"America’s Missing Men"
The stories beyond the rise of untimely deaths.
by Amber Lapp
"The window had no curtains, no blinds. Though the back of a big screen TV obscured a portion of the view into the living quarters of the duplex. Passing by I’d often see a young man on a couch, facing the TV, controller in hands, inexplicably wearing a medical mask over his mouth and nose; inexplicably, I say, because he was alone. I’d only ever seen him leave to take the trash out. He’d walk with stiff and jagged gestures, with the unsteadiness of old age though he looked to be in his 40s. Neighbors didn’t judge; he was a veteran and Lord knows what he’d seen. Neighbors did wonder. And pieced together a life story, brief as was his time on our street before he moved onto somewhere else.
Thinking about him, I realized that there is something like a touch of the tragic about many of the lives of the young men on my street in a small town in southwestern Ohio. It’s a homey town in a fast-developing and affluent county, not far from Cincinnati, with a good school district, close to opportunity in many ways. But there’s something quietly amiss, something about the men. I think of them as good men - often sensitive, often kind. But it’s like the train left and they are still here waiting.
***
Logan’s girlfriend affectionately says that he’s like a big kid. The joy he takes in celebrating every holiday makes him our kids’ favorite neighbor. He stockpiles fireworks for months in anticipation of the Fourth of July, and the day after Halloween he’s playing Christmas music while setting up Santa yard inflatables. On the first big snow of the year he texted us to say not to worry about shoveling - he was already up doing the rounds with his snow blower, laughing like an elf and chucking the occasional snowball out of sheer delight.
He’d been talking for weeks about the giant Frosty blow-up he’d found at the Flea Market - just $200, in need of a patch, but no problem that couldn’t be solved with duct tape. It would be taller than our houses, he said. The kids would love it. And so I wasn’t surprised one cold night to see him in the dark, supporting a towering white snow man.
“Come here!” he called, I presumed eager to show it off. But though his voice conformed to its regular quick and cheerful cadence, the content of his words didn’t line up. He was slurring a bit, tearing up a bit. I’d never seen him like this, and it caught me off guard.
I pieced together that he’d been laid off from his job at the factory. He’d had an argument with his girlfriend. He worried he’d need to take a job that involved traveling for months at a time (a lineman did he say? Or was it something with storm cleanup?) He loved her, he’d waited so long to find her—he was 30, by God - and he’d wanted to get a place in the country, have kids, live the good life. He loved the Amish, he said, indulging in a tangent about their baked goods, apple pies.
But seriously, he really wanted to know - why couldn’t his life be more like theirs? What was going on in this day and age? It reminded me of all the times I’d heard him blasting
Oliver Anthony from the cab of his white pickup: “Livin’ in the new world with an old soul…”
I was moved. I was also concerned that perhaps Logan was uncomfortable. Because since we had begun talking he had not once moved his left arm, which was holding a long piece of rope that was somehow supporting Frosty, who was indeed higher than our houses. “I can’t figure out a way to keep him propped up,” Logan said. He was going to have to work on it.
***
At 7:32 a.m. on a Thursday morning in February, there’s a knock on my door. My neighbor has just gotten home from her night shift at the nursing home, and she’s going to make a loaf of banana bread from old brown bananas in the back of their freezer because food stamps ran out, so they’ve got to make things stretch for another four days. She is going to make the bread, get her nephew on the school bus, and then try to sleep for a few hours before her next class at the community college. Can she have a teaspoon of baking soda?
In addition to her nephew, she also lives with her mother and her brother, who is in his 30s and works for Amazon. In a particularly annoying case of bad timing, in addition to the food stamps running out, her brother was suspended for running a red light in the Amazon truck and will be unable to work (or get paid) for the next four days.
The young man across the street also transports goods for a living, also lives with his parents, and has part-time custody of his kids. He’s been off work temporarily for a shoulder injury that needed surgery. “Should have gotten workman’s comp,” he says, “but waited too long to file.” With his arm in a sling, he helps his kids ride around on the driveway on trikes and Little Tikes.
