Pain persists years after son's death from cancer

June 18, 2007

In February 2005, Barb and Dan Wilson watched their 15-year-old son die of cancer.

They buried Wyatt Daniel Wilson after memorial at Toledo High School, packed with family members and friends who had supported the family through six years of medical treatment.

Two years later, the pain persists.

“Grief is not a straight line,” said Barb Wilson of Toledo. “You’re going along fine and then just all of a sudden you drop, and then you just climb back up and you’re fine.”

“I just work a lot,” said Dan Wilson, shop foreman in Seattle for Puget Sound Truck Lines. “It still brings tears to your eyes. … It doesn’t get any easier. You just figure out a way to live with it.”

It’s especially tough on holidays, such as Fathers Day, and Wyatt’s birthday and the day he died, Feb. 6. “It never goes away,” he said.

Barb Wilson has seen her share of grief. Her brother, Michael Lee Wright, was killed in Vietnam. Her parents died a year before Wyatt’s death.

“You never forget when it’s a child,” she said, recalling her grandmother’s grief at losing a child to drowning. Forty years later, she said, “Tears would come to her eyes.”

During the turbulent six years of Wyatt’s battle to live, the Wilsons divorced, but they worked together to help their only child. Dan’s medical insurance covered many of the bills, and the Toledo community supported them as well. Barb spent months at a time with Wyatt living in the Ronald McDonald House in Seattle while he received cancer treatment at Children’s Hospital.

At the hospital, Barb said she saw 19 beautiful children fight to live, only to die. One family brought a little girl to the hospital for her first treatment on a Wednesday and she died Friday. Another set of parents watched all four of their boys die before the age of 12. A teenage boy living in the Ronald McDonald House with his mother awoke one morning to learn that his mother had collapsed of a heart attack downstairs and died.

Despite her fear, Barb said she never let Wyatt see her cry.

“You could see the fear in kids’ eyes when the parents would get upset,” she said. When parents stop smiling, children react to the “deer in the headlights” look they see in the eyes of their mother and father.

Many parents wanted to die after burying their children, Barb said. She also contemplated suicide, but couldn’t do that to Wyatt. “He tried so hard to live and for me to end my life, just so pettily, he wouldn’t have been proud of me.”

I cannot begin to imagine the pain these children and their families endured.

I knew Wyatt and his parents only a little through church. Our family attended spaghetti feeds and bought raffle tickets for fund-raisers. Along with so many others in Toledo, we hoped and prayed for a miracle cure that would save his life.

“We wouldn’t have made it without this community,” Barb said, specifically mentioning Mary Rico, Steve McNew, the Ripps and the Kinsmans. “They supported us mentally, physically, food, bills … To have a town come together behind one family like this for six years was just amazing.”

In May 2006, the community dedicated the Wyatt Wilson Memorial Playground in a Toledo park. Although Wyatt is buried in St. Francis Mission’s cemetery, the park is where Barb goes to grieve.

“I see so much sadness at the cemetery. When you go to the park, there’s the big rock there with Wyatt’s picture and the date there … when he was born and when he died. When you look around, it’s happy.”

But Dan, who lives in Auburn, Wash., said he visits the cemetery once or twice a month, bringing flowers and visiting with his son.

Barb and Dan both hop on their Harley Davidson motorcycles for therapy. Wyatt loved riding the Hog with his dad, and Barb began riding while her son was in the hospital. “It was the only thing that would drown out the sound of the hospital.”

Now Barb is hoping the community will help one last time to share recollections of Wyatt’s all-too-brief life in a book. Anyone can contribute a memory or photo online by following this link: http://beta.imemorybook.com/bookshelf/99082/contributions Or contact me at 360-864-6938 or at the email address below.

When he was 9, doctors diagnosed Wyatt with rhabdonmyosarcoma, a rare form of testicular cancer. After a series of surgeries and chemotherapy, he went into remission for two years, but the cancer returned.

Barb recalled one return trip from Seattle in 2004 when she asked her son if he was afraid to die. He shot her that look teenagers give parents who ask a stupid question, then answered: “Why should I be afraid? Grandma and Grandpa are there.”

“I never saw a look of fear in that kid’s eyes ever,” his mother said, adding, “Those six years were everything to me. I got to see him grow up.”

But in December 2004, the family ran out of options.

“Wyatt didn’t want to be in the hospital to die. He wanted to be home,” Barb said. Hospice nurses cared for him at their Toledo home. He lay on a hospital bed in the living room, curled up watching cartoons.

His last night, Wyatt asked his mother, “Why did God give me all this stuff that was so rough?”

“I just put my head down and it’s the first time he ever really saw me cry. And I said, ‘I don’t know, baby, why don’t you ask him? You’ll just have to ask him.’”

Dan, Barb and I all wonder what he answered.

Julie McDonald Zander is a personal historian and former journalist who lives in Toledo. She owns Chapters of Life, a company dedicated to preserving the past, one family’s story at a time. Her Web site is www.chaptersoflife.com She can be reached at memorybooks@chaptersoflife.com