inspiration out of tragedy

Did you catch the story about Matt and Melissa Bryant late last week? When they came in to check on their infant son Tryson on Wednesday morning, they realized every parent's worst fear. He was non responsive.... He was dead.

18 months old.... crib death... sudden infant death syndrome... call it what you want. I'm sure for them it is simply an unfathomable nightmare from which they really would like to wake up...

They buried him on Saturday, and Matt had to decide if he should work on Sunday, his normal workday...

no, he's not a preacher... he's a placekicker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I cannot imagine the strength it would take to get out of bed, and I find it simply supernatural that he somehow found a way to strap it on for the annual rivalry between his Bucs and another baytown football team, the Packers...

"I wanted to do it for Tryce", he told a reporter after the game, "a sort of tribute"...

well it was quite a tribute...

here's how ESPN.com's Pat Yasinskas described it:

A day after burying his infant son, Matthew Tryson, Bryant went out and kicked three field goals, including the game-winner. Bryant then walked into the media room, looking dazed, and talked about how he played because he wanted to honor Tryson and admitted he had a running dialogue (in his head) with his son throughout the game.

You couldn't possibly sit in that room and not feel your heart coming apart. I went back upstairs and wrote my column. Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. But you don't just move on from something like this.

In the 20 or so hours since that column went up, the comments section has been filled up with beautiful thoughts for Bryant and my mailbag has received more letters than on any day since it started a couple months ago. As of this moment, I've received five letters from readers who also lost children.

Every one of them talked about how you never lose the pain, but you do what you can to get by.

Every one of them made me realize what I witnessed yesterday wasn't a football game.

It was a lesson in life for all of us. It would be easy to make Bryant a story of tragedy and triumph, but that wouldn't be accurate. You couldn't hear any triumph in Bryant's voice or see any on his blank face as he spoke. Three field goals don't just wipe out a tragedy. A million more field goals won't even do that.

That's what makes Bryant's story so powerful. It's real and it's raw emotion. You've got to learn from it.

The people who wrote about losing children have never met Bryant and they probably never will. Yet, they're all faced with the common daily challenge of doing what they have to do to get by.More than anything -- and this is what separates Bryant and those people from a lot of other athletes and the fantasy world we've all created -- they're human beings. They're real.

And they're a whole lot stronger than some myth who can go out and bench press 400 pounds.

God Bless Matt and Melissa...

tm