***
Sue’s baby (brown-eyed and cherub-cheeked) grew into a boy (tousled hair and expression of mischief and promise). She remembers him as a sensitive child. The kind of boy who’d cry at a sad movie. As a man, he’d had his loves and he’d had his troubles - with pain, with drugs, with the law. He sometimes worked in roofing and water remediation. When he was well, he built his world around his niece, constructing promises no one was sure he’d be able to keep.
Sue misses him. She’s made it her mission to pay attention to other people. While at work passing samples at the grocery store, she’s had some life-saving conversations powerful enough to give you goosebumps. She says that even if she can save just one person’s life, it’ll help her to feel like Rickey’s death was not in vain.
On Facebook, before he took his life, he posted Skippy’s
“Suicide Letter” as a goodbye note.
"Speeding down the freeway, I been driving way too fast.
Swervin’ ’round the corner and I’m hoping that I crash.
Baby, I don’t want you to be sad when I’m gone, no, yeah.
This is just a letter to my family and my fans
I guess I ain’t happy with the person that I am."
“To think of what he must have been going through,” Sue says. “We need to get the word out.” In the same month that Sue lost her son, the American Institute for Boys and Men published
research on “unnatural male deaths.”
Since 2001, the fatal injury rate for men has risen from approximately 80 per 100,000 to almost 127 in 2022, an increase of 59%. Throughout this period, the male injury death rate has remained consistently around two-and-a-half times higher than women’s. There has been a particularly notable increase in the magnitude of fatal injuries for men since 2014, and a large jump of 23% since 2019 (compared to 2022).
The report goes on to note that the magnitude of this loss is “higher than the death toll among U.S. soldiers in World War II.” Ohio, in particular,
ranks third in the nation for “deaths of despair” - that is, deaths related to suicide, drugs, or alcohol.
When Rickey lived across the street from me, we’d wave at each other from time to time. I remember once he grimaced and told me of a particularly acute headache. But I like to think of him as the little boy I see in the picture on his mom’s Facebook page: sitting in a quilted rocker on his mamaw’s lap, lit alive by her love, his look of wide-mouthed glee too brilliant for this broken world. Sometimes, somehow, the look of a child evades the wearing of the world. At the cemetery when they put him in the snow-covered ground, Sue’s cousin turned to her and said, “He’s back in Mamaw’s arms.”
***
In the older section of this cemetery on the hill at the edge of town there are a disproportionate number of small headstones bedecked by cherubs or lambs. Children and babies, sometimes right beside the graves of the young women who were their mothers. The newer section of plots from the last couple decades tells a different story - of the untimely deaths of young men. Photographs of their faces look on from stone; there are decals of cars and fishing poles, cans of Bud Light and sports pennants.
One among them is Mark, whom I first met in 2010 and who died of an overdose after a relapse on Father’s Day in 2017 at the age of 35. During his life Mark - who was intelligent, attractive, and well-loved by friends who remember him for his wisdom and prescient ability to speak into their lives - contended with a strong sense of failure: failed educational and career plans, failed relationships, the thorn of being addiction-prone.
One Friday night, a few years before his death, Mark sat at his parents’ house, where he lived, playing cards by himself and ruminating. “When my dad was my age, I was already six years old. You know what I’m saying? It’s crazy to think about that.” He thought about that for an hour that night as he dealt and redealt hands to himself. I let so much time slip away. He added, with conviction, “That’s why it’s time to shit or get off the pot. That’s why I know I need help.”
Mark’s life lacked the exterior constraints of regular work, a wife, and kids. But like other young men, he eventually found that freedom stifling. Indeed, the absence of a committed partnership became one of the more painful aspects of his life. As sociologist Brad Wilcox recently
noted, “Recent research from Gallup and the University of Chicago, for instance, suggests that the nation’s retreat from marriage is one of the most important factors driving deaths of despair up and happiness down across America.”
