He, though, had spent the night before in the room, sleeping in the bed, surrounded by the memories, the images, the links to guys like Roosevelt Chapman, Josh Benson, Paul Williams, Chris Wright, Archie Miller and so many other Dayton Flyers who had meant so much to their son.
Yet, whether it brought avoidance or immersion, the room meant the same for Sheila and Scott Bernard.
There was no place to better remember their son, 11-year-old Parker — the Bellbrook Middle School sixth grader who had died a week earlier following complications from surgery to remove an out-of-the-blue brain tumor — than his bedroom, which is a shrine to University of Dayton basketball.
Parker was memorialized in so many ways big and small on Friday.
The number on his basketball jersey — No. 4 — was painted on the big rock in front of Bellbrook High School. His name flashed on the electric sign along Feedwire Road in front of the middle school.
His sixth-grade classmates and the middle school teachers all wore special T-shirts and yellow wrist bands, each bearing his name and number.
Several of his buddies had had their heads sheared in his honor, and now, in the darkness of their grief, some were finding a silver lining they figured Parker would appreciate. “The girls like to run their hands over my shaved head,” Blake Hemelgarn, Parker’s best pal, said with a small smile.
The Salvation Army basketball team that Parker had joined this season — a team made up mostly of inner city black kids from Dayton — presented the Bernard family with his jersey at a special memorial service, aptly titled “A Celebration of Life,” held at the middle school on Friday. The Bellbrook Wee Eagles football team did the same.
Teachers, coaches, classmates and family members all took part in the gathering — a two-hour remembrance of Parker as a gifted student, top athlete and good-humored charmer — that drew a crowd so large that it overflowed the auditorium and filled the adjoining hallways.
But Scott thought the most private, most personal place to capture his son’s spirit was in his bedroom at their Bellbrook home.
After passing a bathroom decorated in Flyers colors and knickknacks, you entered Parker’s room — painted red and blue — and it was like stepping into a Dayton Flyers museum.
Above the bed was a UD banner signed “To Parker... Best of Friends ... Roosevelt ‘Velvet’ Chapman”
A framed and autographed Paul Williams game jersey was propped up against a wall. Josh Benson’s No. 44 uniform was folded neatly and displayed at the foot of the bed.
A Flyers bank board depicting a photo of Brian Gregory and his team of five seasons past was mounted on one wall. There were blue curtains, a UD clock, an autographed basketball and another wall held a gallery of framed game programs, several from this season.
Scott and Parker had season tickets in UD Arena’s Coach’s Corner — Section 103, several rows up from the UD bench, along the rail next to the players’ tunnel — and they went to every game together.
“He was my best friend and we spent every minute we could together doing things we loved,” said Scott, who works at UD. “And there is nothing Parker loved more than UD basketball. Going to the games became something we wouldn’t miss for the world.”
He picked up the Flyers’ latest game program — from last Wednesday’s 75-65 victory over Charlotte — stared at it in silence and finally shook his head:
“Look who’s on the cover — Parker ... Josh Parker ... But my Parker wasn’t there. That’s the first game we haven’t been to together in years.”
Some friends had accompanied him so he wouldn’t be alone, but when the game ended, you saw Scott sitting there with his head in his hands, reality crashing down while all around him folks stood and cheered the victorious Flyers.
“Walking to the car afterward by myself without him, it hit me,” he would say later. “This is going to be very hard from now on.”
‘My kind of boy’
“I knew he was my kind of boy right off,” Bruce McKinney, Parker’s grandfather, told the crowd at the celebration service. “He was at our house — he wasn’t walking or talking yet — and he had no particular interest in TV.
“But then, one day he pulled himself up and stood there intently watching a commercial ... It was a Victoria’s Secret commercial ... And from then on his dad gave him this word, ‘Babelicious.’”
There were a lot of Parker Bernard stories on Friday, many of them funny, some poignant, and a couple, no matter how hard everybody tried otherwise, that were utterly heartbreaking.
“I think it’s appropriate though that this is a joyful celebration of Parker’s life because when I think of him joyful is the first word that comes to mind,” said Scott Anderson, his fifth-grade history teacher.
The latter showed itself in the classroom — he was a straight-A student — and on the football field and especially the basketball court, first with the Bellbrook fourth and fifth grade teams and this season with the Salvation Army.
Whether it was teachers or coaches doing the recounting on Friday, you continually heard what a decent kid he was, someone who showed, as does his older sister Peyton, that he was from a loving family.
“He was more than just a student to me,” Tammy Bacich, his math and homeroom teacher last year, told the crowd. “I loved him ...and I miss him.
