renee. Craner gave her permission, and Alden left for the hospital.

When he returned a few hours later, he could barely speak.

Craner asked about Renee.

Alden didn’t answer. He was somewhere else.

Craner sat him down and tried again, bracing for the worst.

“Alden, what happened to Renee?”

Renee, who was sixteen, had slashed her wrists at home, but been found in time. Her parents had committed her to a psych ward, where, as soon as she had the chance, she filled the bathtub, wedged herself under the faucet, and inhaled water until she died. No one knew why.

Two days later, her obituary ran in the Daily Herald:

Renee Amar Richards, 16, died Thursday evening, Dec. 17, at the University Hospital, Salt Lake City, of a short illness.

The argument for whitewashing suicide goes like this: too much attention, especially in the press, can trigger more suicides, creating a chain reaction.

That’s indisputably true. Research confirms that excessive discussion of a suicide (particularly a celebrity suicide) leads other people to kill themselves. In some cases, merely knowing that a friend committed suicide is enough to cause dangerous depression, and that’s without preexisting conditions.^*

But how much discussion is “excessive”? And what happens when no one says anything about a suicide, even when the word is already out?

Whisper streams are a force of nature, and sooner or later, fragments of truth start to circulate, especially in peer groups. For anyone already fighting depression, the lies and cover-ups send a clear message: Don’t talk about it.

As silence deepens, thoughts turn inward, and odds of another death increase.

* The hazards are starkest for at-risk teens, who already kill themselves at a rate four times higher than other adolescents. (Broadly, “at-risk” means those with emotional and/or behavioral problems, as well as those from poor or dysfunctional families.) Things are even worse in Utah, where suicide has long been the number one killer of teenagers. (The expanded picture is scarcely better: Utah’s overall suicide rate—i.e., including all ages—is nearly double the national average.)

Days Full of Night

Monday, December 21, 1970

It was just a few hours until winter solstice, when dark stretched on forever. Outside, Pleasant Grove was cold and frozen.

Earlier that day, Alden had gone to Renee’s funeral, where everyone heard the “short illness” story. There was no release, just bleak, ugly pressure.

Afterward, Alden longed to see Teresa. Just touching her relaxed him; it slowed the chaos and let him breathe. But Teresa’s parents were inflexible, and school was out until January, so he just had to wait.

He opened his journal and began to write.

I’m learning to cope. With Mrs. Craner’s help, I’m learning about Teresa.

(I’m also going to try and write more poetry, lyrics, what have you.)

I’m sitting here wishing for a cigarette

lonely for the girl I met and hoping

that the girl I met might be on the next bus home

The time that I was looking for closed

their doors and we’re no more and so I wait

in silence and alone

Jeri Craner had adopted Alden as a kind of project, steering him toward focus. Everyone knew that Craner could talk to Alden, and they knew that Alden would listen. When Alden seemed to be drifting, Craner would pull him aside for a few words. Sometimes, Teresa would ask Craner to check in, just to make sure he was all right.

“Teresa would sense it, or Alden would say something to me,” remembers Craner, “and I’d say, ‘Alden, promise you’ll call me.’”

Before grief counselors and school therapists and online support groups, this was how it worked. A loose coalition of friends and teachers, all doing their best to keep each other upright.

Now and then, Craner would stop by the Barretts’ house. She’d talk with Doyle and Marcella, then she and Alden would walk or drive through Pleasant Grove, Alden mostly griping, and Craner trying to give some perspective.

It’s not enough to obsess about Teresa, Craner told him. You’ve got to build your own life. Give Teresa some breathing room. Let her figure things out.

If it’s meant to be, she said, it will be. If not, you’ve still got to live.

Teresa, meanwhile, was doing her best to please everyone: her parents, Mrs. Craner, Alden. It was easy to put herself last.

Over the Christmas holidays, she tried to placate her parents by going on a date with someone else. It was no big deal, or shouldn’t have been, but Alden heard about it secondhand. Now, his anger and grief had a partner: jealousy. The hours alone gave him lots of time to imagine all the worst things, and his brain turned in on itself.

Word got back to Teresa, who felt terrible. She should have told Alden about the date herself, before it happened, but things just felt so complicated. Talking with Alden was never casual; everything churned.

A part of her liked it, his balance of joy and anguish. It was beautiful in a strange, dark way. Until it went haywire. Then it just hurt.

The surges had been there since childhood, when Alden would burst into tears or pull at his hair. At sixteen, he could ride out the peaks and valleys, mostly, or even embrace them. They were, in all their shifting power, a kind of constant.

But the extremes were exhausting. They were, in the end, just floods of chemicals—neurotransmitters spraying from a broken dam, then stopping, then starting again.

In time, and properly treated, such things can level off. The shifts become less frequent, less intense. Life is less colorful, but also less blinding.

Alden wasn’t even close to that, and now he was back in a bad, familiar place. A room filled with trip wires and no obvious exit.

Doyle and Marcella talked with Alden’s shrink, but didn’t learn much. Citing privacy, he wouldn’t discuss what Alden said, even in vague terms. He did, however, share his formal diagnosis: Alden wasn’t depressed. Moody, perhaps, but not depressed.

Doyle and Marcella knew better. They had lived with Alden for sixteen years, and seen his bleak moments firsthand. Even now, nearing adulthood, there were nights when he was scared to be alone. He would put it off as long as possible, staying up late and talking with his parents until he finally fell asleep on the living room couch. Other nights, he trembled with anxiety, tears streaming down his face. Why? He didn’t know. He couldn’t say.

