His final text said, ‘I’m doing awesome!’ The next day, he was gone.

“I’m doing awesome! Love you. Good night,” he wrote.

Then he stayed up late, chatting with an upset friend, consoling her that those feelings wouldn’t last.

The next day, a roommate found him. He had hanged himself from a ceiling fan, using a scarf and ties.

Charlie was loved, but he was also hurting. Recently, Stephenson, a crisis communications consultant based outside Washington, D.C., discussed “Blackbird,” her new book about Charlie — and about the blindsided second-guessing and devastation of parental grief — at the Ocean Edge Resort in Brewster.

September is Suicide Prevention Month. With her book, which somehow manages to be both devastatingly real but also funny and achingly relatable, Stephenson wants to de-stigmatize the discussion around suicide.

I caught up with her in a separate conversation, where she spoke candidly about the importance of transparency when confronting mental illness and about moving forward through despair.

I appreciate that you say that talking about mental illness and suicide reduces their power, because I feel like the more we don’t discuss this, the more mysterious and shrouded in shame and power it is. What would you like parents to know about supporting someone who lost a child to suicide?

My confidence in every aspect of my life was shattered — things that I never questioned before: Can I write an email properly? Can I make the right decision about which food to eat for dinner? Everything becomes this moral dilemma: Should I stay in bed? Should I get up?

The friends, family, and community who supported me found a way to validate me as a human, as a mom, as a friend. I have one friend who found a way in virtually every conversation we had to say: “You’re a good mom.” Because you don’t feel that way.

That validation helps you kind of sit upright a little bit, so you can take in the new world.

The word “confidence” is interesting. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to unpack that a bit. Did you doubt yourself as a mom? Did you feel purposeless? Where did that lack of confidence come from?

As a mom, you know, we’ve got one job, and that’s to protect our kids. It doesn’t matter what your parenting philosophy is, or your personality, or your family situation. Job one that’s baked into us is: “Protect your child.” When your child dies by suicide, it feels like: Wow. You had one job, and boy, did you mess that up.

I understand a lot more about suicide now, obviously, but that’s still, honestly, a little how I feel. There’s a desperation there that will never, ever go away: How could this have happened? If you can’t get that right, then how can you do anything else?

We hear constantly about how teens, especially, are more depressed, lonely, or isolated than ever, for a variety of reasons. I’m speaking now as a mom of a high-schooler: I worry when my son displays any sadness, even if it’s normal teenage hormonal stuff, that it’s a sign of something big and scary. Do you look back and think about warning signs? What’s the reflection process like?

I’ve done forensics on his whole life, back to: “Gosh, he sucked his thumb. Did I take his lovey away from him too soon? He cried on his ninth birthday. What does that mean?”

I think it’s important to explain that, for me, and I think for anyone who has experienced deep loss or some sort of trauma or tragedy, the way you carry on is to figure out what story you can live with.

I realized it does no good to stay with all the questions that don’t have answers. What if I had made him stay home for the summer? What if I had insisted that he text me every morning when he was eating breakfast because I knew he wasn’t eating?

I’m not saying don’t go there; I’m saying: Don’t stay there. One thing that really hit me hard in the early days is that I am a professional communicator. Literally, people pay me to tell them how to speak and what to say, and my son was quiet about this really important part of his life. I hadn’t cultivated the ability in him to craft his story and to be honest about what he was going through and to ask for help. That’s never going to leave me.

What do you mean?

I mean that I thought his being quiet was charming. It certainly was his personality. But one of the many factors in his death, I think, was his inability to really express what was going on in his mind, and to even say, “I’m so overwhelmed, and I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t feel like myself, and I don’t know what to do about it.” I did try to have those conversations with him, and he would be like: “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

What’s a parent to do? I think a lot of teenagers, boys especially, will just say, “I’m fine.”

There’s the hopeful answer, and there’s the very depressing answer. The hopeful answer is that I really think that having these hard conversations, particularly between parent and child, takes practice. It’s something I think we are culturally better at now than, say, when I was growing up or when my parents were growing up.

Having your kid find the courage to say, “I didn’t do well on that test,” or, “Such-and-such friend is mad at me and I don’t understand why” starts really young.

We can’t be afraid of hard, age-appropriate conversations. There are people who are experts in emotional resilience and child development. I’m not one of them, but I know it’s a pretty simple thing that we can do as parents, to make it safe and normal to have hard conversations, and so that by the time, if you’re concerned, it’s a little easier to say, “I need a little more information from you, because I know you say you’re fine, and maybe you are, but tell me more about why you’re spending so much time in your room, or why you haven’t talked to that friend in a while, or why you’re slowing down on this sport that you used to love.”

You don’t have to be in a crisis situation in order to be a better communicator.

What do you hope that readers will learn, both about Charlie but also about the larger message of going through this and carrying on?

I think that the book is about trying to take the mystery out of suicide. Because suicide, suicidal thoughts, this brand of depression that killed my son, is extremely powerful. It took a life. Yet we give it more power by keeping it secret, by not talking about the cause of death or by not expressing the shame and the guilt of being left behind.

