Her youngest son shot himself in the head with the Winchester 30-06 he got as a birthday present from his father. Two days later his father died of colon cancer.
It was right before Christmas in 1997.
The father and son obituaries ran together in the newspaper. Ron Eddy Whitcraft, 49, and Ron Whitcraft II, 23. The double memorial service at the Tlingit and Haida Community Center in Juneau spilled out the door.
Friends and family who huddled around Franks eventually had to get back to their own lives, leaving her alone staring at her apartment walls, food rotting in the refrigerator, music cranked up loud so no one could hear her scream.
"My heart hurt so bad," she says.
She hurt to the bone. It even hurt to wash her hair. So she cut it all off.
Six months after burying her husband and son she mustered the strength to go see somebody. The very first session, the counselor told her it was time to get over it. Franks never went back.
She knew the counselor was wrong, but it took her years to figure out how to explain it:
"This is not something you get over, it's something you get through. Big difference."
Franks has learned a lot these past few years, and it boils down to this: Cancer happens; suicide doesn't have to. And in the process, she's gone from not wanting to talk about it to talking about it to anyone who'll listen -- about warning signs, about prevention, about its impact on those who get stuck trying to make sense of it all.
A suicide survivor is defined two ways, she says. Those who attempt to kill themselves and don't succeed, and those left behind when they do.
As one of the wounded, Franks now works in suicide prevention as part of her job at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. She's also the state liaison for the Suicide Prevention Action Network, or SPAN USA.
She's told her story over and over to students, elders, community leaders and people on the street. Talking openly about suicide is considered "a cultural taboo" in many Native communities. She does it anyway, because she has to, driven by a higher purpose.
"I don't want anyone to hurt the way I do."
MYSTERIOUS VISITOR
Franks' husband of 25 years, who'd gone from 300 pounds to less than 80, lay in a coma, his body shutting down, when a friend found her son dead in the woods. Two days later, practically paralyzed with grief and working on her son's eulogy, her husband took his last breath.
When people ask how she got through it, Franks gives an honest answer.
"I didn't," she says. "I drank a lot."
She pulls a piece of paper off a desk and draws X's to mark the stops she once made between her job at a Juneau law firm and her lonely apartment wallpapered in family memories -- photos of her two boys, the one she lost and her older son Richard, in their Boy Scout uniforms, as altar boys, playing school sports.
"I worked here," she said marking the spot, "and there was a bar here and a bar here, a bar here and a bar here. ... I'd have two beers here and two beers here. ... The last one is where I'd end up.
"By maybe 11 o'clock I'd be staggering across the street to my apartment. There were a lot of times I woke up with my coat on and my purse in my hand because I'd passed out."
Hiding was getting her nowhere. After six months, she'd had enough. She was barely eating, maybe one meal a day and sometimes none. Instead of hitting the bars, she started treating herself to breakfast each morning before work.
She claimed a chair at the cafe counter of a Juneau hotel, ordered toast, coffee and pineapple juice and kept to herself. For a while, anyway. Other customers started talking to her and she to them.
"So we kind of had our own little corner," she said. "We would talk about anything in the world.
"This one day, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there was this old lady, an elder Tlingit lady. She looked tired, worn out. There were a lot of wrinkles on her face. I turned and looked at her.
" 'You will do good things for your people,' she said."
Franks turned back to the others and shrugged.
"When I turned around again, and it wasn't that long, she was gone."
Franks got up from the counter to find the old woman. She stepped out the door, looked up the street, then down. She went back inside and checked all the stalls in the women's bathroom .
"She wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere. So I went back and said, 'Well that was weird.' And they said, 'Where you go? And I said, 'I was looking for that lady.
" 'What lady?' " they said.
No one else had seen her.
That got Franks thinking. She'd taken one step toward healing. She was ready to take another.
"I knew within our Tlingit culture, you're not only representing yourself, you're representing your family, you're representing your clan, you're representing your tribe."
Franks began poking around the Internet for information on suicide and its aftermath and ended up connecting with others in a suicide survivor chat room. She also started reading other people's stories.
"I read about how other people survive," she said. "I looked at their survival techniques and tried to incorporate them into mine."
As she regained her strength, she started talking. And once she started talking, she stopped asking why her son did what he did.
"Pretty soon you can't ask the question because there's no answer."
MAKING IT OFFICIAL
At first, Franks told her story to people here and there. As word got around, she started making presentations to various groups.
"I was talking about this as a mother who lost her son to suicide," she said. Eventually she wanted more credentials.
"In order for people to listen to me," she said, "I felt I needed to have that education rather than just street know-how."
In 2005, she moved to Anchorage to attend the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she earned her associates degree in human services in May. She refined her message and widened her audience through the Alaska Native Oratory Society.
George Charles, director of the National Resource Center for American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Elders at UAA, videotaped her story and presented it to a group of elders serving as advisors to several organizations.
"Elders, they know of the high suicide rates, so of course it hit home," Charles said. "Our numbers are extremely high.
"I admire her for the way she has faced the issue and found ways to heal, not only for herself but for other people."
A NEW LIFE
Franks has a whole new life now. She's remarried and, after an internship with First Alaskans Institute, works at the Native hospital, where she spends one day a week immersed, officially now, in suicide prevention.
Her mother, who worried so much about her during her worst days, would be so proud. She passed away in 2000.
Before closing her casket, Franks placed a necklace inside containing ashes from her husband and son. The rest had been scattered, so now she has a place to visit them all on Memorial Day.
When Franks speaks publicly about suicide, she brings the memory of her mother with her. It's a traditional Tlingit blanket she inherited when her mother died. Adorned in buttons and bead work, it was made by a woman in Hoonah, where Franks grew up. This "auntie" had nine children and made identical blankets for each of them.
"When they had the potlatch and these blankets were going to be given to all this lady's kids, she said, 'Oh we can't sing the dedication song yet because there's someone else I want up here.' She called my mom up and said, 'You are like a daughter to me.' So my mom got the 10th blanket."
The blanket, Franks says, gives her strength.
Tlingit culture keeps her strong in other ways too.
Two years after the deaths of her husband and son, the community gathered again in their honor.
"My mom picked a young man to take on the name of my son and another young man to take the name of my husband," she said. "So I still have a tribal son, and I still have a tribal husband.
"They're never going to replace them, but their names still go on. And that's a big comfort to me."
SURVIVORS OF SUICIDE: A national webcast on suicide and suicide prevention was presented live Saturday. The archived presentation is now available for viewing.
The numbers
• Every 16 minutes, someone commits suicide in this country.
• More than 32,600 people die by suicide each year, making suicide the 11th-leading cause of death in the U.S.
• Nationwide, there are an estimated 816,000 suicide attempts each year, or one attempt every 39 seconds.
• Contrary to popular belief, suicide is not most common during the holidays. Rates are the highest in April, June and July.
• Fifty-two percent of all people who kill themselves do so with a firearm, accounting for almost 17,000 deaths each year in the U.S. Use of a firearm is the number one method used by people 35 and older.
• Alaska has the third-highest suicide rate in the country.
• Suicide is the sixth-leading cause of death in Alaska, with an average of 2.4 suicides a week.
• Statewide, there's an average of 1.6 attempts every day, resulting in more than 570 hospitalizations per year.
• Alaska males commit suicide at 3.4 times the rate of females.
• Alaska Natives are more than three times as likely to commit suicide than the national average.
• Each year, an average of 44 Alaska Natives die from suicide. That's one suicide every eight days.
Sources: The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, the Alaska Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the State of Alaska Suicide Prevention Council
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