Mentorship's Impact: A Big Brother’s Journey Of Foster Care, Mental Health, and Suicide

In this deeply moving episode, I have a somber but powerful conversation with Dennis "DJ" Quinn, a lifelong mentor and Big Brothers volunteer, to explore the transformational power of one-on-one mentorship. 

From childhood trauma to the long-term impact of showing up for someone in need, Mr. Quinn shares his personal journey through decades of volunteering—highlighting how critical emotional support is for kids without stable homes or parental guidance. We discuss what impact he had, if at all, and how we can have an impact as mentors.

Mr. Quinn, still emotionally distraught about the suicide of one of his "little brothers" and his mentoring journey, shares the heart-wrenching yet inspiring story of Mike, a young boy he mentored from age seven through a lifetime of mental illness, institutionalization, and eventual tragedy. Through the story, we get into how mentorship is not about replacing parents, but about being consistent, compassionate, and present for someone who might otherwise feel invisible. This includes understanding that reciprocation and feedback are shown and presented to us by others in a variety of ways.

With all of this, we get into Mr. Quinn's new book, Stick Figures: A Big Brother Remembers, which chronicles his years with Mike and provides a real-world case study of how mentorship can be a lifeline.

https://www.djquinnauthor.com/

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Transcript

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of cap. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and today we are focusing in on mentorship. We've talked a lot on the show about. What exactly is mentorship? Reanalyzing it, defining it, talking about different programs out there and different resources, but we're gonna focus in today on how important is it and how important can a single relationship be a one-on-one mentoring?

How can that change someone's life? We're gonna talk about what happens when people don't have mentors, what happens when they don't have the right support, what that can lead to from mental illness and suicide to just, uh, life full of trouble and trauma that could have been avoided had we just. Taking mentorship more seriously, not as we've discussed on the show.

Not everyone is brought into the world with a good set of parents. You know, there's a high divorce rate, there's a lot of people who are parents by accident, and, uh, having a kid doesn't make you a parent, you know, necessarily only entitled, you know, not all of us are ready to teach, to grow and to help raise a person, but there are people out here who wanna volunteer to be a mentor in any way they can.

And we're here today with an individual who. Partnered up with a program to be a volunteer, and he is gonna talk about how that mentorship kind of journey played out in his life and why he's doing what he's doing now to help hopefully impact many more lives. Mr. Dennis Quinn, it's so great to have you here.

Well, thank you very much. It's good to be here. Appreciate being on the show with you. Yeah. So I know just from researching you and all that, that you mentioned a lot a being a Big Brother volunteer. For those of us who aren't familiar with what Big Brother is, could you break that down for us? Sure. Uh, big Brothers and Big Sisters is a national organization that I.

Has been around for quite a while and they primarily used to focus solely on, on one-to-one matches where they would match an adult volunteer with a, a child. The big brother side of it was a lot of times boys growing up in a a, a home where they did not have, uh, consistent a ma male contact. And, um, so the program has been, has then evolved into, they have different mentoring opportunities that aren't always the one-to-one out in the community type deal.

Um, where I came from was, uh, I ca was, I'm the second oldest out of a family of nine children. And how I found out about Big Brothers is we would be sitting around the TV watching shows and they would have commercials. About Big brothers and big sisters. And for me, I couldn't imagine growing up without my, my dad in the house or you know, with two parents, right?

And so even as a young kid watching that, I decided that, well, when I move away from home sometime I think I'll, I'll try to do that and be a big brother. And that's how I got involved with it. And I have been. Three different times involved in a program with that. I had a little brother in Minnesota when I first moved away from home.

I was 23, he was 11. Um, my second little brother, I had matched with him when I, he was seven years old and I was probably in my mid thirties at that point. And then, currently I'm involved in one that's called lunch Buddies, where the volunteers go over and have lunch with a first grader. Every two, two times a month.

And that usually involves about a 20 minute lunch period. And then, uh, about a half hour out on the re the playground. Running around and playing tag with six years old and, uh, uh, so it's, it's a lot of fun. It's a different, different app atmosphere on that one than the one-to-one mentoring. But that's how I got started and it has evolved into a big part of my life.

Both of my little brother matches went on for a significant period of time. The first one, I met him in 1980 when he was 11, and he just passed away in November at. Age 54 from a, a car accident at work. And then the second little brother, I was with him for a 13 year period from the time he was seven till he was almost 20.

Right. That's so, um, you know, when, whenever it comes to parenting, they always say you shouldn't, you know, you know, no parent should have to. Be around to experience their child passing away before them. And, uh, you've had that happen twice with these as you know, I mean, do you feel like a, a parental bond with them or is it more of a older brother?

