Weeks later, Lake Washington still looks murky and unsettled. The air feels arctic and people seem to walk slower along the dock at Marina Park.

When 27-year-old Larry Stephenson jumped into the lake near the park and drowned Jan. 26, our Kirkland community suffered a loss.

In our own ways, we grieved.

“It’s so sad,” said a woman, who called me to say just that. Other residents have called throughout the past couple weeks to inquire about any new leads – the who, what, when and especially why.

Others grieved via e-mail.

“What happened? Why did it take so long? Did someone die? Can’t Kirkland react on its own,” wrote a resident who watched King County divers search for Stephenson after he went into the 40-degree water. “I just want to know what is going on with my tax money that we can’t even have a small boat downtown to use in a situation like this.”

Anger is part of the grieving process.

So too are the “If -I-had-onlys.” That Monday, I had just finished sending that week’s Reporter to press. At 8:30 p.m. – only minutes after two witnesses called 911 to report Stephenson’s cries for help – I shut off the office lights and went home. If only I had waited a few more minutes.

In a time of loss, people grieve and try to make sense of what happened. So I turned to Stephenson’s father, a well-known Tri City attorney also named Larry.

He was a very bright young man, Larry said of his son. He was the “magic-magician type” and was good at mathematics and playing black jack.

“In high school, if he was gone six or eight hours, I wasn’t worried about him because I knew he was at the bookstore or library researching something he was interested in, like magic,” he said.

He was also into old-fashioned clothes and unique places – like Kirkland.

Stephenson was never the social type, but things went wrong last spring when he started acting different. He talked about seeing things from time to time, until his brother took him to a mental health facility in Tacoma.

“When I went to see him, I will never forget,” Larry said. “They brought him in and he had this shuffle and was like a statue. It just knocked me to my knees. His form of schizophrenia was the catatonic type.”

Larry saw his son a couple times before he drowned, including during Christmas when Stephenson gave his father a “nice book.” But from the time he was hospitalized until the accident at Marina Park last month, he was never “quite right.” He was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, but wouldn’t take them because he felt he could get his condition under control himself with a little more rest.

Larry said he has no doubt what happened the night his son died. He had some compulsion – something just told him to go into the water, he said.

“It’s absolutely real to them and something told him to go into the water and he did,” Larry said.

It is difficult to make sense of Stephenson’s death. But Larry points to a clear message that we can look to instead.

Whether it’s schizophrenia, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or depression – we should accept people who suffer from mental illnesses. Sometimes families or society does not want to admit that their loved one or someone they know has a mental illness, Larry explained. The result? Those who suffer are afraid and they hide the illness.

“It’s very disturbing to me, I’ve seen it in my office too many times where a young person is diagnosed a certain way. It’s terrible to condemn someone to a life of pain because of the perceived stigma that mental illness is wrong.”

Whether his son’s death could or couldn’t have been prevented, Larry urges others to get mental illness out in the open, talk about it and embrace it.

“Everyone just wants be accepted,” he added.