They rushed to the emergency room, but the tests showed nothing. On the third, they went to another beach, in Florida, where Jonathan woke up one night with such extreme chest pain that he feared his heart was about to stop. At the end of each December, they’d start the calendar over.įor the first two years after Tyler’s death, they didn’t travel back to Isle of Palms for his birthday. Olivia’s favorites were the ones that showed his beautifully imperfect smile, caused by what she called a “pull,” which had left one side of his bottom lip slightly higher than the other. In their own bedroom, Tyler’s parents kept turning the pages of the calendar that featured a different photo of him for each month. “I dream”: “about cookies.” “I say”: “I believe in God.” “I understand”: “my Mom is so lovely.” “I wonder”: “what Heaven looks like.” “I worry”: “everyone that gets hurt.” “A good boy and a fisherman,” he answered. They didn’t remove his assignment from first grade that began with “I am” next to a blank line. You are the best Mom ever,” he wrote, signing it “Love Tyler,” before adding, “P.S. In a letter to Olivia, he once tried to head off any potential punishment. He didn’t get in trouble often, but when he did, his parents confiscated his many electronics, because nothing irritated him more than that. He thought SpongeBob SquarePants was hilarious, and he could play Minecraft for hours. Still, Tyler was, in many ways, just a kid. “An old soul,” relatives often called the boy, who named his beagle Johnny Cash. “Dear Lord,” he always began when his turn came, and sometimes it took four or five minutes for him to reach “Amen.” Tyler brought his devotion home with him, too, requesting that he and his parents pray together each night before they went to sleep.
Tyler was serious about the things he deemed important, and he took nothing more seriously than karate, which he earned a junior black belt in at age 10, and church, which he attended almost every Sunday, even when his mother and father didn’t.