Fischer has since talked to countless other parents whose children — young and adult — have taken their own lives.

They were different lives, different demons, different circumstances. But the shock is often the same.

“Most parents don’t know the signs. If they did, they wouldn’t know what to say. Honestly, most parents just hope and pray it goes away,” he said.

In the Pobuda’s home in Kingsley, south of Traverse City, Shae’s suicide note remains in a manilla police envelope, sealed with red tape marked “evidence.”

One day, Jamie Pobuda and her husband, Gary, will read their granddaughter’s note, they told Bridge. But not now. Not yet.

They said they had never known the teen as anything more than a quiet, sweet and respectful kid who who dreamed of college and most recently wanted to learn to cook.

In dark, personal spaces, though, Shae felt betrayed by her own parents who were no longer her in life. It was a depth of sadness and anger exposed only in a journal her grandmother found after the girl’s death. Inside were curse-strewn words about betrayal and grief, Jamie Pobuda said.

“It was such angry stuff in there. She never even swore,” Pobuda said. “She was, in my mind, still my little girl.”

What drives suicidal acts

The concentric rings around suicide are with different versions of the same question: Why?

Whatever the age, a biological psychiatric disorder sometimes is at play. Other times, it’s situational depression, layered upon previous trauma, a lack of support, and terrible timing. Alcohol and drugs drive up risk, experts say.

And in the moment of crisis, there is access to lethal means.

“When people take their lives, they feel they’re trapped, that the pain will never get better,” said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “They’re not even thinking about taking their own lives. They just want the pain to stop.”

But why the surge in the past 10 years?

“You have to look at the time frame and you have to ask yourself ‘What is largely different and affected so many people?’” said Eric Herman, a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety and mood disorders at Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit.

Opioids? A recession? Certainly both have shredded families across the state.

Gun violence in schools and on streets? Climate change? For many now, those are ever-present threats.

Herman, though, hears about something else more often among the adolescents and teens he counsels: They take no time to power off.