A lasting legacy of music to remember a life cut short
Before James Haughey learned to drive, his mother Marilou would give him rides to Long and Mcquade to look at baby grand pianos.
James, who started playing the piano at the age of six, would ask staff at the store if he could play one, and would perform for everyone in the store to hear.
To honour their son’s memory, Marilou and her husband Alex raised money to buy the baby grand piano James had wanted, and on Thursday morning gave it to his school, Bethlehem Catholic High School, as a gift.
James was a year away from completing the necessary requirements to teach music when he died on May 5, 2014.
He and friend Sarah Wensley were killed when the vehicle he was driving was struck by a drunk driver in a stolen vehicle. James and Wensley, both 17, and their friend Kara Mitsuing were on their way to track practice.
Mitsuing survived but was seriously injured.
Marilou and Alex listened as former student Andrea Desalisa played the piano in its inaugural public performance. Her hands floated above the gleaming keys, landing as she played a special arrangement of Kid Cudi’s The Prayer and John Legend’s All of Me. She and James’s parents sported bow ties.
The Haugheys each shared a message with the students. Alex said his was from his son, known to many as J.P., through him: Be proud of yourself, no matter how big or small your accomplishments are.
Marilou told the students she doesn’t want their parents to go through what she is going through, and spoke out about preventing impaired driving.
“Every single day (when) the afternoon comes, I wait for him to come home,” she said.
Playing piano and music were James’s passions, Alex told reporters after the students returned to their classes.
“From the first day, we set in our hearts to try and raise enough money to buy a baby grand. Although he couldn’t have it in his bedroom, then we’ve got a great place for it here in Bethlehem High School that the students will get really good use out of and take advantage of having some quality equipment to practise on,” Alex said.
Marilou remembers hearing her son playing the family’s piano in the living room in the wee hours of the morning when he didn’t have to go to school the next day. If it wasn’t the piano, it was one of his two guitars, she said.
“Even our neighbours, they miss the piano during the summer because he could sit on the piano and just hammer it out as loud as he could — and so, that’s his passion,” she said.
After his death, the Haugheys held fundraising events, such as steak dinners, and received donations toward the piano from the local community as well as people in the Philippines.
The Haugheys’ only child left a lasting impression on staff at his school, including his first-period music teacher, Darcie Lich.
Lich recalled that James, a percussionist in her class, would slip in late with a Tim Hortons cup in hand.
One day, she told him that if he was going to be late again, he should bring her a cup of coffee too.
The next time he was late, he walked in with two cups. That was her last memory of him. The piano is a beautiful gift, something most students wouldn’t ordinarily get to access to, and a legacy to J.P. — “to have something like that as a reminder of the gifts that he brought to our school and of the kind of impact that a single person can have through the arts, through music, through just living passionately,” Lich told The Starphoenix.
She and James’s homeroom teacher, Camille St. Amand, played a duet, Anetra’s Dance, during the ceremony.
Bonny Stephenson of MADD Canada’s Saskatoon chapter also spoke, imploring students not to drive impaired, to arrange for rides if they are intoxicated, and to call 911 to report suspected drunk drivers.
Stephenson lost her son Quinn in 2013 after a drunk driver struck his vehicle.
She said losing their sons brought the two families together, but they don’t want any other family to experience such a loss.
“You still love, you still care for your child even though there is no physical presence,” Alex said. “And I think that’s one of the most painful things for a parent to go through. And if we can change the attitude of impaired drivers, and we could save one life, it is worth it, doing whatever we’re doing.”