Filed by Ben Allen in Feature.
September 26, 2012
 

Click here to download audio

The suicide of Cade Poulos is sadly not the only one in north central Oklahoma in the last couple years. Ty Field killed himself on May 13th, 2010, using a gun in his parent’s bedroom. Ty’s parents Kirk and Lauren say Ty was bullied, Cade’s friends echo that on his facebook page. On Wednesday, I talked with Kirk about his journey from May 2010 until now. Click above to hear the full interview.

What it was like:

“It’s been a nightmare. It’s been a nightmare every day since Ty left. There’s hardly any words to describe it. You’re not supposed to bury your own children…There’s no way to describe how it affects a family and how it affects a community.”

What he remembers about that day: 

“Very little. Very little about the first two or three days. Laura and I were in shock, we were in a fog. We were hoping it was just a bad dream, a nightmare that we’d wake up from. We kept expecting for Ty to open the door and walk through it at any second.”

How do you move forward?

“Everybody has their own approach. Some families don’t move forward from it, ever. We’ve seen some parents that have wanted so badly to be back with their own children that they have taken their own lives. That’s not the answer. It’s never the answer. What Laura and I have chosen to do is to try to stop this from happening to another family, another mom and another dad, another baby. So we’ve given everything we’ve got.”

Message to the parents:

“We love you. We support you. We will do anything and everything we can to help make this stop so that another family doesn’t face the nightmare that these people and my wife and I live every single day.”

And just one note: Stillwater Public Schools say they have no record of bullying of Cade Poulos, just as Perkins-Tryon administrators said there was no record of bullying at school.