Safety & Worker Wellbeing

Living with Suicide Loss

A Personal Story from Inside the Glass Industry

July 30, 2026

By: Melanie Dettmer

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My brother Trevor was 17 when he died by suicide in 2006. I was 23 and three years into my career in the glass and glazing industry. I want to tell you what that was like, not because my story is unusual, but because I know it isn't. And I think the people who need to hear that most are the ones reading this column.

There is no version of this where I tell you I saw it coming. I didn't. There is no version where I say I knew the signs. I was his big sister. I knew he was funny, that he could get under my skin faster than anyone alive, that he had his whole life ahead of him. And then he didn't.

When I went back to work at Brin Glass in Minneapolis, I didn't know how to carry it. Nobody teaches you that part. You learn how to read a spec, how to manage a deadline. Nobody teaches you how to walk onto a job site with something like that inside you. So I did what I think most people in this industry do. I kept moving.

But something happened that I didn't expect. Two co-workers came to me, separately, and told me they understood. One had lost a brother. One had lost a son. They didn't have scripts. They didn't have training. They just had the guts to say something. In that industry culture that people love to call "tough," two people made the most vulnerable choice you can make at work. They let me know I wasn't alone.

I carried that with me for a long time before I understood what it meant. It meant the instinct was already there. The willingness to show up for someone. What was missing — what's still missing in most workplaces — is the structure around it. The permission. The language.

I didn't have a model for what talking about it looked like.... I didn't know if it would make me the person everyone tiptoed around. So mostly, I kept it close. And I suspect a lot of people reading this have kept something close, too.

For years I didn't talk about Trevor at work, not widely. I had a trusted few — the people who'd earned that. But beyond that circle, I didn't have a model for what talking about it looked like. I didn't know if it was appropriate. I didn't know if it would make people uncomfortable. I didn't know if it would make me the person everyone tiptoed around. So mostly, I kept it close. And I suspect a lot of people reading this have kept something close, too.

The construction industry loses roughly 5,000 workers a year to suicide. That number is staggering when you see it on a page. But every one of those is someone's Trevor. Someone's coworker. Someone who showed up on Monday and whose absence on Tuesday left a hole that nobody knew how to talk about.

I started talking about it because the silence got heavier than the awkwardness. That's the honest version. There was no epiphany, no single turning point. Just a slow realization that if I had the platform and the experience, keeping quiet was its own kind of failure.

There's a phrase I come back to often: seize the awkward. It comes from a campaign designed to help people have the conversations they're afraid to have. But it's become something bigger for me. It's how I try to live inside this work. The awkward is the moment before you ask someone how they're really doing. The awkward is the silence after they tell you. The awkward is asking to give a complete stranger a hug during an "out of darkness walk," a yearly event hosted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The awkward is writing an essay like this for a trade publication and knowing your colleagues are going to read it.

This fall will mark 20 years since I lost Trevor. Twenty years of learning how to carry it. Twenty years in an industry that, for all its toughness, has more heart than it gets credit for. I think about those two people at Brin all the time. They didn't fix anything. They didn't have to. They just didn't look away.

That's all I'm asking anyone to do. Don't look away.