Because I know that's how they describe it as the big brother and all, but do you feel like a parent to them? I think I first went into it thinking, okay, here's a kid without a dad that I'm gonna go there and teach him how to be just like me. That is not what it turned out to be. And it becomes a bond that's almost like a brother.

You become a friend and it's, you're not a parent. You'll certainly get things that come up as far as conversations and stuff that. Would be something that they might direct to their dad or to a good friend. Uh, so that, that is what I found out from that. Uh, it also, the beauty of it, the difference between being a dad and a big brother is after three hours, you, you're done.

See a next week kid and uh Right. You know, back to the parent. But for me. It. They had asked for a year commitment is what they had asked initially for it. 'cause they didn't want these kids to get to get close to somebody and then have 'em leave after a couple months. Some of them had had enough of that in their lives as it was.

So the commitment was originally for a year. My first little brother I worked with every couple weeks for a four year period until I moved out from Minnesota out into the Seattle area. The second little brother, I, I was with him for a. S officially for a five year or six year period. And then I moved out of the county, which was outside of that, that big brother organization's, uh, boundaries.

And at that time they, they closed the match and they offered the kids either to be rematched or were not, and. The kids both decided that, uh, mine and my partner's kids both decided that they would just stay with us and, and we continued to, to, you know, work with them as, as if they were our little brothers.

And that carried on until, till the end of the time. So it, it was different. It's, and, and I learned from my first little brother's match. He had met his father. The father didn't live with him, but he had met him just prior to me being matched with him and. I learned very quick. You never replaced the father, even though the father didn't communicate with him, even though he never saw him other than the one or two times in his life that was always still his dad, right?

And so you'll never replace him, and that's not what you're intended to be, but you're just intended to be there as a friend, as somebody who can guide them. It has shown their, their studies have shown that it helps kids in school. It helps 'em in their social life. And a lot of children I know in the, in the playgrounds and that they don't have a dad at home to talk about when the other kids are talking about their dad.

But they can talk about their big brother or their big sister, however, however it goes. So what would you say? Are some of the most difficult times or issues you've had with that relationship? Just like any relationship, it's not always perfect. Sometimes, like did you and your little brother ever get into a, a disagreement or did he ask some questions that you just didn't know how to answer?

I would think the, a lot of times, especially in the first one, he wasn't somebody who gave back a lot of feedback. A lot of. F Amid instant, like you could really see he was having a fun time. He was a pretty stoic, pretty s uh. Okay. You know, quiet kid, um, where I got some feedback from that. When you start thinking, well, am I making a difference?

Am I wasting my time here? Is he, am I just hauling him outta the house and may Right. It's something he feels obligated to. Uh, he was, we were out with one of his friends one time and the kid said to me, oh, he talks about you all the time. And so that was kind of a clue that, okay, yeah, this is important to him.

He was, he was always eager to go out and do things. The second little brother had come from a situation where he had been thrown in and out of foster homes for the first five years of his life, and they had said that, that you may see a challenge to see if you're gonna stick with him. You may see that from him.

And about the fourth time I took him out, I saw that where he, we butted heads on which way we're gonna go. At this park, he wanted to grow directly to the water in the mud. Right off the bat, I was more like, let's go play for a while and then you can get all dirty and we'll go home. But he, he started walking away from the car and finally he picked up a bunch of gravel and threw it at me.

And that was the point where was a confrontation. And so I settled that by telling him. We're going home. And he said, well, it's not two hours yet. We can't go home. I said, we're going home. And we, we had a little meeting with his mother when we got home and, and handled that. And from that point on, I never had any, any, but I, I knew that it's okay.

He's challenging me, right? To see how far he can push me. And after that, we had a pretty good relationship where there was n none of that. And with him especially, he was, he was younger. I made a deal with him that if anything came up in conversation that I thought his mom needed to know. When we got home, he had the option of either telling her why I was there or he could tell her after I left, but I was gonna call her then and make sure that he told her.

He always chose to have big brother in the room. I think he thought his survival chances were better if he told mom the bad news. Well, somebody was there to help him out. Right? So little things like that and you just learn as you go along that, that this is how you interact. It's kinda like having a friend and just being consistent with it was real important.

Right. And you know, not every kid is the same. Every kid's a different experience. So it's definitely. Something that's always changing, but you're also, you know, piggybacking off prior experiences, what worked and what didn't work. But in the beginning of the episode, I kind of hinted at what can happen when there's not good mentorship in someone's life, or even when there is, but we're limited in what we can do.