Alden isn’t depressed.

Doyle thought about that “diagnosis” on nights when Alden couldn’t sleep or couldn’t stop worrying. The nights when Marcella sat near Alden’s bed, watching over her fitful, anxious son until morning.

Doyle wanted better answers. What about medication?

Alden doesn’t need medication, said the psychiatrist. He isn’t truly depressed.

One evening, Alden was upstairs, talking with his parents. Doyle had to be up early the next day for surgery, and finally called it a night. Alden had that worried look, but no one knew what to do. Doyle and Marcella said goodnight and headed down the hallway.

CRASH!

They turned in time to see a flowerpot smash against the living room wall. Dirt and clay went everywhere, and large, broken chunks hit the floor.

For a moment, no one moved. Then Alden started crying.

Later, when Marcella thought back on it, Alden’s expression might have been the very worst part. Not anger, or even sadness, but fear.

Patience

1970 had ended with Renee’s suicide, and 1971 began with another, different loss. Two of Alden’s closest friends, Kim Lewis and John Lundgren, had proposed to their girlfriends, and were now engaged. Actually engaged, in a way that Alden wasn’t. In a few months, both John and Kim would be married and starting new lives. As for Teresa, she’d be done with school and making her own plans. Alden would be stuck in Pleasant Grove, facing another year at PGHS. Another year of homework and teachers and face-offs over politics. And a final, slow countdown to Vietnam.

On TV, flag-draped coffins were coming back in droves—more than fifty thousand so far. And nobody quite knew why. “The domino theory,” they said. “For peace with honor,” they said. It all just felt like momentum. In two years, that might be Alden coming off a plane, all boxed up and shrouded, or missing a hand, or blind, or in a wheelchair.

And there was no stopping it. He couldn’t run away again, not without Teresa. He didn’t have a draft card to burn, and Pleasant Grove didn’t have a protest movement. The bastards wouldn’t even let him vote until he was twenty-one, and he might be dead by then. So he picked fights at home, at school, anywhere he could. He bitched about cops and religion and the pressure to obey. And nothing changed.

He was holding out for March. Once Teresa turned eighteen, she could make her own decisions, and her parents wouldn’t matter. Then, things would be easier.

Sunday, January 3, 1971

Well I’m just waiting

for the day

We’ll be together, in our

way

side by side friends in

time

I’ll be yours and you’ll

be mine

The clouds will go girl,

we’ll see the sun

and we’ll be warm girl,

when the winter comes.

Right now, you know it seems

a long time to wait

but in almost no time we’ll leave

this city of hate

and we’ll be one, love

just you and me,

I’m just trying to tell you how it’s

going to be (someday.)

Doyle went back to Alden’s psychiatrist. Wasn’t there some kind of medication they could try? Anything at all?

The psychiatrist repeated his verdict: Alden didn’t need it. He wasn’t really depressed.

Wednesday, January 6, 1971

God, you bastard—why me?

Sunday, January 10, 1971

This has been a week of depression; I’m getting over it, though. With my shrink and everything, it has been cool.

My sister is a major cause of the problem. However, with time and space, I’ll get over it.

It is coming about with Teresa, coming back, into an existence of greater feelings and love.

It’s bitchin’.

It was his final entry.

Best of You

Saturday, February 6, 1971

In the frigid dark, more than eleven hundred students from all over Utah converged on the Alpine School District, just a few miles west of Pleasant Grove. Piling out of cars and buses, the teens stretched and yawned, their breath puffing into the cold, dry air.

The boys wore neckties, and the girls wore dresses. Some had briefcases, and others carried big file boxes. A few had boxes and a briefcase.

Coaches did head counts, then everyone made their way into the warm, dry buildings. Once inside, students checked the time, then double-checked their prep: file folders, fresh pens, legal pads, stopwatches.

Off to the bathroom for a quick once-over. Zippers up? Cowlicks down? Stockings smooth and unblemished?

Then came the waiting.

The Alpine School District Invitational Forensic Festival^* was a big deal for Alden. This was his first year as president of Pleasant Grove High’s debate team, and the tiny group—now led by instructor Evelyn Rasmussen—was already punching above its weight. A win at Alpine, against more than fifty other high schools, would be an unmissable statement.

First-round schedules went up, and debaters got the info: opponent, judge’s name, what room to go to, and what side of the issue they were taking. Then everybody dispersed, the banter and friendly tension turning to adrenalized thrum.^*

Debate tournaments use a bracket system, narrowing the field from hundreds, to dozens, to a handful, to one. But debaters rarely know the winner of one round until the next round is posted. If you’re scheduled, you keep going. If you’re not, it means you lost, and you become a spectator, watching and brooding until things wrap.

Every round is more intense and nerve-racking than the last, the crowd swelling with ousted competitors, all of them watching and squinting, waiting to see if you’ll choke. And as with any tournament (e.g., Wimbledon, presidential elections), there’s no glory in finishing second. Beating all but a single competitor doesn’t make you nearly perfect; it makes you a loser.

Through the morning and early afternoon, debaters fell away, vanquished. The defeated could at least relax a little; they no longer had to compete. The triumphant needed to maintain their focus, so they practiced and paced, one eye on the clock.

By 3:00 PM, only a few were still going, and when the final bracket went up, there was Alden’s name. He grabbed his prep and headed to the classroom, where a crowd was already gathering.

