How Rodger Deevers paints his way out of the abyss

Note: This story contains frank discussions of mental illness and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For local resources, the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Lane County lists ways that residents can get help now if needed.

When Rodger Deevers was 13 years old, he saw a black hole. 

He was in the backyard of his family home off River Road, lying in the shade of apple trees and watching the clouds pass by. Then, there in the branches, he saw what looked like a grease stain smudge on a window hanging in the air. It was uncertain around the edges, an impossible presence. Something wrong. 

A wave of inexplicable despair washed over him, he recalled. He didn’t tell anyone that he had seen something. There was another family crisis to attend to: his uncle, Jack, was an engineer and Vietnam veteran whose bipolar manic tendencies rotated him between the veterans’ hospital in Roseburg and the Deevers family home in Eugene. 

No need to stress out his parents more over a one-time weird thing, he thought.

But it wasn’t. The hallucinated black hole smudge was a rarity, but the deep well of depression it brought with it was a daily companion. 

Now, 44 years later, he has entirely pivoted to complete candor about his struggles with mental illnesses, suicidal ideation and post-traumatic stress disorder, like in his comments at a May meeting of the City Club of Eugene on the relationship between arts and mental health.

“Three days ago I was thinking about killing myself,” he said. “I’ve been suicidal for 26 years. I deal with severe mental illness. I have four diagnoses, and if it wasn’t for art, I wouldn’t be here.”

Instead of a greasy, despair-stoking black hole, Deevers chooses color. He’s a painter, always working on a canvas in the makeshift studio he’s set up in the office of the financial advisory firm that he and his brother Gary took over from their father. His work largely consists of brightly saturated portraits, faces daubed in splashy saturated pigments.

But more than painting for himself or for profit, the majority of his pieces are done for free for nonprofits. He’s currently painting a portrait of actor Gene Wilder, in character as Willy Wonka, on a canvas set up in his office. It’s for an Alzheimer’s-themed art show organized by Ken Brown of the Hope Project.  

Then there are the pro bono mural projects he works on, like the ones done last summer for a Eugene apartment complex for former foster youth, or the mural on a piece of plywood when ice cream shop Peek-A-Boo Delight’s glass front door was broken, or the cheery woodland mural for an overnight shelter for families experiencing homelessness earlier this month.

“When I’m able to put paint on the canvas, I feel like life isn’t work,” he said. “The challenges just aren’t as plentiful, and honestly, I could focus.”

What keeps Deevers around

Deevers said his overarching message is that people can live with suicide. He knows that sounds ironic.

“But it’s absolutely true,” he said. “I’ve done it. It takes work. It takes some effort. It takes a reprioritization of what your life is. But it’s so worth it, because what it does is it gives you control.”

For him, that takes the form of a guiding concept he calls “preventive resilience,” which for him looks like a granular approach to scheduling his day: He gets out of bed as soon as he opens his eyes. His depression, he said, makes him want to linger and retreat from the world, so popping up and making the bed is a must-do. He frequently checks in with himself to gauge how he’s feeling.

It also looks like plenty of time spent painting between meetings at Deevers and Sons. His brother, Gary, handles most of the one-on-one customer interactions, while Rodger focuses more on the development side, bringing new clients in and representing the firm in the business community. 

“He just wants to be of help,” Gary Deevers said of his brother. “Whether it’s helping people with a retirement plan, or to talk somebody off the ledge when it comes to suicide, or to go and have coffee with somebody, just so that they know that somebody’s there to listen, his paintings, when he’s doing murals. He has so many multifaceted things, but it all comes back down to the one single focus, which is to help people.”

To Deevers, the problem with how people talk about suicide and mental health is that it’s all done far too late in the process. Proactive discussion, he thinks, would help push people to take care of themselves earlier in the process, when they can build skills toward a productive daily life, and not later on, when they’re in crisis.

“If the spectrum of mental wellness is a ruler, everything that we do as a society, is done in that last inch, and it’s all reactionary,” he said. “I need people to get back to inch five or six — that’s when we can do work. That’s when we start initiating the preventative resilience at that point, not in that last inch.”

I’ve been to the abyss. The first time, if you pull yourself back and never go back there, you’re fine. But the second time, and especially the third time, it looks right back at you, and then the fourth time it knows your name, and the fifth time it calls for you.

rodger deevers

While he espouses preventive resilience now, there are times when he wasn’t as vigilant. 

