Death and All His Friends
One of the joys of working at a school is that you get to watch young people grow up. Even though I’m not technically a teacher I still interact with students on a daily basis - rescuing a lost term paper, helping with a project, or hiring on student summer help.
I met Tyler before I even worked at the school, actually. When I was working at the Y, there was this teenage boy, about thirteen or fourteen, who was mad for lifting weights. He would sneak in the back door and down to the free weight room - where no one under fifteen was allowed - and lift weights. I ended up sharing all of my Muscle and Fitness magazines with him so he could actually have some organization to the process.
Later I went to work at the school, and we ran into each other. We immediately hit it off again, talking about his lifting regime and the difference between practical strength and what body builders do. He would come by my office and eat his protein and talk about life, the universe, and everything. One summer he was looking for a job, so I hired him to help install the new computers. He was over the moon - it was his first job. He was so excited about it - to actually have his own pocket money - it was infectious and you had to be excited for him as well. The other student workers were not happy about him working for us. I never found out for sure if Tyler really had Asperger’s, but he sure seemed like it. He had no ability to pick up on non-verbal cues, he had no subtlety and he was very literal in every sense. On his first day of work he told me where he kept his seizure medication. He said it would probably never come up, but he wanted to make sure someone knew about it. Again, I’m not sure what the medical condition was, I didn’t want to pry. He drove the others mad. They claimed he had a temper and I’d just never seen it. Perhaps I coddled him, but you know I never caught him off in a closet taking a nap during work hours, either, like I did the others. He was excited to come to work every day and he worked hard, although he also drove my boss mad, being Asperger-ish. He didn’t do very well with generic instructions. But he was a good kid and I liked him.
Often times in the summer he would walk to work - a little over two miles each way. It’s hot in Texas but I never remember him complaining about it. I would usually give him a lift home.
His junior year he played football for the first time - nose tackle. Knucklehead, he knew nothing about football, but one of the coaches wanted him to work on practical strength - lateral movements and such - and thought this might be a way for him to do it. Plus he probably needed a nose tackle.
The spring of his senior year he got the opportunity to pitch a film idea to professional producers during the AFI Dallas Film Festival. I gave him a lift downtown - after I made him change clothes. Being Asperger-ish... yeah. He took the “Dress comfortably” literally and was wearing cargo shorts, a polo with the shirt not tucked in, and trainers. I told him I was fine giving him a lift but he wasn’t going to pitch his film looking like that. I explained that even if someone tells you to dress comfortably - if the event is important to you, DRESS like it’s important to you. I watched his pitch and it was really well done.
He went off to college - Hampshire - to study classics. He taught himself Greek. He took transfer courses at Amherst. When he would come home we would talk about his plans for the future. He knew studying classics was a dead end but he hoped to study philosophy or classics in graduate school and then become a professor. We’d also talk about Harry Potter and he wondered how Alan was going to pull off the rather physical scenes in Deathly Hallows. He was home this past fall and I remember being delighted to see him. He was graduating this year after having been accepted to UC-Berkeley for graduate school.
This morning he missed a class. This was so unlike him his professor sent someone round to his dormitory to fetch him. They found him there, dead. As of yet we have no information on why this is. His mother came to the school to pick up his younger sister. She was hysterical. The sister became hysterical. There is nothing quite like hearing someone cry out with such anguish and pain and have it reverberates through your building... it’s really the most awful thing.
I keep hoping that I’ve heard wrong, and that I’m typing this for no reason and everyone can have a laugh later at my expense. But I saw the look on his mother’s face this afternoon, and my hopes for a good laugh later about it are slim. I keep thinking of his sister, who before lunch was probably just wondering when she could kip off behind a locker to have a snog with her boyfriend.
Tyler wasn’t a saint by any means. He was most likely on the Spectrum, and people lose patience with that when they don’t understand it. He could be exasperating and difficult and sometimes a lunkhead. But I was always interested to see what sort of man he would grow up to be. And now he’s gone. And I miss him terribly already.