Their brain is sick, no different than if your heart is sick or your lungs are sick or your kidneys are sick. I really want to drive home that there’s an illness behind a suicide. One of the things I heard a lot in the early days was: What happened to him?

He was sick. If someone had a heart attack, you wouldn’t say, “Well, what happened to him? How did this happen?” His heart broke; it shut down.

People want to pin a suicide to a bad conversation or that he must have been disappointed about the track of his life. I can’t speak for everybody, but particularly, I think for young people, it is an illness. It takes over them.

Who else was he, bigger than this disease?

He was the youngest of three, with two older sisters. I had three kids in three years, which is its own form of mental illness.

He was always really quiet, and he was an observer. His sisters would be running around, playing or screaming or crawling all over the furniture, and he would just be sitting there watching.

He had a great sense of humor, one of these guys that would, out of nowhere, throw a zinger, or some really sharp observation. He was a great listener; he was the one that people turned to. He was the one people asked for advice, or went to talk to when they were having a hard time.

He was surrounded by great people, he had his crew, and they were really tight and good to each other. He did not show any signs of mental health struggles or stress in middle school or high school. Looking back, I probably could pinpoint some anxious moments, but I think they were pretty run of the mill.

He went to the high school he wanted. He went to the college he wanted. He was pursuing the studies that he wanted. He was working and traveling and socializing.

When he started to feel sick in his junior year of college, he was unmotivated, is what he said. I learned this later. He was kind of spacing out, and he was worn out. On the outside, he was operating fine. He wasn’t missing anything. He was doing well in school.

But it was hard for him, and so he put himself into therapy on campus. He didn’t tell us; he wanted to handle it by himself. For context, I’ve been in and out of therapy my whole life. His sisters have been in and out of therapy. This is not a secretive, off-topic subject in our house.

He was in therapy for several months, and then we got a call from a friend of his the spring of his junior year, who said Charlie had talked about harming himself. I couldn’t have been more surprised. I was absolutely shocked. I’d just seen him a few weeks before. Everything seemed fine.

I flew there overnight. I was there when the sun came up, got a hotel room across the street from where he lived in a group house, and I stayed there for a week.

He completely let down his guard. He was very vulnerable. He cried. He said he was scared. He could not articulate what he was scared about. That’s when we learned he’d put himself in therapy. He’d called a crisis line on campus, and they helped him. He worked with his professors to make sure that he pushed some deadlines back.

I was like, “Charlie, if you need to stop and drop out right now, it’s OK. We’ll stand behind you. Nothing is more important than you being on steady ground.”

And he said, “No; I want to finish.”

After about a week, I came home. We saw him several times, and we could tell he was struggling because he wasn’t eating. He was very thin. He didn’t look like he was sleeping much, but he was really trying hard, and he was seeing a therapist. He was talking about the future. He was making plans. He was out with friends. He was working, he was exercising. We were checking in on him.

I was like: “We don’t have to get into a long, serious conversation every time we talk, but I need to check on you. I’m going to ask you questions. What’s going on in your head is between you and your therapist or someone that you trust. It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me, but I need to know how you’re doing.”

He was an honest kid, and three weeks before he died, he was at home, and I had a little walk and talk with him, and I just said: “Tell me what’s going on. Where’s your head?” He said, “I think I’m doing well.”

But this is the depressing answer. This is the thing no one wants to hear. I hesitate to say it, but I have to say it: Depression can be bigger than any conversation you have. It lies to you.

The night before he died, he was out with friends. He was having a good time. They were staying up late into the middle of the night, and one of his friends was having a hard time, talking about some drama, and he said to her, “Whatever you’re feeling right now, it’s not going to last.”

That shows you how fast and how strong these emotions, this depression, can be — how powerful those lies can be. He was giving someone advice that he could not see.

What would you say to someone who might see their own child, potentially, in your story?

Keep talking. And as parents, as individuals, as institutions, as a society, remove every obstacle to getting help. For example, if your child has said, “OK, I think I’ll talk to a therapist,” and they’re normally an independent kid, don’t say, “Let me know when you set up the appointment.”

When you’re sick in your brain, something like researching, calling, setting up an appointment, finding insurance? Those are the very things you cannot do. Take those things out of their hands.

The other way to remove obstacles is to realize that your kids aren’t always going to come to you, and if there’s someone that they trust, cultivate that trust regardless of who they are: if it’s their friend, another relative, a coach, a teacher. Moms want to carry it all, but sometimes we’re not the right person.

Any resources you’d like to point people to, besides your book?

The Foundation for Suicide Prevention has a lot. They’re great. There was a book that I read called “The Grieving Brain” that came out right when I lost Charlie. It was a little scientific for me at that moment, but it did help me understand a different aspect of the grief itself, which was very helpful.

And Anderson Cooper’s podcast [“All There Is”] came out right when Charlie died, and I’m telling you — it was so affirming. I go back and listen to episodes, and it’s so real and so honest. It helped me see that my path to healing was through being vulnerable, honest, and open. I can’t say enough about that.

If you or a loved one are having emotional distress or thoughts of suicide, call 988 to connect with a lifeline specialist for support.

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Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her @kcbaskin.