Gary Deevers recalled a Christmas where someone else’s vigilance kept his brother alive. Rodger had been in a funk and left the family gathering. Their mother called him and demanded he get back to the house. Rodger had guns in his house at the time, Gary said, and in retrospect, he thinks that night could have been the end.

“I’ve been to the abyss,” Rodger Deevers said. “The first time, if you pull yourself back and never go back there, you’re fine. But the second time, and especially the third time, it looks right back at you, and then the fourth time it knows your name, and the fifth time it calls for you.”

He lied about his mental health to get into the Air Force, saying he was fine so he could pursue a career as an engineer. After he left the military and worked odd jobs, his father extended the offer for him to work at Deevers and Sons.

He spent time in the Johnson Unit, which used to be the inpatient unit for patients with acute behavioral health crises at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center. Outside of art therapy and crisis stabilization, he said, that wasn’t helpful either. It was about saying what he had to say to get discharged, which he said made him feel like a “con man.”

His wife, Lisa Deevers, left him after 12 years and three children because he wasn’t taking care of his mental health. He never disclosed his problems to his wife, and the two fought under the strain of raising three boys, two of whom have autism, one with high support needs.

After being divorced for 12 years, the two remarried and have now been together for another 13 years.

Lisa, who has known Rodger for more than 30 years after the two met at strength training class at Lane Community College, teared up when talking about how much she adores him.

She said that beyond her husband’s work helping others, she’s seen firsthand how it lifts his mood when he has a mural project or another nonprofit to help out.

“It’s opened up so many avenues for him, and I hope to God he just keeps on doing what he’s doing, and I hope he doesn’t decide to not come home someday. That’s another fear of mine.”

But even now, life is not perfect. Around his life as a painter, financial adviser, husband and father, Deevers said he frequently has moments of suicidal ideation. He has the toolkit to get through daily life, but recognizes that advice like “making your bed in the morning” and “checking in with yourself” does not land when someone is in the thick of it. 

“When you’re in crisis, none of that matters,” he said. “It’s like, ‘I’m thinking about killing myself, and you’re talking to me about building a foundation?’”

That’s why he’s careful to never offer false hope when he’s talking with someone who is suicidal. That’s a frequent, informal activity for him as he’s become more vocal as a suicide-reduction activist, with people in his network referring others who are struggling for conversations with Deevers. (He said he is always cognizant that he is not a licensed professional, and is quick to refer people to go to the hospital or get other help when a simpler conversation is not enough.)  

False hope has stung him especially. The Deevers family were members of Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal Christian denomination. But speaking in tongues and having hands laid upon Deevers when he was a teenager didn’t help, even though he wanted it to. He let himself believe it worked for a few days, he said, but then the familiar feeling crept back in.

“If you allow yourself to believe in hope, and then that hope doesn’t show up, it could be harder than just dealing with the thing on its own,” he said. “I’m not going to give you any hope. I’m going to tell you how I think, what I know, but I don’t offer hope, because if I can’t provide that, I know the despair that hope causes.”

Instead of hope, he wants people to have something more concrete: agency.

Remembering better times, in paint

When talking about how people can put a vague, pleasant cover on mental health, Deevers invoked the story of 1930s Budapest, where a spate of suicides led a professor and hypnotist to make a satirical “Smile Club,” which reportedly caught on in earnest as people practiced smiles to combat depression.

“That is just another, in a long line of attempts by people, to change our thoughts and feelings and behaviors around a very complex deep psychological issue, instead of actually making it a conversation about why we’re feeling this way and how we can best support people who are in these positions, that the idea is, like, strap a smile on,” he said. 

In the makeshift studio in the back of Deevers and Sons, the walls are covered in different, more heartfelt smiles in the portraits Deevers has painted. 

His current canvas, the in-progress painting of Wilder as Willy Wonka, is set up over a drop cloth taped to the office carpet floor. But the painting on the opposite side speaks more to the work he’s looking to do more of.

It’s a portrait of his friend, Josh Means. Deevers found out via Facebook that he died by suicide in 2023. He was angry at first. Deevers was supposed to be his last call, so he could try to talk Means out of it. But he didn’t want to remember his friend like that. So he started painting a portrait of him with his trademark colorful smile, smiling out from the canvas.

He’d like to keep that going across Eugene and Springfield. Deevers wants to do free portraits for people whose loved ones have died by suicide, to change how people think about them after they’re gone.

“Those memories shouldn’t all be bad,” he said.

Deevers would like to hear from people who have lost loved ones to suicide and would want a free memorial portrait. He can be reached via email acceptism@gmail.com.