You know, I wanna talk about your book that you recently published and, and tells the story. That I don't, I don't wanna spoil. I'd love for you to share with us what happened and, and the why you're here on the show today and, and guessing on other shows. What happened to that is I met Mike, like I said, at seven, and he had been bounced in and out of foster homes for the time.

He was two, where the court would take him out of the house and then they would put him back there when the mother felt capable and, and she had had other children that were already had been taken out of the home, and he wasn't aware of that. The woman who ended up being his foster mother during almost all of those times was Betty and Betty.

Became very concerned that he was gonna get lost in the foster system. So she took the steps to adopt him legally. And she, that adoption was finalized a couple months after I met him. She was 63, had three adult children, and, and her daughter lived in the area and was I. Also really helpful in, in, in helping out with Mike.

Mike had some neurological, uh, difficulties. I don't know if he may have been fetal alcohol syndrome child, but he, his speech was primarily affected where he, between the brain and the tongue, something got missed in the circuits. And so he had a very difficult time talking and they had kind of clued me in on, on this before I, I agreed to take the match or they agreed to me, take me and.

When I first met him, she had told me she wanted him to learn some social boundaries and some of that, and one of the first things we did was he used to bear hug everybody he would meet. And when I opened the door to go into his house, he gave me a great big bear hug around the waist. And from that day on when I left, I showed him a, a handshake.

Here's our big brother handshake that we will do, and. He learned just from doing those things and that, that these are the boundaries we, we follow. And when we would go places, I would have him order his own food so that he got used to talking to people in public. He, all of those things, he made a lot of progress.

He had, uh, he became. You know, he just loved to go places. He, he loved stories. He was a real lovable kid. He was the opposite of my first little brother. And that he gave you a lot of immediate feedback that this is, is something I really enjoy. When he got to be, uh, in puberty, probably about 14 years old.

All of a sudden he, the, the weird behavior of being a teenager. Kind of combined with just weird behavior and he developed mental illness that eventually to took him to a point where he was no longer safe to live in his home. He was hospitalized in, in psychiatric, uh, places for a while. He ended up living in a series of group homes, foster homes on the streets when he'd run away into mental facilities, and, and that's.

Where he finally ended up, and my role at that point was, what do I do? What can I do? Right? And, and. Should I just quit? Am I wasting my time? And I made the decision that I would continue to see him every couple weeks or so, and just to be there and make sure that he knew that there was somebody, that he was connected to, somebody who in his life, who was I.

Was still there for him because his, his mother was in failing health at that point. And so I did that and sometimes I would call to go out with him and he wasn't there because he had been removed from the home or he had run away. And so it became a game of that, how do I do this? And I learned through that process that of how little I have control over him, uh, how little I had over the, the control of what, what was happening to him.

And, you know, I learned what, what my role was to do, to show up. And that was basically. What I had to offer him. I will show up, I will look in the eye and talk and just let you know that somebody's still there for you. And that's what the, the book I wrote, the Stick Figures a Big Brother remembers, follows that journey from when I first met him until the end of end of the road on it.

And it was. It was an incredible journey. Uh, you know, I mean, we'd play chess for hours in the, the state mental hospital, and he would always beat me, but yet he had, he couldn't cope on the outside life, but he, he was a very intelligent guy and the medications would help sometimes and it would. It would silence the voices in his head, but it also silence him and play foul things with his body, throw his weight off, all of that.

So that whole struggle to see him go through that and never knowing what he was gonna look like and what state he would be in when you saw him from one week to the next, it was pretty powerful. Right. And to confirm he did ultimately end up, uh, taking his own life. Correct? Correct. Yeah. And so how long has it been since that happened?

I. That happened in 2006 is when it was. And, uh, I went up and got his things from the, from the hospital and then it took me, I went through, he had two boxes left. That was it, two boxes of stuff. That was his whole leftovers from his, the, his. Right. And I went through it and, and most of it was dirty clothes that I threw away, but then the other box I didn't, didn't go through.

It took me five years to get to the point where I went through that for, it sat in my closet and I just didn't, didn't have the nerve or just let it go, that I didn't do that. Right. And, and one of the things I saved out of that, the first day I got the boxes home, I pulled out the chessboard that we had used to play chess.

Every couple weeks when we would go there. That was kind of the cement of the relationship at that point, was the chess games. And talk a little bit. Yeah. Um, yeah. So how long was it, because I know we mentioned your book was recently published, so when was the book, when did the book come out and what was the delay between writing it?

