They played their best for Kyle
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Ask any student at Visitation Catholic School in South Tacoma about 9-year-old Kyle Shiotani, and that kid will have a story.
There’s Carson Dinkins’ Kyle: king of the knock-knock jokes, champion climber of trees, the wrestler, strong enough to haul his mom across a room in a fireman’s carry.
There’s Bransen McClintic’s Kyle: the fastest kid on the football and basketball teams.
There’s John Johnson’s Kyle: invincible in snowball fights, and on the Fourth of July insisting that every firecracker get its chance to sparkle.
In Visitation’s fourth-grade classroom, Kyle Shiotani’s desk is almost as he left it when he went home sick Jan. 27. Except now a cross sits on it, surrounded by notes and rosaries left by his buddies.
Sometimes they just sit at his desk and think about him.
On that Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the school’s family and special friends luncheon, Kyle spiked a fever.
The next day his dad, Dwight Shiotani, took the day off from his job with the City of Tacoma to stay with him.
“I thought he was getting better,” Dwight said. “We played Halo. He whipped me as usual. In fact, we stopped playing because I was too easy to beat.”
The next day, Kyle’s mom, Shirley Shiotani, stayed home from the tax and accounting business she’d just launched. That afternoon, she called the doctor, who thought Kyle might have appendicitis. At Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, doctors hooked Kyle up to an IV, admitted him and started doing tests.
“The doctor came back and said he had liver failure. He said it just like that, flat,” Shirley said.
“I could tell he was shocked,” Dwight said. “Within 20 minutes, Kyle and Shirley were in an ambulance going to (Seattle) Children’s Hospital. They put him on the transplant list right away.”
With vast odds against getting a perfect match within a few days, Dwight and Shirley volunteered to give their son half their livers. Shirley’s blood matched her boy’s.
Saturday night, Shirley was admitted to the University of Washington Medical Center, scheduled for donor surgery the next day.
But Kyle was doing better on Sunday. Doctors thought his liver might be repairing itself. They decided to wait on the transplant.
“Very early Monday his blood-work numbers started getting bad again,” Shirley said. “Pressure on his brain was increasing.”
“They were prepping him for surgery. We had no choice,” Dwight said. “Shirley went down to the UW.”
She was in the surgical suite, drifting into the anesthetic. The UW doctors were waiting only for the go-ahead from the team at Children’s.
It did not come.
“The pressure on his brain increased too much,” Dwight said. “The activity in his brain stopped. When Shirley came out of sedation, they told her the surgery was canceled. I got there a few minutes later.”
Machines kept Kyle alive until his mom and dad could be with him. Doctors still do not know what killed Kyle’s liver.
It was Feb. 3. Kyle would have turned 10 in four days.
Shirley and Dwight grew up in Hawaii with the broad sense of family that is ohana. With ohana, family is as much about love as it is about blood. With ohana, the kids in Kyle’s class and the parents at Visitation work parties are the Shiotanis’ chosen family.
That awful morning, worry wedged itself in beside Shirley’s grief.
“My biggest concern Tuesday morning was the children,” she said of Visitation’s 180 students. “I called my closest friend, Liz Albers. I let her know what happened. If I couldn’t make sense of this, how could the children make sense of it?”
Albers called Principal Sheila Harrison.
“It was important that the children and the staff not learn this piecemeal,” Harrison said. “I called an emergency recess.”
The kids went out to the playground. The teachers came to Harrison’s office.
“We worked out what to do. We wanted to tell each family. We wanted to tell each class. I wanted to tell the fourth grade. We decided that when we had done that, we would all go to church and pray the rosary,” Harrison said. “During the rosary, the children’s voices started getting stronger and stronger, and parents started showing up.”
Over the next few days, children who had never lost a friend tried to figure out how to cry and laugh at their memories of Kyle. They had to work out how to honor him, how to keep him alive in their minds.
The fourth-graders asked their teacher, Jerry Manley, not to change Kyle’s desk.
They bring rosaries for it, and sit at it. They write messages to Kyle.
Each of the 17 fourth-graders has a small stick with a number on it. At the beginning of the day, they put that stick in the hot-lunch box or the no-lunch box.
Kyle was No. 14.
“It’s retired,” Manley said of the stick. “We’ve put it on the wall. As long as I’m in that class, no one else will have number 14.”
In the days before his funeral on Feb. 9, Kyle’s friends made banners and posters in his memory. They wrote brief letters to him. The Shiotanis invited them to place those letters in Kyle’s casket.
The kids also did what Kyle would have wanted: They kept up with their schoolwork – and they practiced basketball. He was No. 5 on the team of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders coached by Toby Dinkins and John Albers.
“These kids have not won a game in two years,” said Sherri Dinkins, whose son, Carson, was best friends with Kyle. “Last year they got the scoreboard turned off in every game.”
That’s the merciful policy for games in which a team is losing by more than 20 points.
“This year their goal was to not get the scoreboard turned off, she said.
The boys decided to wear Kyle’s number on their sleeves, to fold his game T-shirt on the bench and place it where he usually sat. They wanted to dedicate the game to him, but a counselor advised them against that. He worried that if they lost, they’d feel they’d failed their friend.
So the boys promised Kyle that when they met the team from St. Patrick School on Saturday, they would play their hardest.
“They started the game, and it was like I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know where these players came from,” Toby Dinkins said. “I have never seen them play like that before.”
Visitation parents were crying, laughing, shouting, cheering.
“It was the best game I’ve ever watched,” Sherri Dinkins said.
“It was the hardest game I’ve ever watched,” said Shirley Shiotani, who was there with Dwight.
Close to the buzzer, the scoreboard was still on. It showed Visitation leading, 29-27.
Carson Dinkins scored, and then St. Pat’s. It was 31-29 when a Visitation player committed a foul. St. Pat’s had two free-throw shots.
“The poor St. Pat’s player,” Sherri Dinkins said. “He had this insane crowd of Visitation parents, cheering and yelling. He made one, and he missed one.”
Visitation had won by one point.
Kyle Shiotani, the little guy who played big, would have been 10 that day.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com">
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
