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Child's Death A Reality Jolt For Parents

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: November 26, 2008

In the case of Efrem Tyree, a remarkable 9-year-old whose last act of creativity was to fashion an escape from life, thoughtful adults rediscover what it means to be stumped. Welcome back to grammar school.

We gape, grasp, fumble for a cogent explanation. Education fails. Experience, too.

We can conjure surefire solutions for an international financial meltdown, follow up with a quick fix for what ails domestic automakers, render a complicated opinion on "Dancing With the Stars," and be finished in time for lunch.

But this? Who dares decipher irredeemable despair in the fourth grade? Efrem Tyree, whose final thoughts were his alone, left few clues. From the void comes a grim new reality.

These phrases - "9-year-old" and "commits suicide" - shouldn't pass within a dozen time zones. But here they are, fused into a frozen slap across our grown-up preoccupations.

Kind, Smart, Sensitive

Weighing suicide in his 1960 study of psychosomatic disease, British physician A.T.W. Simeons wrote, "A tendency to self-destruction seems to be inherent in the overdeveloped human brain." This at least, given the little outsiders know, seems to fit.

Tim O'Shaughnessy, a neighbor whose 7-year-old son was a sometimes-playmate, described Efrem as "smart," "awesome" and "kind," but with a tendency to take "everything personally." It's any outsider's guess whether Efrem was predisposed to hypersensitivity, or it emerged from a perfect storm of difficult conditions.

His parents were recently separated; he'd moved with his mom and little sister from Fort Myers to River Ridge; he'd encountered tough social and academic sledding as the new kid at Athenian Academy; and Efrem and his mom apparently had settled into a pattern of school-related arguments.

That stipulated, it is not for us to wonder - and in so wondering, accuse - whether Jacqueline Tyree heard but ignored her son's warning signs.

After all, modern America is punctuated by countless millions of bright, intuitive youngsters who have endured, or are enduring, similar hardship without resorting to that final desperate episode.

Terrible, Horrible, No-Good

Alexander, the iconic anti-hero of children's literature, suffered a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day and sought only to escape to Australia. How quaint. How innocent. Efrem Tyree's stack of terrible, horrible days eclipsed every possible getaway but one, leaving the legacy of a world unimaginably recast.

Now we know. A 9-year-old not only can entertain thoughts of self-demise, he can develop a plan and methodically carry it out. After dinner. Scrubbed, pruney and soft from a bath. With his mom and sister in the next room. Devastating.

The 9-year-old in the Jackson household has lately engaged the jabberwocky of long division; resists limitations on video-game play and hours invested in SpongeBob SquarePants; considers "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" great literature; longs to master pingpong; and would rather not extract conclusions from the data compiled in a recent science fair experiment.

To the degree that an unlicensed, inexpert parent can discern, I'm thinking the heir apparent does not despair. But perhaps the lesson of Efrem Tyree, if a lesson exists, is that details matter. What did Mom miss? Maybe nothing.

What are the rest of us missing about our own offspring? Let's resolve to find out before reality shifts again.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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