What sparked that idea of eventually writing it? Actually the first, the first day I met him, I thought, this kid is, this is pretty a unique situation and, and someday I'm gonna write a book about this. I did a lot of writing in, in my career and I thought, I will do that. Uh, what took the time was from the time he passed away, I wrote a lot of different parts of it, I lot that then at Covid, which hit about five years later, I continued.

Got a, a lot of it done and hadn't put the format of together or what exactly the, I knew the storyline, but how, what pieces were gonna be in there. And then when I retired, then I had the time to do it, to get right at it. And, and, and that's when I did, and that's why I finished it up then. It took over that period of time in order to get that done.

Um, I did a lot of writing. I was a up, did marketing when with, for the real estate team that I was on, and that was a continual, nonstop work and I just didn't have the energy to put into the book and into that emotional writing that I did when I had either the covid break or, or the retirement. So, and, and then there was a huge learning curve too on putting the book together itself, which, uh, right to, yeah, it was pretty, pretty good.

So how are you doing nowadays, emotionally with, and obviously that's a very scarring event, and have you dealt with a, a feeling of inadequacy like you did all that you could, or do you feel like you didn't do enough? Like how has that. Emotional rollercoaster since that passing been like finishing up the book was, uh, good closure.

It was a help for me to go through that and to finally get it down on paper and to finally take it from one point to the next, to the start to be, start to the end. The emotional part of it was. Really difficult. I missed him a lot. I struggled with how a child would be born in this world with all those disabilities, all those challenges, the broken family to start with, and then continue on through that and make you next thing.

You're all of a sudden getting mental illness that you're not not in, in charge of it. I feel very. Very, very, very good about did I do enough? I did everything I could. I went out there consistently, and that is, there was nothing I could do about it, but I did what I could. I spent some time before I would go in there.

Every time I would pray that I just make this good for Mike, whatever it might be, because he. He was, other than, than a few people, none of his biological family was around, but the adoptive family still was, but I was probably the consistently to before and after when I'd go see him, I, I felt very, very good about it and, uh, I knew that I felt comfortable also in that he was no longer locked up.

Uh, it was hard to go see him locked in a locked ward and then come home and see my dogs having more freedom than he would ever have, and him being a human being because he could not cope with, with the disease that was had taken over his mind. So, I. All in all, I feel I feel very good about, about it. I think it's a, a real powerful story, but it has also changed my look at people on the street.

You see people on the street, and that's no longer just some guy on the street that's somebody like Mike when it gets cold every day. I remember in the wintertime, I, I think Mike's not out there on the streets tonight, and that's a good thing. And he had a profound effect on me on spirituality wise. We used to talk about God periodically, and, and it helped me become a better man.

Just spending that time with him and seeing what he was, what kind of a situation he was in, seeing the angels that were taking care of the people in those, those rooms, they, they are doing work that nobody else can do and it, uh. It, it touched me in a lot of different ways, but I feel very com very comfortable.

I'm glad I had that time with him and, and, you know, everybody, his, his mother gave him a chance and that was the most important thing in his life is he had a chance to, and it just didn't work out. Right. Right. And so your book, we've mentioned it a few times and I'll mention now the title. It's, uh. Stick figures.

A big brother remembers what is the significance behind the title stick figures. Significance is when, when I first met him, that one of the things they told me is he has trouble with transition. So when you take him out, you don't say, we're gonna go, it's, we're going to, well Mike, we're gonna go in five minutes.

We're gonna go in two minutes. Okay. It's time to wrap it up. You had to do those transition things. So the first day I met him, I had made a calendar for him and I took it over to him and gave it to him as a gift so that we could mark down when. We are gonna get together the next time. And what that turned into then was he would bring the calendar when we came home, we'd sit down with his, him and his mother, and he'd bring the calendar over and.

I would draw these little stick figures on what we had done that day and, and they were nothing fancy. My little stick figure is about the best art I can ever, ever come up with, but it turned into a little written history of what we had done. He'd flipped through the pages and you could see we had gone to the University of Washington to a football game, or we'd gone swimming this day, or his birthday was this day, and he really enjoyed doing that.

When we'd sit there. We continued that for about four years to, uh, of doing that. And each year he'd get a calendar from me for Christmas and, and then we would continue on doing that when he could no longer live with his mom. The, those calendars got lost in a subsequent move and we never had those again, but the.

The, at the end of the story there, there, the stick figures ties into it, and I've always considered that as a, just a, it was, it was really great to have those little, little things in there, and it was just a thing that just happened and, and turned out to be a good little history for 'em. I wish I still had the, the calendars, but they, they got lost in the transitions.