Five weeks later, when it no longer mattered, the Pleasant Grove Review would state the simple truth:

At the Alpine Invitational Speech Meet, Alden Barrett went undefeated.

* “Forensics” = debate and other types of competitive speech.

* To my fellow speech nerds: by necessity, I’m focusing on debate and its protocols. No offense to Impromptu, Extemp, and other disciplines.

The Downward Spiral

The sense of elation didn’t last long. One of Teresa’s old boyfriends, a guy named Barton Curtis, had finished a stint in the navy, and was back in Pleasant Grove.

Barton was trouble. He was rowdy, and liked to drink. Six months earlier, he’d rolled his car, putting himself and two passengers in the hospital. What’s more, Barton was the boyfriend connected to Teresa’s suicide attempt.

Back then, her parents hadn’t wanted her dating someone four years older, let alone some kind of hell-raiser, and they’d ordered Teresa to break it off. Her parents had even gotten a court order to keep Barton away from her. For her own good, and all that.

Teresa enjoyed defying her parents, so she’d kept seeing him. Finally, Barton’s mother had called Teresa’s mom to complain. Your daughter is going to land my son in jail. That’s when it all exploded, and Teresa had swallowed a few hundred aspirin.

Now, with Barton back in town, Alden had one more worry, especially when Teresa made noises about seeing him again—mainly to get back at her parents. You don’t want me dating just Alden? Fine. How about this?

And she wasn’t above trying to make Alden jealous, especially if it got him to focus and stop drifting off into Aldenland.

Once, they’d been at a basketball game, and Alden had just wandered away somewhere. No warning, nothing. She glanced over, and he was gone.

I’ll show him, she’d thought.

It was halftime, and two guys were playing Ping-Pong at the back of the gym, so she went over and asked to join in. They were extremely welcoming, and after a while, she looked up. There was Alden, simmering in place, ready to fight.

It was like that a lot. You fought, you made up, you fought, you cried, you swore your undying love, then did it all over again. And if the hurt was bone deep, it still paled in trade. That’s why you kept coming back.

So Alden tried not to fixate on Barton Curtis. Barton, who was older, and who’d been in the navy (a navy fireman, no less), and who had a past with Teresa, and . . .

It all just piled up.

Goodbye

Mid-February 1971

Alden got home from another day at PGHS. The house was quieter than normal.

Marcella was there, and she broke the news. Lately, Duchess had been sleeping more, sometimes ignoring treats or toys. No big surprise—she was nearly fourteen.

That day, it had been worse. She’d had trouble standing up, and there was a nasty lump on her sternum.

It was cancer, said Marcella, and Duchess had been in a lot of pain. Pain that couldn’t be stopped. The vet had put her down.

Alden listened. Duchess was dead, and he hadn’t been there for her.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fucking fair.

The End

Friday, March 12, 1971

As the sun descended, it lit the horizon, and for a moment, Utah Valley was circled in fire. On every side, mountain peaks glowed orange, then faded to an icy, muted violet. The March air sharpened with the coppery smell of a final evening freeze.

Far below, dwarfed by mammoth walls of rock and snow, Utah County looked like an outpost, or a city in a bottle. Pinpoints of light—from porches, restaurants, cars—glittered and swarmed, moving with the slow pulse of winter.

On Center Street in Provo, Alden and Teresa walked toward the Paramount Theatre, a large movie house with fake marble pillars and deep red carpets.

After the stress of the past few weeks, it was a relief. For one thing, Alden and Teresa were on an actual date, their first in quite a while. Forget her ex-boyfriend and all the recent doubts. Teresa was here, holding Alden’s hand, and that said everything, especially tonight.

Teresa’s eighteenth birthday was just a few days away, which meant things would soon be better.

This was still Provo, so it was a double date; Alden and Teresa were joined by Alden’s friend Steve and another girl. At the box office, the two couples bought tickets to Love Story—one of the year’s biggest movies, right behind Fiddler on the Roof and The French Connection.

Inside, they found their seats and had a moment to settle, their eyes adjusting to the dim light. Then, a crackle, and the Paramount logo filled the screen.

Right away, you knew things wouldn’t end well. The music sounded like a funeral parlor’s lobby, all dripping piano and slow violins. If you still had any hope, the movie’s first words erased it:

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” asked Ryan O’Neal as Oliver Barrett, a scruffy Harvard preppy. “That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.”

There was weirdness here. For one thing, that last name: Barrett. Just a coincidence, but still. And Ali McGraw, who played doomed everygirl Jenny Cavilleri, was a dead ringer for Teresa Blain.

For the next hundred minutes, Alden watched an autumnal, Ivy League version of his relationship with Teresa. The boy and girl who long to be together, but are cursed by timing and class-conscious parents. The breakups and reunions, the tearful declarations, the vows to never, ever give up.

“I give you my hand,” says Oliver, quoting Walt Whitman as he slips a ring on Jenny’s finger. “I give you my love more precious than money. I give you myself before preaching or law. Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?”

Then fate steps in and steals everything. Jenny has cancer. There’s no cure, no hope, only a last few days together. Then time runs out.

The final scene is desolation. Oliver sits on the frozen steps of an empty, run-down skating rink, the snow and sky trapping the gloom. The camera pulls back, reducing him to a tiny, immobile speck in the distance. There is no one else. He is cut off, a young man facing the future alone, unable to connect with others. Trapped inside his grief, he sees only the bleak, lifeless present, with no hope or memory of the sun.

