Short
Life, Long Reach
by Jeff Jacobs
The boys played
the first game only a few weeks after Danny died. They played it in the parking
lot outside High Street School in South Glastonbury, and when winter cooperated
a few years later, they took the game onto Pond Pasture. There were no fans, no
fanfare and no funds raised. There were only the stories.
The boys would throw their sticks in the middle, and one by one they would step
forward and share their Danny Casey memory, their Danny moment.
Anders Peterson had a good one. He remembered when they were only 10 or 11 and
went to a Whalers game. Anders' dad, Donald, didn't care much for the downtown
garages, so he parked on the street a good distance from the Civic Center. Too
far for Danny's liking, in fact, and he chirped all the way to the game and all
the way home. Mr. Peterson had enough. He stopped the car at the foot of
Danny's street and got out with the intention of giving the young fellow a
noogie. Danny deked him good. He locked the car doors, climbed up front and
landed at the steering wheel. As Mr. Peterson's nose pressed against the
window, Danny pretended to drive away.
"Ooh," Anders said, "Danny could be cheeky."
What was it Thoreau wrote? "The death of friends will inspire us as much
as their lives. Their memories will be encrusted over with sublime and pleasing
thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our friends
have no place in the graveyard." If Henry David's ghost could freeze
Walden Pond this morning, Danny surely would pick him on his side for a game of
shinny.
This is a Christmas story of a young boy's life and a young man's death. It's a
story of a brave leukemia victim, his caring family and of the love for a
town's former major league team. Mostly, this is a Christmas story about the
power of friendship.
Danny Casey and Anders Peterson became friends in the first grade at Hopewell
School, and they never stopped being friends. They would play street hockey in
the Casey garage. They would do all sorts of things.
Danny had been diagnosed with leukemia at 20 months and at 2 became one of the
first in the country to receive a self-transplant. His own bone marrow was
removed and re-implanted. Danny was smaller than the others - a Whalers or Red
Sox painters cap proved best for covering his head - yet Anders found something
especially big in Danny.
"Danny was the most loyal person I ever met in my life," Peterson,
27, said. "He was loyal in a Whalers, Red Sox kind of way, rooting for the
underdog, pulling for the impossible, caring about everybody, never giving up
on anybody."
Modern medicine will blame the long-term effects of radiation, but surely there
is a reason Danny Casey needed two hearts for one lifetime. He needed one for
the Red Sox to break and one for the Whalers to break. Yet to concentrate on
his death is to miss a robust life. Peterson still giggles about that April
night in 1995 when they were seniors in high school. Steven Rice scored with 22
seconds left, Darren Turcotte beat Patrick Roy in overtime and Danny and Anders
rode around Hartford with windows open screaming while blaring Brass Bonanza.
Man, they loved the Whale.
"After he got his heart transplant [in October 1996], we were passing a
golf ball back and forth with hockey sticks in the hospital hallway at Brigham
& Women's," said Peterson, who played at Kingswood-Oxford. "We
were talking about skating that winter. He was supposed to get bigger and
stronger. When his body rejected the transplant, I felt such shock and anger. I
felt as if I had been personally betrayed by God. There was a lot of grief for
a long time."
Danny Casey was a good friend of Arnold Dean and knew some of the Whalers. The
Casey family was active in the Jimmy Fund, starting a golf tournament to raise
money. Danny was only 20 when he died on Dec. 2, 1996, but he died with 80
years' worth of friends. St. Patrick-St. Anthony in Hartford was standing room
only for his funeral.
Yet in an obituary that notes Danny's devotion to the Whalers was "the joy
of his life," one sentence, nine powerful words, let the world know who,
beyond his family, had meant the most to him: "Danny also leaves his
lifelong best friend Anders Peterson." Danny's mom, Kathy, said Danny would
have demanded it be included. A friendship knows no graveyard.
"Andy is such a remarkable young man," Kathy Casey said. "And
the guys bring Danny alive with their game."
So a hockey game grew. Peterson, now a guidance counselor at a high school in
Boston, had attended Wesleyan and former coach Duke Snyder donated ice time.
The game moved inside and the guys began to raise money in Danny's name. They
raised $1,000 in 2001 and $2,500 last year. With the eighth annual game at 7:30
p.m. Friday at Wesleyan, Peterson expects to raise more than $3,000. They're up
to 15 a side, 50 to 100 spectators. Still mom and pop numbers, but also
growing. There's a pureness in Peterson's motive, a relentless joy in his
giving. He won't stop until he builds something special in all this.
"As a parent who lost his child, the biggest fear you have is everybody
will forget your kid," said Danny's dad, Bill. "What these boys are
doing all on their own, well, there is such a beauty in it for us."
Their names are Tyler Webb and Bobby DeGemmis and Brendan Callahan and Evan
Lips. They'll wear Whalers jerseys. They play Chuck Kaiton soundtracks. They
play Brass Bonanza after every goal.
"We do some laughing, we do some crying and we pretend we're the Hartford
Whalers," Peterson said. "We celebrate Danny's life by doing what he
would have been doing."
Peterson said he dreams of getting Ron Francis and Kevin Dineen and some other
former Whalers in the game. Long term, he would love to build something along
the lines of what Dennis Leary has built for the Worcester firefighters.
Danny's parents, who fought the good Jimmy Fund fight for more than a decade,
have encouraged Peterson and the boys to carry the torch.
All the funds from the game benefit the Perini Quality of Life Clinic at the
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, specifically the annual childhood cancer
survivors weekend retreat at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford.
"Danny was pretty high functioning, but a lot of cancer survivors have so
much of their childhood taken away," Peterson said. "There's a
medical part in this, but there's also a social part with the camp. That's in
the spirit of Danny."
Even mentioning the Whalers in a column has become a difficult exercise for me.
As soon as there's a Wh ... e-mails start, "Get over it. They're gone.
Give it up." So emotions get trapped in a box, and that's not healthy.
Surely, it's the same for others in their own social circles. Maybe this game
can be the start of something good for a lot of folks. Maybe it can become a
place for former Whalers and forever Whalers fans to meet and do something more
than bemoan the loss of a hockey team.
"The Whalers were more than hockey," Anders Peterson said. "They
are part of who we are. I remember the day of Danny's funeral, it was the
Whalers' last year and a few of the guys went to the game. Kevin Dineen scored
this incredible game-winning goal on Dominik Hasek [from his stomach with two
Sabres on him] to put the Whalers in first place. It didn't last ... "
But the friendships do.