What a suicide in Wyoming reveals about all of us.
By Spyridon Andrews
October 31, 2026
I am sitting in a bar in Sheridan, Wyoming. I can’t help but overhear a conversation about a local suicide that the bartender said was precipitated by a man’s wife leaving him. I am acutely attuned to this because an acquaintance, and now friend, whom I met in a bar in Red Lodge, Montana, told me about the suicide epidemic among men in Montana. It’s not the first time I have heard these kinds of stories. They often involve men going through divorce or separation and sometimes losing not only a marriage but also their daily connection to their children, their friends, and the life they thought they had built.
It’s no secret that mothers are far more likely than fathers to be the primary custodial parent. It’s also no secret that women these days also initiate the majority of divorces, especially among college-educated couples. Taken together, these facts raise a question that no one seems to be asking, or even cares about asking: what happens to a man when he loses his marriage, his home, and the ordinary privilege of seeing his children grow up? What happens to a man when the courts tell him that he can no longer play a role in the upbringing of his children—something that every good man dreams about—because his wife no longer wants to be with him and a family court judge wants to move quickly to get this case off of her docket?
To the average man, the loss of a job is more than losing a job; it is the loss of their sense of striving and honor. We’ve all heard the beautiful ballad from Peter Gabriel, sung by Kate Bush, Don’t Give Up, an inspirational and heart-wrenching song of an unemployed man trying to hang on. But that’s not what I’ve seen in my life. Maybe there are some inspirational stories out there, and I welcome readers to share them with me. But what I have encountered in situations involving friends and family is that a lot of women don’t stick around.
Studies support this. Some of the men’s groups in evangelical churches can and do provide some support, but as far as mainstream Protestant churches are concerned, all they are going to do is hear a lecture on using proper pronouns.
When we look at the extent of the despair in some of these communities, it is not just middle-aged men who lose their jobs. Younger men in these communities often struggle to see a future for themselves. Local officials where I am today, in Sheridan, Wyoming, have expressed concern about suicide, and the community has experimented with gatherings that encourage people to talk openly. Bars like the place I was last night, The Pony, have done what they can to host these meetings and encourage solutions.
Meanwhile, nationally, men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women; divorce and separation are associated with still higher risk for men; and rural suicide mortality exceeds urban mortality. I can’t yet confirm—without more examination—that all of this is linked together. But the statistics are disturbing enough without any exaggeration on my part.
There is nary a mention of much of this in the national political conversation, although it is not far from the minds of the people in these small towns. The Sheridan County coroner has raised concerns about this and spoken out publicly, as suicide deaths this year were reportedly approaching or surpassing the previous year’s total. And Sheridan is not alone in grappling with this problem.
Small-town Americans are the people who have built this country. They built the highways and the railroads, dug for coal, copper, and silver, and even in Montana, they dug for the shiny little objects that women like to wear around their necks. They drilled for oil and grew the crops that put food not only on American dinner tables but also fed the world, especially as it tried to recover from the World Wars. There would be no Chicago, no Detroit, no St. Louis, no Kansas City, no Los Angeles, and no San Francisco if it were not for the courage and bravery of these men.
Meanwhile, in the big city, it boggles the mind that commentators like Maureen Dowd and Ana Navarro actually have jobs—famous for their utterances that men are useless. They can make these numbskull utterances to equally dim audiences, because the men they never see will never know and are too stupid to thank them for building the entire world that they exist in. In the 21st century, these are the kind of people that are considered useful and talented, while the steel workers, former coal miners, and railroad workers have no place.
Blue-state beta males nod in agreement not only because of a nauseating desire for approval in the eyes of their ferociously stupid overlords but because—and this is the real reason—they know that they could never measure up to the courage that the forgotten men who built our country have displayed. These two types of parasites continue to draft off the men who helped build our way of life, while the host dies and fades from memory.
My time in the American West has revealed a great many positives, but it has also exposed problems at the core of our culture. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and writer, understood how slavery attacked the family and denied people the security of belonging. Tocqueville identified a different danger in democracy: individualism, the temptation to withdraw into a small private circle and abandon the larger community. He saw the antidote in churches, families, voluntary associations, and habits of mutual obligation. Without these, liberty might leave us not connected and flourishing, but isolated and alone.
Well, look around. The family is now fragile at best, as we congratulate ourselves on our liberation from old obligations. Forget the fact that many marriages end. What about the families that were never formed? Just the scale of abortion since 1973 reflects how contested the place of children and family has become in American life. In states like Massachusetts, the legal profession can seem more concerned with abstract claims of autonomy than with the children whose lives are at stake. The millions of children never born, the millions of families never formed, and children who never grew up and, in turn, never had their own children only point our country toward demise. So, I do not think it at all surprising that we have become remarkably casual about what happens to the people left behind when the household dissolves. We just don’t seem to care about anything other than what we want as individuals right now.