The movie pulled every string, took every cheap shot. By the end, you were either crying or heartless—and Alden Barrett had a soft, unprotected heart.

He also had hope. In a little over four days, Teresa would turn eighteen, and she could make her own decisions. She could tell her parents to go to hell—say she’d be with Alden no matter what.

Then, after leaving the theater, Alden and Teresa got into a fight.

The movie hadn’t helped. Everyone’s nerves were raw, emotions at the surface.

Teresa also knew what Alden wouldn’t acknowledge: her birthday wasn’t a magical fix. Alden was only sixteen, with more than a year of high school to go. What were they supposed to do, elope? And live where? On what? It would take time to figure things out.

For that matter, Teresa had another three months at PGHS, which meant at least three more months of living at home, skirmishing with her parents. Adolescence had pushed that relationship into the red: even now, as she entered adulthood, they were still on her case, pressuring her to see other people.

Alden on one side, her parents on the other. And nothing she did would please everyone. So she would split the difference . . . and go out with Barton Curtis. She didn’t love him, so it was no threat to Alden, and it would buy some time while (maybe) teaching her parents to back off.

Talking to Alden after the movie, Teresa tried to explain.

For the rest of her life, she would insist it wasn’t a breakup. “I was crazy about him,” she says. “I loved him, and I’m sure he loved me.”

But Alden heard Barton Curtis and going on a date and see what happens and God knew what else, and felt the ground slide away.

He got upset, then angry. And then they were fighting.

Before long, they were all in Steve’s car—Alden and Teresa, and Steve and his date—and everything was awkward and tense, Alden’s dark silence killing the mood.

They dropped the girls off, then Alden and Steve just drove around for a while.

Steve was seventeen, an age when every day brought new horizons. The world was bigger than Pleasant Grove; the world was out there, waiting to be seen.

But Steve also knew about Alden’s internal weather and how he could vanish inside, walled off by gloom and frustration. Steve tried to coax a response, and it all came pouring out. At sixteen, Alden was exhausted. He’d been arrested, spent time in jail, run away from home, and kicked a drug habit. He’d lost his religion and tried to replace it with a mash of Eastern ideas, but Pleasant Grove was Mormon as mayonnaise, and no one wanted to hear that Hare Krishna bullshit.

He still dreamt of following in his father’s footsteps and working in medicine. Sure, his grades had tanked, but that was only schoolwork—that was not caring. That was booze and dope and everything else he’d finally beaten. But he still loved the science. Science was real; it had answers and evidence. Pleasant Grove had only faith. And faith just wasn’t enough.

Since childhood, Alden’s brain had felt pressured, ready to explode. And he couldn’t always explain it. Sometimes the words jammed together, bringing more frustration. Maybe no one would ever understand. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was life.

Now, above it all, Teresa had dumped him for someone else—he was sure of it. She knew how much he needed her—how she kept him sane, talked him down when his thoughts went wild. They had planned a life together. And now it was all in pieces.

His friends were graduating, getting married, seeing the world. He was stuck in Pleasant Grove, surrounded by kids and do-gooders and cinched-up hypocrites. He couldn’t even have a cup of coffee without risking trouble—all those scolding, wrinkled looks.

Another two years. In this place.

And then what? With shitty grades, it wouldn’t matter how smart he was. Vietnam was full of smart guys, all walking through the same dense, biting jungle. All toe tags and body bags.

Steve did his best, saying what he thought was true. Things get better. Life goes on.

They talked for almost two hours. Heading home that night, Steve hoped he’d said the right things.

“I was only seventeen,” he said thirty years later. “I didn’t have a hell of a lot of wisdom for him other than being a friend.”

And All That Could Have Been

Saturday, March 13, 1971

The morning sky was a wet wool blanket. Rain and ice pelted the Barretts’ house as Alden dialed Teresa’s number.

When she answered, Alden wished her an early happy birthday. It came out flat. He’d already bought her a present. Maybe if she was home later . . .?

The call fizzled out with no plans made. Teresa figured he would come over with the gift and they’d talk things through. Or maybe just talk on the phone again.

At home, Alden stayed in his room with the door closed. His parents had driven to Logan, two hours away, for an NCAA playoff game, so Alden was in charge of his younger siblings, Elaine, nine, and Scott, eleven. Outside, things were wet and mushy, so Elaine and Scott were inside, playing with a few neighbor kids.

Before heading to Logan, Marcella had written a chore list for Alden:

1.Replace burned-out light bulbs

2.Clean up your room

3.Get hair cut

He did the first two, and crossed them off.

The hours ticked by. Teresa waited. Wasn’t Alden coming over, or at least calling back? She grew annoyed, then angry.

When the phone finally rang in late afternoon, sure enough, it was Alden. By this time, Teresa didn’t even want to hear his voice, so she hung up. The phone rang again. She answered and hung up a second time.

Now it was almost like a game.

Okay, thought Teresa, the next time he calls, I’ll really answer.

But he didn’t call back.

At home, Alden slammed down the phone.

“Fucking bitch!”

He left the bedroom. Most of the other kids had gone home, so it was just Scott and Elaine, plus a friend of Elaine’s named Katy.

“Did you feed Pete?” Alden asked. Pete was the family’s new dog, another German shepherd.