Though his friends teased him for being “celibate,” Mark was tired of short-term relationships and decided to only date someone if he thought he might marry them. Marriage to him was when you “find the one that makes you be the person that you know you can be.” To be ready for that he told himself, “‘Stop being a retard, Mark. Stop being an idiot…. Focus on yourself, get your life in order, and it’ll come to you.’”
Mark discerned the need to shift from chasing highs to chasing demons - common language used to describe what it is to vanquish the brew of self-doubt, apathy, and languishing, sometimes rooted in adverse childhood experiences or other trauma. As another young man from the same town as Mark once told my husband David, “I’m battlin’ demons all the time. Everybody does.” (The idea was there, too, in the suicide song of Sue’s son: “I’ve been feeling worthless, baby…. The demons that I fight have been coming for my soul.”)
Another common expression Mark used was “doing me” - which sounds selfish, but is more synonymous with self-mastery and finding peace than it is with self-indulgence. As in, forging the basic sense of self and character that men like Mark feel they never formed in the first place—a process that
ideally happens in childhood, in the experience of family life, but which might be shortchanged in a world of relational instability and moral upheaval. Mark estimated that he watched his parents break up and get back together 25 times during his childhood. “People’s morals aren’t the same” and “people aren’t brought up the way they used to be brought up,” he observed.
It was difficult for Mark to imagine getting married in his current state. He wouldn’t “feel good enough” for a woman until things changed, he said. “I’m without a license, I have two cars and can’t drive either of them [because of DUIs], I live at home with my parents.” He talked about going back to school, getting steady work, and being able to live on his own and pay the bills.
For years, he ping-ponged between motivation - bodybuilding, runs in the woods, hustling for odd jobs, setting his alarm for church on Sunday mornings - and discouragement. He longed for “when I have myself back to where I know I should be.” There was struggle, there was progress. “I don’t know how to put it,” Mark paused and thought a moment before finding the words. “We get brighter day by day.” He’d been doing pretty good before he relapsed.
Social commentators today tend to emphasize personal and political rights and freedoms, and to analyze our times through that lens. But our current moment makes little sense without first understanding the unsettled selves of so many young people today - and the deep and underlying yearning for interior freedom.
For some of the working-class young men I know, there is a political apathy - a disengagement from and cynicism about public life - until this more basic freedom is better secured. “I don’t vote,” Logan tells me, in the same conversation in which he tells me that his license was recently suspended. (“I got in trouble” - he doesn’t specify why, though I can imagine.) His dad is a “big union guy” who follows the news closely; Logan has other things to worry about.
***
The hopeful thing is that we all know men who have found this peace. Because despite the serious and worrying trendlines, it’s still true that most men are not dying deaths of despair; most men are working, hanging with friends, marrying, raising kids, and, increasingly,
finding religion. And in their hard-earned wisdom lies the path forward.
Like Rob, the man my husband once met in a bar, who went from cheating on his girlfriend and drinking too much to owning his own successful roofing company, married now for almost two decades to his high school sweetheart and raising their four boys - the oldest of whom is about to graduate from high school. Or Alex, whose parents divorced and whose dad went to prison by the time he was four, and who contemplated suicide in the lonely high school years. Or for that matter, Chris Lunsford, better known by his stage name
Oliver Anthony, who dropped out of high school, worked in manufacturing, and struggled with drinking and mental health issues before a
song recorded in the woods, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” went viral, making him the first person ever to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 without any prior chart history. In a recent
speech at ARC, he revealed his life’s new mission: to spark
revival in rural America one small town at a time.
A comment on the YouTube link of that ARC talk struck me: a man made the point that we talk about politics and the economy, but we forget about peace. He was referring to inner peace and went on to describe a book he once read that changed his life by helping him reframe his mindset.
In each of these instances, the alchemy that led to change is as unique as each of these individual lives. It is not formulaic, though it does seem patterned. For Rob, Alex, and others I’ve spoken with since I first began interviewing working-class young adults in 2010, factors in the mix include marriage, mentorship, mindset, meaningful work (or at least a way to find purpose in the work that must be endured).
