WINSLOW -- The headline in the local paper read "City boy inhales fumes, takes life."

The boy was Teresa Rael's son, just 13 at the time.

"As a mother it made me very angry," Rael said of the headline 13 years ago. "I took it personally. I took it as extreme disrespect for me and my family."

But Rael, a Winslow resident, is an educator, too, and that side of her eventually surfaced from her anguish and took a different perspective on the story.

"My logical, rational self could step out of my mother self and say 'This really sucks, but I'm glad (the newspaper) did it, because somebody will read this story and realize there is stuff in their home that they don't think about that can kill."

In Rael's case, the deadly weapon happened to be a can of spray paint.

Today Rael spreads her own awareness. A year ago she participated in the Out of the Darkness community walk in Bangor, a fundraising event sponsored by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Rael will walk again on Saturday, Oct. 18, in an Out of the Darkness fundraiser in Waterville.

The 3-mile route she plans to complete that day is nothing compared to the journey she has taken since that tragic day in 1995.

To deal with the devastation, Rael dedicated herself to understanding the forces that led to her son's death. She quit her job as a full-time instructor at Kennebec Valley Community College and enrolled at Vermont College of Norwich University and designed her own graduate degree program on suicide, eventually earning a master's in suicidology.

She refers to her graduate work as "three years of self-induced primal scream therapy."

Rhoda Freeman can relate to that. The Maine director for American Foundation for Suicide Prevention went through her own primal scream therapy after losing her 24-year-old son to suicide eight years ago.

She first became a volunteer and more recently an employee for the national, not-for-profit group.

Freeman said she and her husband decided to be open about their son's death from the beginning.

"You never get over it," she said, "but you have to live. What good does it do to sit there being depressed about it for the rest of your life?"

Maine's suicide rate in 2005 (the latest data) was 13.2 per 100,000, or 18th in the nation, according to the Maine Youth Suicide Prevention Program.

Freeman said the foundation's hope is that it can bring down those numbers by creating awareness and spreading education on the subject.

Rael said being a parent is a difficult job, one that nobody does with perfection. But a key principle to follow, she said, is to separate the child from the child's behavior.

"You can hate the behavior," she said, "but never the child."

In the respect, Rael is grateful for one of the last conversations she had with her son 13 years ago.

"In all the nightmare of that day and the aftermath of that day," she said, "one thing that has given me great comfort is that one of the last things my son and I said to each other was 'I love you.'"

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com