No one had fed Pete. Scott and Elaine started fighting about whose job it was. Alden boiled over; he grabbed a fork and threw it at them. It missed, but it got their attention. Scott saw something scary in Alden’s face; he looked frantic and helpless, like a trapped or injured animal.

Alden told Scott and Elaine to go play in their bedrooms. The neighbor girl, Katy, went with Elaine; Scott went to his own room, shut the door, and started to play marbles. A few minutes later, Scott heard the front door close.

Over on Locust Avenue, Teresa waited for Alden to call back. When he didn’t, she finally gave up. Her mother was taking her shopping for a birthday present, so Teresa bundled up and the two of them headed out.

Later, when Teresa got home, she saw something on the front porch—a cardboard box. Inside was a pair of gold earrings, plus some things she’d given to Alden: a small, framed picture of herself and a lock of her hair.

Teresa started to panic. Something was wrong, she could feel it. She wanted to phone Alden, but her parents were nearby, and though she was nearly eighteen, she wasn’t allowed to call boys. They could call her, but she couldn’t call them. And anyway, she didn’t want her parents listening in. So she waited.

Scott was still playing marbles in his bedroom. He heard the front door open and close again: Alden was back. A few minutes later, Alden came to Scott’s room. Scott figured he was still in trouble for fighting with Elaine, so he didn’t say anything or even look up.

Alden just stood there, watching Scott shoot marbles.

After a long while, Alden spoke. “How ya doin’?”

Scott kept his eyes down. “Fine.”

More time passed. Finally, Alden said, “I love you.”

Scott didn’t answer.

Alden said, “Well, goodbye,” and walked away.

After a while, Scott wondered about dinner. His parents had left Alden enough money to take everyone to the Purple Turtle for burgers and fries. Scott figured that wouldn’t happen now, not with all the yelling. Alden had probably left again, anyway. Maybe I’ll take some money from Alden’s room, he thought. It’s what he deserves for being so grouchy.

Scott found a bobby pin and went to work on Alden’s bedroom door. Elaine came out of her own room, followed by her friend Katy.

“What are you doing?” asked Elaine.

Scott said he was picking the lock to Alden’s room.

To Elaine, this seemed like trouble. “Don’t go in there!” she said as Scott opened the door.

Untitled

Dear world, I don’t want to get my hair cut, I don’t want to tend kids, I don’t want to see Teresa at school Monday. I don’t want to do my Biology assignment or English or history or anything. I don’t want to be sad or lonely or depressed anymore, and I don’t want to eat, drink, eliminate, breathe, talk, sleep, move, feel, or love anymore.

Teresa, it’s not your fault. Mom and Dad, it’s not your fault.

I’m not free, I feel ill, and I’m sad, and I’m lonely.

Into the Void

From the doorway, Scott saw Alden in profile. He was slumped in a chair, motionless—his head and face obscured.

Stepping inside, Scott saw that one of Alden’s shoes was off. Then he saw the hole in Alden’s right temple. Later, they’d see the gun, a small silver pistol from Doyle’s home office.

On the carpet, a dark pool was spreading.

Scott heard something behind him.

Elaine.

He turned and yelled, “Don’t come in!” but it was too late. She started screaming.

At a house just down the street, Scott and Elaine’s older brother, Bryan, answered the phone. It was Elaine shouting, “Help us! Alden’s bleeding!”

Bryan dropped the phone and bolted out the front door with his wife, Judy, close behind. Scott met them halfway, yelling, “Hurry up! Alden’s bleeding bad!”

Bryan sprinted to the house and went downstairs.

When he saw Alden, Bryan shouted at Judy to get the kids out of the house, now.

Judy corralled the frantic children, steering them outside and down the sidewalk.

Once they were gone, Bryan picked up the phone.

One hundred twenty miles away, in the ten-thousand-seat Assembly Center arena, Doyle and Marcella Barrett watched BYU battle Utah State for a playoff slot.

A message came over the loudspeaker. Dr. Doyle Barrett, please come to the main office. You have a telephone call.

Doyle excused himself and threaded his way through the surging crowd, down the bleacher stairs, and toward the office.

After getting the kids into her own house, Judy tried to calm them down. As she spoke, her own young sons realized that something terrible had happened, and soon everyone was hysterical. In the chaos, Judy didn’t see Scott slip out the front door, headed back home. He was running, praying, pleading. God, I’ll do anything. Anything. I’ll do anything you want. Please, don’t let Alden die. Please, God, please.

He crept into the house and stood at the top of the stairs. He heard Bryan on the phone, saying that Alden had shot himself.

Scott had a flash. We have to pray, he thought. We have to pray. We have to pray. We have to pray.

He ran back to Bryan and Judy’s house. As sirens wailed and children screamed, Scott tried to get everyone to kneel down. The din was deafening, so he tried to show them what he meant: knees against the floor, hands together, begging for Alden’s life.

At the basketball arena, Doyle came back from the office. He had to shout over the cheering and whistles, and told Marcella they had to leave right away.

“What? Why?”

“We have to go home.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

A long moment between two lives.

“Alden’s been shot.” It was all he knew.

He got Marcella to the car, and they roared toward Highway 89, heading for American Fork Hospital. Doyle drove as fast as he could, but the trip still took ninety minutes.

At Bryan and Judy’s house, everyone tried to pray. Judy left for a moment, then came back. She gathered all the children close to her. She just said, “Alden’s gone.”