Once you leave the comfort of the suburbs or the fashionable neighborhoods of the city, you see that communities across America are filled with men seeking purpose and finding too little of it. The industries that once gave entire towns a reason to exist—mining, railroads, farming, manufacturing—have contracted or changed into caricatures. The means to support a family is disappearing at the very moment the family itself is coming apart. For a man who has organized his life around being useful to other people, this is a devastating combination.
Everywhere else, the places where men once congregated, spent time, and supported one another are disappearing before our eyes. The town squares, bars, bowling leagues, churches, and social clubs have lost ground to a world of digital acquaintances and social media tribes that bear little relationship to the democratic communities necessary for a functioning republic. Our politicians, unsurprisingly, are unconcerned. After all, they see their constituents not as neighbors in living communities but as demographic slices, donor lists, lobbyists, and interest groups. Yesterday’s rural and union voters are remembered only when somebody needs a photograph in a hard hat.
But it doesn’t make sense to end on a note about the pathetic nature of Washington. Jefferson thought it should never have been built, and he was probably correct. Washington is not going to walk into a bar in Sheridan, sit down beside a man who has lost his job and his family, and ask how he is doing. But a neighbor can. A pastor should; that’s what they are there for. An old friend from the bowling league or the softball team could. A bartender might—they were always better at diagnosing problems than some fool with a master’s degree. That is precisely why the disappearance of these ordinary human connections matters so much and why we cannot let them disappear.
Tocqueville understood something about Americans that we seem determined to forget. Our democracy did not work simply because we had a Constitution, elections, and a long list of rights. It worked because Americans formed churches, clubs, associations, and local institutions, and because they took responsibility for things that did not directly concern them. They did not wait for somebody in Washington to send a program, a grant, or a social worker. They organized themselves. And in doing so, they learned how to be free together rather than merely alone.
So what should we do? For starters, we might stop treating the collapse of a marriage or the disappearance of a job as somebody else’s private problem. It’s our problem. We can demand that family courts take a father’s continuing place in his children’s lives seriously while also protecting children and parents from genuine abuse.
We can rebuild apprenticeships and local opportunities for men whose talents do not require a college degree. The college degree requirement, an artifact of the Vietnam draft deferment years, has outlived its usefulness, is no longer worth its expense, and has become a finishing school for rich young kids, mostly girls, to learn Marxist nonsense.
Churches might consider spending less time chasing the latest cultural fashion and more time finding out which of their neighbors is sitting at home with nobody to talk to. And the rest of us could revive the bowling leagues, volunteer fire departments, veterans’ groups, fraternal organizations, and civic clubs that once gave men a place to belong. None of this is glamorous. That is rather the point.
We should also be willing to ask a man how he is doing and then stick around long enough to hear the answer. When somebody loses his job, invite him over. When a father stops showing up at church or the local bar, find out why. When a friend is going through a divorce, do not simply choose sides and disappear him from your life. And when a man tells you he sees no way forward, take him seriously and help him. These are small acts, but communities are built out of small acts repeated over generations. A government program cannot substitute for them, and early Americans knew that.
Tocqueville feared that isolated citizens, absorbed in their own private lives and no longer accustomed to helping one another, would eventually surrender their responsibilities to a vast, protective government. He described a form of democratic despotism that would not necessarily arrive with soldiers and chains. It would arrive with citizens who had forgotten how to act together, leaving the state to manage their lives while they quietly withdrew from one another. We would retain the outward forms of freedom but lose the habits that made freedom possible. The reason we still read him today is that he got an awful lot of things right.
I keep thinking about the conversation I overheard in that Sheridan bar. I do not know the full story of the man who died, and why he took his life. But as I spent more time researching what was happening here in Sheridan, in Montana and in isolated communities all over America, I know enough to ask other questions. I know enough to wonder how many people saw him coming apart, how many places he had left to turn, and whether anybody understood how much he had lost. I wonder if we still know how to be Americans. The real measure of a community is not how friendly it is to a stranger passing through. It is whether it knows what to do when one of its own begins to disappear.
We are not going to save these men with another election slogan, or solve this problem with another lecture about masculinity. We might begin by remembering that these faceless working men are important, that their work is important, that their children need them, and that the rest of us owe them something more than an occasional thank-you on Labor Day.
Tocqueville warned us what happens when a people cease to associate, cease to care, and finally cease to govern themselves. The lonely man at the end of the bar is not merely a tragedy in Sheridan, Wyoming. He is a warning about the country we are becoming. And if we are unwilling to do something for him, we will soon discover that there is nobody left to do something for us.
SPYRIDON ANDREWS American Greatness
