New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
A ‘loving, empathetic heart’
Ethan Song died just as life was opening up
GUILFORD — In January, it looked like Ethan Song was hitting his stride as a Guilford High School sophomore.
In the past few months he had gone through major chest surgery for a condition that would have seriously limited his breathing ability. He was an all-star on the lacrosse team. His brother, Evan, had left for Boston College and his sister, Emily, was studying nursing at the University of Connecticut, so Ethan had his parents, Kristin and Mike Song, all to himself.
“We really thought we were on our way,” said Kristin Song. “And he was doing so well in school and just got his braces off. … That day I was like, ‘We are all that and a bag of chips. This kid is going to do great things.’ ”
That day was Jan. 31. Ethan, who unknown to his parents had been playing with guns at a friend’s house, pulled the trigger on what he thought was an unloaded .357 Magnum and shot himself to death.
Since then, Waterbury State’s Attorney Maureen Platt has ruled that Ethan’s death was accidental and stated that the gun’s owner, Daniel Markle, would not be charged because, under Connecticut law, he would have known the gun was loaded and that a minor could “gain access” to it without permission. The Songs have launched a campaign, called Ethan’s Law, to increase gun owners’ responsibility for storing their weapons safely.
Since then, Guilford police have charged Markle’s son, who is 14, with second-degree manslaughter in connection with Ethan’s death, and with firstdegree reckless endangerment from an earlier incident.
“(Ethan Song) could really melt your heart with his compassion for other people.” Mike Song, Ethan’s father
Please ask
And since then, the Songs have dealt with their grief, leaned on their family and close friends and taken action to honor Ethan’s life. But among the hardest things they’ve had to cope with has been how people avoid talking about him, how others freeze when they mention his name.
“That is one of the saddest things about losing a child is people stop talking about that child,” Kristin Song said. “And so for me it’s kind of like mist in the air that kind of like evaporates. And people partly don’t want to ask because they don’t want to upset you. But the most upsetting thing is when people don’t ask you. And so when I meet moms who’ve lost children, I always try to ask them, ‘What was one really amazing thing about your child?’ Just so they feel there’s still a connection to that kid.”
While she understands it can be awkward, Song said, “It’s hurtful, because I have three kids and everyone’s (asking), ‘Oh, how’s Emily and Evan?’ ”
The Songs need and want to talk about Ethan. As painful as the memory of his death is, it’s important that he remain a part of their lives.
“I will say that my greatest joy — I loved every minute of raising my children. I know that sounds like cliche, but I loved hearing their first words, seeing their first steps. It really just filled my cup of joy. So that really was my job,” Kristin Song said.
“And you’re great at it to this day,” Mike Song said.
The Songs have many amazing things to say about Ethan. He had an especially caring, empathetic nature that he expressed in a way that warmed the heart, they said.
It showed in how Ethan cared for 95 of the 107 foster dogs the family has taken in from the Little Pink Shelter. He and his mother had set a goal of 100.
“These dogs come off these 18-wheelers and they’re freaked out because they were either strays, sitting in a shelter,” Kristin Song said. “They would be frantic, and Ethan would just sit down and just have this amazing gift where he could just calm them down. Literally they would just curl up in his lap, and it happened almost every single time.
It was really such a unique trait.”
It showed in his love for his ethnic heritage, which included grandparents from Mexico, South Korea and a Jewish grandmother who left Nazi Germany for the Netherlands and gave Ethan the gold Star of David she had been forced to wear “because he was just so caring about it,” Mike Song said.
On a tour of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Ethan wore an Israeli flag over his shoulders. “We didn’t know he had an Israeli flag,” Kristin Song said. “He draped it around his shoulders and he walked the entire house and he said, ‘This is in honor of Grammy.’ I mean, this is what a 14-year-old kid’s thinking about.”
“He could really melt your heart with his compassion for other people,” Mike Song said.
It showed in how he reached out to others who might be left alone.
“One thing I loved about Ethan was he was the kid who went into the cafeteria, and if a special-needs kid was sitting by himself he would go gather him up,” Kristin Song said. “And I have texts from some of those moms who told me that. I didn’t know that he did this, and it just meant so much to them as a mom, and of course to their child. … He just had a sweet way about him.
“He had that loving, empathetic heart,” she said. After her mother died, “I would always play her music … because my mother played music all the time in her house, and he would hear it up in his room and he would come down and just give me a hug ’cause I would be crying and thinking of her. He just got it intuitively.”
“I think it defined him, and it made him feel different from the other two kids, so he really embraced it,” Mike Song said.
“I’d always tell him, ‘You’re going to make such a great husband,’ because he just naturally was a loving kid,” Kristin Song said. “It just came natural to him. And he was funny, really, really funny.”
“He would crack up laughing about stuff and he would always be teasing us about one thing or another, in a fun way,” Mike Song said.
It would have been ‘his time’
The loss of Ethan means a future with no children living full time at home. Once Evan Song, 19, went to college and with Emily Song, 21, at University of Connecitcut, it was going to be just Mike, Kristin and Ethan — and the dogs — in the house on Norton Avenue. (The Songs moved in August to a house away from Guilford center, in a quieter area with a view of the water.)