The crying had reduced to sniffles, but came back even harder. Except for Scott. He couldn’t explain it, ever, but something went quiet. He felt separate, behind glass. The others sobbed and shook, but Scott just watched from someplace far inside.

Doyle and Marcella arrived at the hospital, where they learned that Alden was already in the morgue.

No need to identify the body. The children had seen it. Bryan had seen it.

There was nothing to do but go home.

As Doyle and Marcella left the hospital, family members converged on the house. Alden’s body might have been gone, but the bloody evidence remained—brain and hair and cooling muck. A couple of the older siblings were downstairs, trying to wipe away the mess.

Doyle’s medical partner, Dale Murdock, had already heard the news, and he arrived to check on everyone, especially the kids.

He gave Scott a sedative. Scott’s body drooped; his heart slowed.

Marcella and Doyle finally made it home. Scott and Elaine ran to their parents, buried themselves in the warm scratch of clothing and familiar smells. They were sobbing again, shaking and silent. Doyle was a big man, with a doctor’s assurance and control. He pulled his children close and promised them: I will never neglect you again. I will spend more time at home. I will be here. I promise. I promise.

Another Rainy Night (Without You)

Teresa was still at home. Alden had never called back, just left the earrings on her porch, plus the picture and lock of hair. She wished her parents would go somewhere, then she could call him.

Someone knocked at the front door.

Was it Alden? This late? Her parents didn’t like him, and this wouldn’t win him any points.

Teresa opened the door. It was the police.

They barraged her with questions. No explanation, just a bunch of things rapid-fire: What had Alden been doing earlier that day? Had the couple fought?

So, she thought, he ran away again.

The police told her Alden was dead. He’d shot himself.

This can’t be happening, thought Teresa, as everything went swimmy.

Then she was in the backyard, where a scream tore out of her. She went to her knees, her voice going raw, shrieking and sobbing.

Then her father was there, reaching down.

He wrapped his arms around her and said, “I wish you’d never met him.”

She wailed and couldn’t speak. Couldn’t form the words.

No, that’s not it . . . not at all.

I loved him.

The Indifference of Heaven

Sunday, March 14, 1971

At the Barrett house, the long, awful night gave way to a glaring, shell-shocked morning.

Outside, the world made love, and danced, and laughed, told jokes, took naps, and worried about insignificant bullshit.

Inside, Alden’s older siblings were trying to scrape his suicide off the bedroom wall. In 1971, there was no one to do that for you. Commercial cleaners wouldn’t come near it, and the only other choice was tearing out the plaster. Blood soaks through everything given time, and dried brain matter might as well be superglue—even chisels won’t take it off. So you do it now. You clean. And gag. And curse. You smell the rich iron, like you’re inside a vitamin bottle. You hate your brother, and yourself. And you keep going.

Alden’s bedroom held the scraps of teenage life: books and clothes and boxes of whatever. The older children sorted quickly, keeping this, discarding that. Nothing absorbent could stay; finding bone splinters in the laundry would make you want to die.

Certain things were set aside for cleaning: family photos, debate trophies, a cherished red Frisbee.

Someone—no one quite remembers who—decided to clean out the desk.

There, inside the top drawer, sat Alden’s journal.

After flipping through the green spiral notebook, the older kids knew Marcella couldn’t handle it. Not now. She had to bury her son in a day or two—there was no need to put his angry, sad thoughts right in front of her. It could wait.

They put the journal away. Later that day, Alden’s psychiatrist arrived, and they let him read through it. He called the journal a “mental autopsy.”

Sunday’s other visitor was Leon Walker, the stake president. Like Catholics, Latter-day Saints divvied up the globe into slices, with a man in charge of each. A stake was a collection of ten or so congregations, usually a few thousand members total. The stake president was in charge of all those souls, and responsible for their spiritual welfare.

Leon Walker had guided families through all kinds of pain and tumult; now he stood in Marcella Barrett’s living room and told her not to grieve for Alden. The boy, said Walker, had clearly been given more than he could handle.

This was not what Marcella expected to hear—not today of all days, with Alden in the morgue and his blood on the wall downstairs. Don’t grieve for him? For my dead child?

Walker kept at it, saying Alden would have died anyway, probably from an illness, or an accident of some kind. It was predestined.

Latter-day Saints get conflicting messages about suicide and salvation. On the one hand, only God can truly judge a person. On the other hand, most roads to suicide are lit by the Devil himself.

“In his role as the destroyer,” says the Church, “Satan can cause illness and death, but only with permission from God. He cannot take people before their time unless they disobey God and thus forfeit their mission.”

But what about mental agony or physical suffering? What about cancer, or ALS, or clinical depression?

Read that passage again: “Satan can cause illness and death, but only with permission from God.”

If there’s anything worse than crippling misery, it might be knowing that God rubber-stamped your torment, but that’s the view of many religions, Christian and otherwise. Whatever the burden, you can bear it, with sufficient faith. But falter in your belief, and God will turn away.

And, though no one had said it out loud quite yet, there was an even darker possibility.

Alden might have been possessed.

Demonic possession wasn’t something the Church enjoyed discussing; it made nonbelievers roll their eyes. But it was part of the dogma. Satan could hijack minds and/or bodies, controlling them for his own vile purposes, and that’s what caused many mental (or even physical) ailments.

It would explain Alden’s misbehavior, the little crimes and boozing. The drug use and the long hair. All those angry questions about God and Church. Who but the Devil would put those ideas in a young man’s head?

