Tyler Daniel Sweere, age 19, of Perham, MN passed away on Christmas Day, 2015, sometime between 3 and 6 a.m., at home. At home meaning prostrate across a corner of the living room floor, blood under the tree we were meant to gather around that afternoon. The piece they printed in the paper didn’t mention the blood, or the gun, or the word “suicide.” But I will.
Tyler was born on May 9, 1996 (the two of us only three months apart) in Champaign, Illinois. He was born to my father’s older brother and his wife, the two divorcing before he was two. In the family albums you can find pictures of us, toddlers perched on my parents’ back step in July, stripped to just our diapers, matching strawberry blonde curls, popsicle rings around our laughing mouths.
In middle school, when our fathers moved both of us back to their hometown in northern Minnesota, we shared friends and sports teams and most classes. With the same eyes and last name, our teachers mistook us for twins. We spent 4th of Julys catching minnows with the kitchen colander and leaping from his father’s dock on East Silent Lake. My father taught us both to water ski, but Tyler quit after getting caught up in the rope and dragged behind the boat.
As an exceptional, self-taught musician, Tyler practiced guitar three hours a day throughout high school, studying music theory, song writing, and classic rock. He criticized my taste in music, but taught me to play The Beatles on his Taylor. When my youngest sister Lucy was born, six Christmases before Tyler’s death, he performed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in her honor. My sister would later ask to look into his open casket, at the buzzed head and stitched-together skull, and fill the entire funeral home with her sobs, wailing how she never even got to know him.
At age sixteen, he renounced God, and most other things his father loved. Tyler was intelligent and ambitious, but also arrogant, stubborn, selfish, and proud. I was also all of these things, but I hid them better. He tried to form a band with a group that included my high school boyfriend, but kicked them all out of his house when they didn’t take the music as seriously as he did. He graduated Perham High School in spring of 2014, in a class of about a hundred. I graduated with honors, he without. When we sat side by side during the ceremony, we smirked at the town and people we would leave behind, but otherwise did not speak.
After high school, Tyler interviewed and was accepted into the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massechusettes, settling on recording and production as his musical focus. For our high school superlatives, the senior class voted him most musical, as well as most likely to leave town and never come back. For a year, it appeared this would be true. But instead he came home to die. And now this town is where he rests.
Tyler is survived by his parents, his aunts and uncles, his eight cousins, his half-brother, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his entire high school class, his college roommate whom he admitted his growing depression to, his still-teenage friends who hoisted his coffin, his father’s girlfriend who found him with the Colt pistol still hooked in his hand, and me.
The funeral service will be held on Saturday, January 9, 2016 at 1:00 p.m., at Alliance Church in Perham, the one he once played bass for on Sunday mornings, then did his best to evade. My father will stand behind the pulpit to give the eulogy, telling of a child who would do anything to show off and make his daughter smile. Because my uncle asks, I will serve as pallbearer, but when it is time to meet the hearse, I’ll find I can hardly stand under the weight.
The burial will follow at the Perham Village Cemetery, on the coldest day of the year, where I will stand in my tights and black pumps in the -40 degree windchill, where the pastor will have to shout Psalm 23 above the January gusts, where we will leave a hole with no stone, where, as I skip town the next day, I will still identify him by the frozen, backhoed dirt, scream into the empty car, feel the road shake with grief, and keep driving.
Emma Kaiser is the winner of the Norton Writers Prize. Her work is featured in River Teeth, Craft, Great River Review, Rock & Sling, and elsewhere, and she is the author of two children's nonfiction books. She is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.
Photo by Michela Mongardi on Foter.com