“The saddest part to me is that we were both looking forward to having three years with Ethan alone,” said Mike Song. They had plans to give Ethan “his time,” as his mother put it. “He was just looking forward to just being the only kid,” she said.
The whole family is close, but Evan and Emily are more typical siblings. “They fought over who’s going to sleep in which room, all that normal sibling stuff they did,” Mike Song said. “So he was going to have the house to himself.”
Ethan loved to travel, his father said. “I was dying to take him to these fun places that I sometimes get to go to.” He has written three books about time management and owns Get Control!, which offers webinars and training on the subject.
Besides the trip to Holland, they went to South Korea to visit Mike Song’s father, a Korean War hero, and they also indulged their love of sushi. “He definitely would say, ‘But we’re going to stop off in Japan and do a sushi thing,’ ” Mike Song said. “He was just ready to travel the world.”
The other food focus was lobster rolls. “We had a quest to find the best lobster roll in the world and the best sushi in the world, so we were reading and evaluating these lobster rolls all up and down the Shoreline and Connecticut,” Mike Song said. “Used to have these arguments about cold vs. hot lobster rolls.
“The funny thing was he would bite into a lobster roll and he’d say, ‘These are the five things about this roll that I like and these are five things that I don’t like.’ … I kind of thought he was just listening to what I said and just parroting it back, but I started to realize he could taste the difference in food.”
“Used to drive me crazy because I don’t eat lobster,” Kristin Song said.
Ethan also was “very intellectual,” his mother said. “He was reading Camus and so was my daughter at college and he understood it,” Mike Song said. “He wanted to go into the military and, that day he died, at breakfast we kind of made an agreement that he would go into college first.”
He also was interested in his family ancestry. “He had collected flags and was obsessed with having flags of different countries that he was from,” Mike Song said. “He had one relative from Mexico (Kristin Song’s mother), so he had a Mexican flag in his room. He wanted to celebrate everybody’s culture. And he was proud of his culture. Sometimes we would say, ‘Ethan, it’s beautiful that you’re so proud of your culture but don’t forget to learn about other people’s cultures,’” and he would take that on as well.
The Songs saw Ethan really coming into his own during the last year. “He was an all-star lacrosse player for one year. … I’m really glad that he did that, and that was really nice to see him doing sports,” Mike Song said. His grades were up too. He was a member of the United Nations Club and Unified Sports, which pairs Special Olympics athletes with those without intellectual disabilities. The Songs plan to make a donation to the organization.
About six months before the accident, Ethan “had to go through a fairly major surgery and he did it with so much courage,” Mike Song said. “His chest was growing inwards. It is not an uncommon thing but … it’s a major surgery. … If it kept going he would have had trouble breathing. So Ethan said, ‘I’m getting that surgery.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this? I mean a lot of people try to live with it.’ He was like, ‘Absolutely not.’
“So, sadly he went through a very arduous surgery, quickly weaned himself off the opioids — he really didn’t want to have anything to do with that, because he really wanted to live, he wanted to survive,” Mike Song said. “And he recovered really fast and his chest looked great and we just thought, ‘Wow, this kid’s out of the woods.’ ”
His father continued: “It was as if — and this doesn’t happen for a lot of people — the one thing that he was self-conscious about suddenly disappeared and so we were very up, and then obviously we crashed …”
Keeping Ethan’s memory alive
As they move forward in their forever-altered lives, the Songs want people to remember Ethan, and not to freeze up when he comes up in conversation.
“For people who really know us well, our family and good, good friends, I would just like people to be more relaxed when I bring up his name,” Mike Song said. Referring to Kristin, himself and their other two children, he said, “You’ve got four people on different grieving pathways. At this point, I like it when people say, ‘How are you doing?’ not how sad they are. … I may bring up Ethan and if I do, don’t feel awkward. It’s just a natural thing for a parent to want to talk about your child.”
Song wants people to respond to where he is today — working to make firearms laws safer and planning other activities in honor of Ethan — not where he was 10 months ago.
“I think for the most part, people have been amazing,” he said. “And if something irritated me it was more because of the rawness of the experience; they were always trying to say something nice. I think early on we decided, everybody means well . ... I think what we realized was before this happened to us that we would have acted the same way. You don’t know what to say. A lot of people said no words. There were 1,500 people at Ethan’s wake so we heard 1,500 different people attempt to try to say ‘I’m so sorry’ and it was beautiful.
“And now I feel like it’s been 10 months and now I feel like I want to ask them how they’re doing,” Mike Song said. “Because it’s awkward for them. They don’t know at what point to stop being this incredibly sympathetic friend. But I like to ask them how they’re doing, pretty quickly. But I always talk about Ethan for a little bit of that conversation . ... So many people can express that this has been a tragedy but it starts to wear on you.”
What helps is people supporting their efforts to pass Ethan’s Law and their charitable fundraisers, he said. “I think those are where a lot of my energy’s going into right now, to turn this negative not into a positive, but ... it helps get you back to some semblance of your former self, to be doing positive things out there. And it seems for me to be a positive feedback loop. I feel better and better the more I bump into these folks who want to collaborate and work on this statute and try to do something that could really change the world.”