“Like everyone else, I remember his laugh, his smile, his mischief, his thoughtfulness and the way he was so kind-hearted, but I’ll always remember something else, too. It’s a little piece of advice he gave me. It’s a little inappropriate, but I hope you allow it today ... And when I think about it, it actually is good advice.”
She told how she was trying to get a rambunctious classroom settled at the end of a trying day and how, as she was turned in the opposite direction, Parker had stopped directly behind her after he had gotten up to sharpen his pencil.
The intent was to startle her, and that’s how it played out. She said she chided him about clowning around and sent him to his seat.
“And that’s when I remember hearing this little voice: ‘Mrs. Bacich, don’t get your panties in a bunch.’
“Well, I was thrown for a minute, and when I finally sent them to line up for the next class, I called him back for a little talk. I said, ‘What were you thinking? Wasn’t there a little voice inside you that said you shouldn’t say that to your teacher?’ He said he thought it was a joke and he was sorry and I believed him.
“I didn’t write him a detention, but I did write an email. I don’t know if he heard a little voice that day, but I know now when I get a little too worked up about things, I hear that voice inside my head. It’s Parker’s voice telling me not to get my panties in a bunch. Good advice ... and pure Parker.”
The crowd roared.
The surgery
Three weeks ago this Monday, Scott said Parker was playing with a Bellbrook AAU team at Trent Arena when he fell and hit his head hard enough to cause a concussion.
Although he took Parker to Miami Valley South — where he said his son’s neck was X-rayed and found to be OK — Scott decided to keep him out of contact sports for 10 days. But then, three days later, while sitting in the bleachers during a school gym class, he said Parker was hit in the head by a ball some kid threw.
Another trip to the hospital followed, and a doctor finally did a CT scan of Parker’s head. That’s when the tumor was found.
“It was at least the size of a quarter, beneath the brain and behind the eyes,” he said.
Surgery was scheduled for about a week later, but three days before the operation, Parker was still at home and went with his buddy Blake to Taco Bell.
“We split a Taco Bell 12 pack,” Blake said. “He wasn’t afraid of getting the surgery, he was just all nervous about getting his head shaved.”
Doctors were able to remove 95 percent of the tumor during the eight-hour surgery, Scott said. But as they thought about the radiation and chemotherapy treatments may follow, Parker suffered a stroke.
Scott said pressure built on his son’s brain, and less than 48 hours after the surgery — on Friday, Feb. 10 — Parker died.
“My friend Ben called me and told me Parker died, and I wouldn’t believe him,” Blake said quietly. “Then I got about 20 text messages. All these people asking if I was OK. I started crying, and then I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat down and started praying to God.”
Helping others
Through the organ donor program at Children’s Medical Center, Scott said Parker’s heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, corneas and some bones were taken for other children.
“That means he’s still around, maybe not in the form we know, but he’s out there helping people” said Sheila, Parker’s mom.
Scott nodded: “At least that can give us some peace — knowing this tragedy has helped someone. And I already had someone come up to me at the Salvation Army gym last night and say he had a friend whose son, he thought, had just gotten Parker’s kidney. They had told him it was from an 11-year-old basketball player.”
Parker is helping people in other ways now as well. A scholarship fund has been started in his name and donations to it can be made in care of the Bellbrook/ Sugarcreek Education Foundation, P.O. Box 5, Bellbrook, Ohio 45305.
Logos@Work, the screen printing company in Dayton where Melissa Kramer works — her son Peyton was one of Parker’s basketball teammates — made the T-shirts the Bellbrook sixth graders wore Friday.
On the front is Parker’s favorite saying, one he got from his sixth grade football coach, Dave Seubert: “You may only be one person in the world, but you are the world to one person”
The shirts are selling for $10, and she said $6 of that will go into the scholarship fund. To order them, contact her at Melissa@logosatwork.com.
Parker was the world to many people, none more so than his folks.
“Now Sheila and I will have to figure out what’s next,” Scott said. “Our daughter will be off to college in little over a year, and all of a sudden we’ll be empty nesters. That was not in the plan.
“In the meantime, I’m just trying to hold on to the positives. I truly believe I had the best 11 years that was humanly possible. It’s awful there is no more, but there’s not one father on this planet who had a better 11 years than I did.”
And some of the best memories are triggered when he visits his son’s bedroom and is surrounded by Dayton Flyers memorabilia.
“My job used to take me to UD Arena sometimes, and while I’d be doing something in the Flight Deck or the Boesch Lounge, he’d sometimes come along, sit off in a corner and take in a Flyers practice,” Scott said. “Right then he thought he had gone to heaven.”
Today, a lot of folks now think he has.
About the Author