Any way you sliced it, Alden Barrett had brought this on himself.

After a while, the stake president said his goodbyes and left, and Marcella stood there, wondering what had just happened.

A Place to Fall Apart

Inside Teresa, physical and emotional pain knotted together—hard, jagged snarls that spasmed in her chest. Sometimes, it felt like her heart would actually tear down the middle, everything spilling out.

On Sunday, she composed herself long enough to call Jeri Craner. Alden’s suicide would be all over school Monday morning, and Teresa didn’t want Mrs. Craner to be ambushed.

Craner was heartbroken. The last time she’d seen Alden was Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Love Story double date. He’d been dejected, and was trying to pick himself up, trying to feel better. He was worried about Teresa’s ex-boyfriend, and wondered if it was serious. I don’t think so, Craner had said. I think he wants to start up again, but I’m not sure about Teresa. I think she’s just trying to show her parents some independence. To show they don’t control her.

Then Alden had said goodbye—just for the weekend, Craner thought—and that was that. She saw him walking away, down the hall toward the outer doors.

Now, in Teresa’s voice, Craner heard the same dour tone.

She’s planning it, Craner thought.

As soon as the call finished, Craner phoned Teresa’s parents, who—amazingly—were planning to leave town for a few days. That was a bad idea, said Craner.

The Blains canceled their trip and kept an eye on Teresa, unsure what to say or do.

Letting You Go

DAILY HERALD

PL. GROVE YOUTH DIES

PLEASANT GROVE—Alden Niel Barrett, 16, 1035 E. 550 S., was found dead of what police said was an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound Saturday evening.^*

He was a member of the LDS Church, living in the Pleasant Grove 8th Ward.

On Saturday, Alden had been alive. On Tuesday, his body was on display. By one estimate, more than nine hundred people attended the viewing—nearly 20 percent of Pleasant Grove’s entire population.

Wednesday morning was the funeral, and it felt like one: damp and cold, just a few degrees above freezing. Still, the church was packed to overflowing, with people standing outside.

Sitting with her parents and hearing all the choked voices, Teresa made a pact with herself. I will never commit suicide. And I will live to be eighty.

Afterward, Alden’s casket descended into the airless, root-filled darkness of Pleasant Grove City Cemetery, and everybody went home.

Later that day, the older kids gave the journal to Marcella. Reading through it, she realized how little she’d actually known about her fitful son. It wasn’t just the poetry or the drawings, but the ideas. In his clumsy teenage way, Alden had been searching for something beyond himself, for another kind of life. Marcella thought about this bright, sensitive boy who had felt so alone. If she’d known all of this, would things be different now?

In 1971, people didn’t talk much about depression, especially in children. (What did children have to be depressed about?) Even worse, no one seemed to listen. Marcella found that out when she talked to Alden’s former psychiatrist. He was all defense, saying he hadn’t realized that Alden was “truly” depressed.

The journal was short, just sixty-seven entries, and she read it over and over. Even the hurtful parts, where Alden lashed out at the Church or the family, were an ugly kind of comfort—her son’s voice, preserved and safe. You could run your finger over the pages and feel the imprint.

As the days passed, her mind circled, homing in on a rough idea. Watching Alden slide toward oblivion, Doyle and Marcella had felt so isolated and trapped. They’d had no one to confide in, no one who had been there. It was like drifting out to sea, alone and unmissed, as darkness swallowed the sun. Maybe Alden’s diary could help someone. A teen or a worried parent. It might even help the Barretts themselves.

Marcella was no writer, but she tried. The words went around in her head, stacking up in piles and drifts until she was exhausted. And wading through Alden’s final months, again and again, was a special kind of hell.

For her own sake, she finally stopped trying, and she stopped reading the journal. If there was an answer, God would show her. In the meantime, she had to keep living.

The notebook went into storage, and for a while, it stayed there.

* How taboo was suicide? Doyle’s medical partner, Dale Murdock (who filled out Alden’s death certificate), had come to the house the night Alden died. He’d seen the gunshot wound and knew the circumstances, but instead of circling “suicide” on the paperwork, he opted for “undetermined.”

To their credit, the Barretts ignored this escape hatch and disclosed the painful truth.

Carry That Weight

In the days after Alden’s funeral, the bright, twisting pain in Teresa’s chest was worse than before, like a heart attack that just kept going.

Someone had given her a sympathy card with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

She went to her knees and prayed for relief.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Something like a ripple went through her, and the physical agony wavered. Her heart was still pounding, but the horrible jags got smaller and smaller until they were gone. And that’s when the grief rushed in, full strength, filling everything to the bursting point. It was pain beyond pain, like nothing she’d ever imagined.

She started crying, and the tears came for hours.

Teresa needed something to cling to—and she needed to get away from her parents.

Even before Alden died, Barton Curtis had been hovering around, hoping to get back together. Teresa didn’t click with Barton—not like she had with Alden—and she told him so, saying point-blank, “I’m not really in love with you.”

Barton didn’t care. She’d learn to love him. Wasn’t that how it usually went?

Four months after Alden’s funeral, Teresa married Barton in a beige-on-beige chapel just eight hundred feet from the site of her midnight wedding. The Daily Herald’s announcement showed her in two-thirds profile, both eyes closed.

Barton’s hell-raising days, it turned out, weren’t quite over. A month after marrying Teresa, he was in court for trying to outrun a police vehicle; eight months later, the state suspended his license for “unlawful operation of a motor vehicle contributing to serious damage.” More charges followed: auto theft, eluding an officer, falsifying a registration.

