There are times when a newspaper’s job is to explain, to put events in context, to help a community make sense of what has happened. This is not one of those times. There is no sense to be made of the death of a 17-year-old who, until a few weeks ago, was looking forward to his senior football season. Nothing we can write will change what the Coyne family has lost.
Owen Coyne died Oct. 1 after a sudden brain hemorrhage. He was a senior at Marblehead High School and a co-captain of the football team. He also played baseball and was one of the best sprinters and high jumpers in the history of the school’s track program. He had recently committed to Williams College, where he planned to play football next fall. Each summer he taught sailing for the town. As his mother put it, he spent his childhood summers at the Corinthian Yacht Club “cannonballing into the pool.” She describes him as the proud captain of the family boat and a doting older brother to Grady, Landon and Ella.
Words fail at times like this, and so we will lean on those of his mother, Angela Paradise, who has shown remarkable grace in the worst days of her life.
“I want people to know that he loved this town so deeply,” she told the Current on Sunday.
She said Owen would have been moved by the way Marblehead has rallied around his family.
“He would be really proud of this town for how much they have supported us,” she said, “during the very worst days of our lives.”
Her family hasn’t had to look far to see that support. Within hours of the news, the Marblehead Sport Shop began giving away free T-shirts bearing Owen’s No. 18 to anyone who wanted one. By Friday evening, the shop had made and handed out somewhere between 250 and 300 of them.
A video the shop posted on social media showed a steady stream of people coming through the door, and the shop said its workspace was filled with “many hugs, tears and bouts of laughter.” Customers pitched in to help print the shirts, and neighbors from Swampscott came by looking for ways to support the town.
Other gestures have been smaller and more personal. On Sunday, some of Owen’s closest friends came by the family’s home to take his 8-year-old sister, Ella, apple picking.
Paradise has also asked something of the rest of us, and every one of us should take it to heart. She hopes people won’t steer clear of her for fear of saying the wrong thing. She wants to hear about Owen, and most of all the stories she never got to hear, the ones from a classroom, a locker room or an ordinary weekend.
“I want to hear stories big or small,” she said.
That request matters, because most of us were never taught how to approach a grieving parent. We worry about saying the wrong thing, or about reopening a wound, so we say nothing at all. We nod from across the aisle at Crosby’s or the sidelines at Piper Field and keep our distance, thinking we are being respectful.
Paradise has made clear she would rather hear from us. You don’t need to find the perfect words. Say his name. Tell her about the time he taught your child to tack a sailboat, or about the catch you watched him make, or about how he held a door for you. Those stories are now part of how his family will keep him close.
There is also a hard truth about grief. The outpouring of the first days, with the vigils and the meals and the cards, will eventually slow. The grief will not. The hardest moments may come months from now. They could fall on a Saturday next fall when Williams takes the field, on the night of the first indoor track meet of the winter, at graduation in June, or on any ordinary Tuesday.
Paradise has said it helps her family to know they have a “village” trying to lift them up. If that village is going to keep doing so, it will have to show up in small, steady ways long after the headlines fade. That means remembering his siblings, who will walk the same hallways and play on the same fields, and remembering his teammates and friends, who are learning far too young what loss feels like. The schools were right to offer grief counseling in the days right after Owen’s death, and we hope students know that help remains available to them in the weeks and months ahead. Parents, coaches and teachers can do their part simply by checking in, and then checking in again.
The people who knew Owen best have described a young man worth remembering for more than his athletic talent. Track coach Nolan Raimo called him the most coachable athlete he has worked with. Raimo said Owen met success and defeat with the same grace and humility, and that he did things right “from the smallest to biggest things.” He added that “every environment was better with Owen in it.” Baseball coach Mike Giardi called him a great player but an even better person. His mother said he had a quiet confidence and was always humble, and that he “would be the last one to boast about his awards or a touchdown.”
We don’t want to wrap Owen’s life into a neat lesson, because his family deserves better than that. But it is fair to notice what his coaches, teammates and family keep coming back to. They don’t talk first about trophies or records. They talk about kindness and humility, about Sunday dinners with his grandparents that he never skipped, and about a teenager who lifted up the people around him. A gifted athlete who never needed to boast is notable, and it’s an example any of us, at any age, could stand to follow.
There is one more part of Owen’s story that we want to highlight. Months before his death, while he was getting his driver’s license, Owen asked his mother whether he could register as an organ donor, and together they signed him up. Neither could have known how soon that choice would matter. When hospital staff raised the question, Paradise said, there was little to discuss. “We know Owen would want this, and we’re on board with it.”
His donated organs are expected to save five people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Somewhere, five families are getting news they had been praying for, because a Marblehead teenager made a quiet decision with his whole life ahead of him. His family hopes his story will encourage other young people and their parents to learn about organ donation through New England Donor Services. We can think of no better way to honor that wish than to have that conversation at your own kitchen table this week.
Owen Coyne loved Marblehead fiercely, and Marblehead loved him right back. That love has been plain in the days since his death. Our job now is to make sure it is still just as plain a month, a year and a decade from now. Stop and talk to his family. Say his name. Keep showing up.