There is often also an account of a momentous waking-up experience - reminiscent of conversion - in which a keen sense of one’s own
powerlessness paradoxically brings with it the courage to hope that another life is possible. Is the silver lining of reaching rock bottom that you reach out for renewal?
It’s these conversion stories that are especially unique in their vivid particularity - in that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction way. For Rob, it came after his mom died unexpectedly. He started to ask himself, “What [am I] going to leave behind for my children, and what kind of position am I going to leave for them when I’m dead and gone?” For
Alex, it came in a moment on a West Virginia mountain when time seemed to stand still, and also in another moment alongside the Ohio River when he encountered a statue of Cincinnatus and had an epiphany: “All men band together, we’re way the hell stronger than we are individually.”
Electrician and writer Skyler Adleta (and friend of mine)
writes about the unexpected influence of reading Lewis and Tolkien behind a shed in a graveyard across the street from his high school - during a time of life when he was homeless and living in his car. “What followed can only be described as the bloom of graceful relief, like a man coming up for air after swimming upward from the darkest depths of the sea. The weight of the ocean lifted from my chest, and I breathed in a new reality.” He also
writes of listening to the Hamilton soundtrack - “I still remember the moment Alexander Hamilton woke me up”- while working in a near-120 degree pigment factory. “I listened to the musical three times in a row during that twelve-hour shift.” Something that had been lost - his drive, his faith in the American dream - was reignited.
I’d like to tell more of these stories. I’d like to read others telling them. Of course, lasting conversion doesn’t happen in a moment. And keeping the courage to maintain hope is work that’s never done. It’s work that takes immense personal resolve but must also be sustained by a web of relationships and institutions. Taking up their own agency is the task before young men today; figuring out how to support them as they do that is the task before the rest of us.
***
I want to pay my respects - to Rickey, to Mark, to all the missing men. So I drive up the hill to the cemetery, tires scraping into the gravel lot. Park, walk, pray. I’ve brought along Viktor Frankl’s "Man’s Search for Meaning", which I picked up after two different young male friends told me of its profound impact on their lives. I sit on a black bench and read. The words are alive, meant for this moment.
Frankl is describing a particularly bad day in the concentration camp. Setting the scene, Frankl remembers “a little talk” that the senior block warden gave “about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness or of suicide. But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths: giving up hope. He maintained that there should be some way of preventing possible future victims from reaching this extreme state.” The warden asked Frankl, a psychiatrist by profession before he had been taken to Auschwitz, to give some words of encouragement to his fellow prisoners:
Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying…. They must not lose hope but should keep courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and meaning.
I pause to think on this. The wind is strong today, and the sun is glaring. A flag whips and tatters, drumming an anxious beat on the metal pole. Blades of grass flatten and stand.
The mention of suffering reminds me of earlier passages. “His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden,” Frankl writes. “Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement.” These thoughts “kept us from despair.”
Is this opportunity present even in a landscape shifting under the erosion of norms, of marriage, of social trust? An era that for the working class has been marked by stagnant wages and rising costs, bitter polarization between the sexes, the rapid technological change of the digital era, an abundance of fentanyl, and a scarcity of meaning?
So many of the young men on my street, in this country, have been baptized into suffering; they wait to be catechized by it. One of suffering’s lessons is this: “that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Frankl continues, “It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
This is not bootstraps-ism; neither is it victimhood. It is a paradoxical surrender, an acknowledgement of weakness and powerlessness in the face of great difficulty, that creates the space for hope to rush in. The stone is rolled away; one stands witness to the resurrection of his own agency.
I walk one more time to Rickey’s grave, which is unmarked except for a small handmade wooden cross. It is bound by wire to his great-grandmother’s headstone. Handwritten in ink is the date he entered this world and the date he left it. And the words, “Until We Meet Again.”"
o
Hat tip to "The Burning Platform" for this material.
