Above all else, Shirlee Zane remembers her husband for giving others the emotional comfort that eluded him in life.
Peter Kingston was a strapping six-footer and native of England who made fast friends of strangers and offered constant aid to loved ones in need.
"He was the caregiver, more than anything," said Zane, 51, a Sonoma County supervisor.
Yet Kingston had since his childhood suffered chronic anxiety and periods of depression, Zane and a close friend said. He took his own life Jan. 18 at the age of 56.
A successful entrepreneur and most recently the finance director at Ursuline High School, Kingston was well-known in local business, nonprofit and education circles. With his first wife Kristina Mailliard, who died of cancer in 2001, he raised two children in the couple's home on McDonald Avenue, one of Santa Rosa's most enviable neighborhoods. He and Zane married in 2004.
Days after his death, hundreds of mourners gathered for a funeral in Jackson Theater at Sonoma Country Day School. It was there that Zane offered a stirring eulogy that has become her new message.
"We need to learn to talk about suicide," she told the crowd. "We cannot be ashamed of the pain in our lives."
Less than four months later, the first-term supervisor and former Council on Aging leader is speaking out about the perils of mental illness, the stigma of suicide and a personal loss she calls "gut-wrenching."
"For people like myself who have never gone to that stage of &‘I don't know how to survive any more,' it's hard for us to understand," she said. "He didn't feel that there was any other way out."
In her first interview since Kingston's death, Zane said her feelings toward her husband remain raw, alternating between "anger and compassion, loneliness and fear."
"You can hold all that together at one time," she said.
She is trying to channel some part of that private grief into a public mission on suicide prevention and mental health awareness.
It's a reprise, in a way, of her one-time role as a Christian minister and missionary. Except this time her sermon is bolstered by her elected office and springs from a cruel personal tragedy.
Zane is a trained family counselor and grief specialist, having once run Sonoma County's now-shuttered Hospital Chaplaincy Services. But even that professional background, she said, left her outmatched by her husband's illness and grasping to explain his suicide.
"I want people to realize that this is a disease," Zane said. "It's not really a choice. My loving, kind, compassionate husband would not have chosen to hurt me or our family or loved ones. He was not in his right mind."
High-pressure job at Ursuline
In the interview, Zane also addressed for the first time continued speculation that Kingston, as finance director, was somehow behind the financial troubles of Ursuline, the 130-year-old all-girls Catholic high school in Santa Rosa that is set to close in June.
In the immediate aftermath of Kingston's death, an Ursuline official defended Kingston's work at the school. Since then, however, school officials have refused to publicly address subsequent rumors that Kingston was responsible in some part for the school's demise. Ursuline officials did not return phone calls and emails requesting comment for this story.
Since the closure announcement in November, they've cited rising tuition assistance and declining enrollment — factors they said were behind a $1.2 million debt — as reasons for the closure.
Kingston was not responsible for those financial problems, Zane said. To the contrary, he had been raising alarms about the school's insolvency as long as two and a half years ago, she said.
"He was frustrated because he was very concerned that the school was not sustainable," she said.
He had recommended sharp budget cuts to address the problems but those suggestions weren't acted on, she said.
Also, Zane said, school officials, including Ursuline principal Julie Carver, should have been more forthright defending Kingston and battling the rumors that arose after his death.
"He had nothing to hide," she said. "He gave good advice. He tried to make a difference but his warnings were not heeded seriously enough."
A family’s loss
Zane sat on a white couch in the sun-splashed living room of the McDonald Avenue home Kingston shared with her and her son David, 22.
Around the house, framed photographs of Kingston stood on the tables and mantels.
Zane said she is in regular contact with his son Jamie, 26 — a father to twin three-year-old boys — and his daughter Gwenny, 22, a student at UC Berkeley.
"My heart breaks for each one of them in a very different way in terms of what Peter meant to them," she said of the three adult children and two grandchildren.
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