While Saturday's turnout for the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk in Morenci was lower than normal this year, multiple generations gathered to commemorate loved ones who'd taken their own lives.
Walkers begin the 2.1-mile loop through Morenci to complete the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk Saturday. Denogean took his life nine years ago and was a senior in high school at the time.
James Rawson spoke briefly at the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk Saturday in Morenci. He said he lost a brother-in-law, Kyle Sarrett, and brother to suicide.
While Saturday's turnout for the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk in Morenci was lower than normal this year, multiple generations gathered to commemorate loved ones who'd taken their own lives.
PHOTO LAURA JEAN SCHNEIDER/COPPER ERA
This walker's shirt explains the meaning of the semicolon logo chosen to symbolize the Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk.
PHOTO LAURA JEAN SCHNEIDER/COPPER ERA
Walkers begin the 2.1-mile loop through Morenci to complete the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk Saturday. Denogean took his life nine years ago and was a senior in high school at the time.
PHOTO LAURA JEAN SCHNEIDER/COPPER ERA
James Rawson spoke briefly at the sixth annual Coty Denogean Memorial Suicide Awareness Walk Saturday in Morenci. He said he lost a brother-in-law, Kyle Sarrett, and brother to suicide.
Nine years ago, Coty Denogean took his life. An annual suicide awareness walk in Morenci is aimed at preventing anyone else from doing the same.
Low clouds of colorful helium balloons bobbed at the Morenci High School football field Saturday morning, where a crowd gathered around 9 a.m. to commemorate Denogean's death for the sixth consecutive year. Most people were dressed in black long sleeved shirts and hoodies bearing semicolons, the symbol his uncle and aunt, Ron and Theresa Campbell, chose years ago as a visual reminder to pause before making a life-altering choice.
Multiple folks took turns speaking, including Theresa Campbell, who reminded a sober crowd about the importance self-acceptance, without having to be perfect. While the walkers gathered to complete a 2.1-mile memorial walk were smaller in number than years past, she said everyone would be there for each other if anyone needed help.
Campbell addressed the stigma attached to having a family member who died by suicide.
“We’re not embarrassed; we’re not ashamed,” she said. “That’s all it was, was a choice. That’s not who they were.”
Then, she challenged the group.
“Probably some of you have not said their names in a long time, because of the stigma. We’re not going to do that,” she said. “We’re going to say their names.”
Her brother — and Coty’s father — Bear Denogean, walked through the crowd with a microphone.
Names, mostly of men, were spoken quietly into the chilly morning.
“I love to hear my son’s name said. I do,” Denogean said, weaving through the crowd, encouraging folks to speak up. But it seemed paper hearts around walker’s necks and and names Sharpied on balloons were sometimes the closest folks could get to doing so.
A tall man in sunglasses and a black baseball hat suddenly walked up to the makeshift podium, a little girl bundled in fluffy pink perched on his hip. Around his neck was a blue paper heart.
His name was James Rawson, he said. He never got to meet his brother-in-law, one of the names that was said aloud. His daughter, he said, looking at the little girl in pink, was named Kylie in honor of her uncle, Kyle Sarrett.
“I lost my brother as well,” Rawson said with emotion. “I have never really accepted it.
"Even though there’s death, there’s life," he continued. "And God blessed us with this little girl and she looks just like him and she looks at his pictures, and she knows exactly who he is even though she’s never met him. And I think she talks to him sometimes, because she talks to somebody.”
Brad Paisley’s song “When I Get Where I’m Going” played as balloons were released. There were hugs, there were tears. Walkers trickled out the gate and began the short route through town.
Clifton and Morenci firefighters surrounded a colossal grill, flipping hamburgers and assembling sandwiches in foil for lunch after the walk.
Raquel Sarrett, Kyle’s mother, stood with her daughters Stevie and Scottie near their vehicle and recounted memories of her son.
He, too, was a Morenci High student, a wrestler who took his life in 2018. “He’d just barely graduated,” she said.
She remarked on the effect Kyle’s death had on his friends and fellow students.
“It just never leaves your mind,” she said.
Bear Denogean and his wife Jen stood in the parking lot, watching the first walkers return.
The walk has an intentional structure, Denogean said, beginning with an emotionally difficult activity like saying the names of family and loved ones lost to suicide, followed with physical activity.
The final step of eating together after walking eliminates the fight-or-flight mode caused by revisited trauma, he said, as the body’s blood returns to the stomach to digest.
At the end of the event, people would be leaving with smiles on their faces, he added.