Right. Yeah. And so obviously the book, like we mentioned, was a bit of closure for you and something you wanted to get out there. What is the impact you're hoping it'll make? Who should read it and why? You know, what is the change you're hoping to see through this story of one individual? But we know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of kids going through the same exact situation each and every day.

My hope would be that the people who would read it would be inspired to get involved in mentoring. Uh, a kid or being in a program that, that does that, that helps 'em out even as a young age. That is, there's a great need for that. I saw with the two matches that I had with Scott and my first little brother, Scott, and also Mike, how powerful that was in not only helping them.

It gives them some foundation. Give them the a sense that, hey, there's some people here that care for me that will help me out, but it also helps them. The person who do does that for me, it was very anchoring in my life. It was also a reality check for what's goes on in some other people's life. It helped me get outta my own head for that two to three hour period when we would be there and.

In Mike's situation, what happened to him and what we ex went through together, I became very aware of how difficult it is for kids, like in that situation to find housing that's gonna work for 'em. Where do you put these people? Where do they keep themselves? He would get put into foster home as and then, and then cause trouble and get, get thrown out of them.

Uh, so I, all of that stuff has really helped me and it really. But I think it would really benefit a lot of, of men who could step up and do this and, and in whatever form, because that is a real powerful one to one thing. Spending time with a kid, you don't need any qualifications. I mean, there are restrictions for the, that they, that the agencies put on in an organiz thing, but you really don't need any qualifications.

You just need to go in and. Be there with 'em and, and be a friend and a support. I heard a woman one time on a podcast that was talking about, she was a minister, and she said that she has no fixes. She has no what? Magic wand that's gonna take care of these people that are in, in, in trouble. But what she did have was a ministry of presence where her presence was, was the thing that she could give them.

And I found that. Really powerful. Um, I also do some counseling or not counseling. Some of us in a 12 step program go over and talk to the. Juveniles that are in detention in the county jail. And last night we talked to one, one guy on the way out, he stopped and he thanked the guys that had come over there.

He said, when I first got here, I thought you guys were stupid for coming over here. We didn't want to hear about that stuff. He said, but I saw, see you guys come here, over here every week and you listen to us and you talk to us and you keep showing up. And he goes, that's pretty neat. I wish I had some of this information when I was.

Out there before I got in trouble. And I thought that was a pretty good illustration of what, right. What we can do is just show up and talk to these guys, and they sooner or later get the drift that, hey, there's people out there that, that are willing to help me out. And I, and that's kind of what we try to give them.

Here's some resources you can use when you get out or, or throughout your life to, or some of your family can. So that's, that's kind of what I would hope comes out of this book. But, and it also, I believe, gives a little voice to Mike, a little voice, a little, let people know what a wonderful kid he was and that there were people who stepped up in his life.

And, and people can do that. It doesn't save the world, but it helps somebody else have a little bit easier go in it. Right. And I think that we can all agree there is such a need to. Take a step back and look at the foster care system and how it's going to give a second chance to those juvenile delinquents who have gotten into trouble and to more importantly help them from even going down that path to begin with.

Like you said, mentoring them and being there for them before they make the wrong choices, and if they do make the wrong choices, being there, showing up and being consistent and showing that there is someone who cares A lot of times with. Suicide with addiction and with, uh, even just when kids act up in any way, it's because they feel like no one cares 'cause they're being seen and not heard.

So I think it's so important that they feel heard. And so even though this episode was a somber one, it's a a vital one. It's a necessary one. I find great beauty in your story and I think it's really important that it continues to get out there. So I want to thank you for writing the book for your.

Current work as continuing to help mentor young people and then for being on the show as well. Thank you, and I appreciate the work that you're doing too on this show. I know you have a very strong, uh, uh, your, your guests have a strong interest in mentorship and the things that you're doing to help, help support that.

It's, it's so important. Uh, it's, it's really important and, uh, you're doing a good job of it, and I appreciate being on here. I appreciate that. And on the, in the description below, we'll have your website where people can find blogs, your shop, and everything else, more information and how to get in contact with you if they'd like to.

So ladies and gentlemen, be sure to look into that and then also look into programs like Big Brother or if there's. Nowadays, there's a lot of other programs. If you can find one that's more suitable to your schedule or to your area, be sure to check that out. And you know, like you said, Mr. Quinnan, there's, it doesn't take much qualification if you can be there for them.

And listen, we're not always gonna have all the answers like we discussed, but if you do your best to be there for them, that's what really matters. So thank you for being there for them and for being here today. Thank you.