Teresa stuck it out until 1975, when Barton stopped coming home. To hell with this, she finally thought, and filed for divorce.

Back on her own, she drifted from the Church and started smoking pot. That, and some drinking, made things easier, or at least that’s how it felt.

Now and then she talked with Marcella Barrett. They’d always gotten along, and the calls were helpful reminders. You’re not in this alone. But then they’d say goodbye and return to their own small prisons, with nothing ahead but time.

Ghost of a Chance

There is no right way to process a loved one’s suicide, but there are millions of wrong ways. Some people fall to pieces, which makes as much sense as anything. Others clench down and try to outlast it, the misery lashing like nuclear rain. That’s what therapists aim for: Just make it through a day. Then one more. That can work, sometimes, but not because the rain ever stops. Instead, you just learn to live with less sunshine.

This hideous murk can swallow whole families. Parents face a lifetime of self-hate and second guesses, giant red asterisks at the corner of every good moment. Marriages teeter. Siblings face a doubled risk of suicide. And the only people who truly understand can seem like awful reminders.

On the night of Alden’s suicide, Doyle Barrett had pulled his children close. I will never neglect you, he said. I promise. But now everything was a horrible echo, and that included his family.

He started living in the past, a place where Alden still existed. First, he sketched headstone ideas, something to replace the grave’s small marker. He settled on a slab of charcoal granite, seven hundred pounds and polished smooth, with one of Alden’s poems engraved in big letters. Set into the front was a photo of Alden in a blue suit, his hair neatly combed, looking serious and handsome.

Alden Barrett’s headstone as it looked in 1971. Note: this image was digitally restored to reflect the headstone’s original appearance. (Photo by Rick Emerson; original portrait of Alden Barrett by Doyle Barrett. Poem by Alden Barrett.)

After finishing the headstone, Doyle found other ways to be absent. The easiest was to just keep working. No one expected a doctor to clock out at 5:00 PM, so he pushed it as long as he could. Home was a living morgue, and every moment away was a moment of relief. In time, he began an affair and hoped it wouldn’t get back to Marcella.

Scott and Elaine, still just eleven and nine years old, didn’t have jobs to go to. Their lives were home, school, and home again, breathing the same joyless air day after day after day. Worse, they’d lost their roles in the new, reordered family. Who were they supposed to be now?

One night, as the family knelt in prayer, Doyle asked God to bless the children with some of Alden’s abilities; then he started crying. Scott was frightened, but kept it to himself. If I become like Alden, he thought, will I end up just like him?

Inside, he replayed the final minutes again and again and again. The argument, the footsteps, the goodbye, the body, the screaming. Every time, the pain felt brand new. It never got any softer.

Elaine was an open drawer; there was no hiding her agony. Scott seemed better, but it was all surface. Inside, he was scratching himself to pieces, reliving the screams and the hot-penny taste of panic.

Doyle and Marcella enrolled the kids in therapy, but options were scarce, so they settled on Alden’s former psychiatrist, which didn’t allay Scott’s fears.

They want me to take Alden’s place.

For the next three years, Scott and Elaine had regular sessions with the psychiatrist, but Scott feels little was accomplished. “To this day,” Scott says, “I don’t recall a single word he said. I do, however, recall the feeling of how pointless and unproductive the sessions were.”

So he turned inward, initially fixating on the gunshot. Why hadn’t he heard the sound? It was probably a trick of acoustics, but all the same, it nagged at him. One more thing to chew on, over and over and over.

He read books about addiction and pestered Alden’s friends with questions about death and mental illness. At school, he wrote essays about drug abuse and sobriety. He wanted to understand. He wanted to fix it.

He also wanted to fill Alden’s role: the questioner, the student, the star. When that didn’t get his parents’ attention, he switched to Alden’s other role: the troublemaker. By 1973, Scott—now fourteen years old—was drinking, smoking, skipping school, and disappearing for stretches of time.

Scott’s behavior earned him a three-month stay at Primary Children’s Hospital, supervised by Alden’s former shrink. When that didn’t work, Doyle and Marcella tried a new option.

Provo Canyon School had opened in 1973, and claimed to address behavior issues “on a deeper level than possible in public schools.”

Years later, the truth would come out: Provo Canyon School was barely a “school” at all. It was a prison that ran like a black site.

But those revelations were still in the future. Doyle and Marcella sent Scott to PCS shortly before his fifteenth birthday, and he was there for more than a year.

The rest of the family drifted along, everyone in their own bubble. Doyle went to work, Elaine went to school . . . and Marcella prayed for some daylight.

Religion isn’t big on explanation. The divine plan unfolds, and your job is to follow. Through thickets of pain, you keep on moving, because there is a reason. At least there’d better be a reason, or someone is playing a cosmic joke at your expense. Without a reason, pain is just pain. No lesson, no greater good, no opportunity for triumph. Just dull, stupid hurt that goes on without meaning.

Marcella didn’t believe that, couldn’t believe that. So she kept her faith, praying and waiting for answers.

On August 14, 1977, she finally understood.

DAILY HERALD

GO ASK BEA SPARKS ALL ABOUT ALICE

PROVO—When Bea Sparks of Provo spoke of Alice, tears welled up in her eyes. “While working in drug abuse,” she said, “I came across this little girl, who gave me her diaries. After her death, I prepared them for publication.”