Spring/Summer 2000 One Year Later

Spring/Summer 2000 - One Year Later

A Missing Link
by Kari McGinnis

A stuffed lion stretches across the top of the small bed. The curve of its body marks the place where 10-year-old Stephen Tsiorvas laid his head each night. Not only was the lion his pillow, but it was one of many prizes collected during a childhood full of luck. Stephen won the stuffed Lion King character in a drawing contest.

"He hated that movie, but he loved that lion," Stephen’s 18-year-old brother George Tsiorvas says, shaking his head and grinning.

Katherine Dalen, Stephen’s mother, laughs as she recalls Stephen’s uncanny knack for winning things. The last time he picked out her lottery tickets he won $10, she says. He won more free bottles of pop than anyone she knows.

"I have a feeling God scoped it out and knew it was going to be a short life, so he packed all Stephen’s luck in early," she says.

Stephen’s luck ran out on June 10, 1999.

Stephen’s room is a place where his family continues to discover who he was. As the youngest child, his character reflected influences from six siblings, including Katherine’s children from her first marriage — Bredon Kiddle, 26, and Emily Kiddle, 23.

Stephen’s 16-year-old brother Andrew Tsiorvas plops down on the bed next to the lion. He stares at the ceiling for a moment and then picks up a stack of empty Kool-Aid packages from the shelf at the head of the bed. Katherine smiles at her son as he begins counting the points on the back of the packages.

"Who knows what he was saving those for," she says. "But that’s how we know him — by his collections."

Piles of role-playing game cards and an assortment of books clutter the shelf above Stephen’s bed. Katherine reaches to the top shelf and pulls down a book about dinosaurs. As she flips through its pages, she says she understands why it was his favorite. Its pages are filled with colorful drawings of every type of dinosaur imaginable. Stephen spent hours looking at the pictures and reading about all the different dinosaurs. When he was outside digging with his friends, sometimes they would search for dinosaur bones.

His vivid imagination and outgoing spirit helped Stephen fill his days with childhood adventures. With big brothers to keep up with, Stephen never let his juvenile rheumatoid arthritis slow him down. By the age of 4, he was clamoring up trees, racing his bike and playing football and baseball as if he didn’t even have a disability.

"We have this attitude in my house that there are no physical disabilities," Katherine says. "It’s how much ability you do have." She remembers when Stephen was 1 year old and his arthritis left him sitting in the corner staring out the window and watching his brothers play.

"He would try so hard to stand, try so hard to fight his way through it and he just got depressed," she says softly, her eyes staring into the distance. "It was enough to break your heart."

But he didn’t let it keep him down for long; Stephen was a fighter. Although he didn’t walk for four months, the mischievous baby found ways to make sure he was always part of the action.

"He’s one of those little buggers who likes to be absolutely in the middle of everything, whether he’s going to get stepped on or not," Katherine says, a smile spreading across her face as she remembers how Stephen would crawl into the middle of George and Andrew’s wrestling matches. "In his diaper and bare body, boy he was going to be right in on it, chewing on somebody."

The rambunctious little kid wanted to be involved with everyone.

"That was the thing about Stephen, he was nice to everybody no matter who they were," Andrew says. "He could make friends with anyone. He always wanted to box with everybody and he constantly wrestled with my friends." He laughs as he explains that Stephen even had a way with women. George nods his head and begins laughing as he recalls the time he took Stephen to a job fair with him.

"I’d have to go chasing him around and when I’d find him there was always a beautiful woman there," George smiles as he tilts back in his chair. "So I’d introduce myself and then I’d start to introduce Stephen and she’d say, ‘Oh we’ve met.’"

Katherine tries to be there for her kids. Sometimes, she says, she feels they haven’t had enough of a chance to talk about Stephen’s death, but that they understand how hard of a time she’s had and know their feelings are important to her.

"Stephen seems to me to be the one who binds multiple communities together because he touched all their lives," her voice trails off and she takes a deep breath. "And I miss him a lot. I mean look at what I’m missing — all that bubbly, talkative, I-know-everything-in-the-world stuff."

Her home has an emptiness to it without Stephen that is magnified because two other kids have moved out since the accident. A year ago, seven people filled the rooms with playful laughter. Now, George and Andrew are the only kids Katherine and her fiancé, Skip Williams expect home at the end of the night.

Stephen’s stepbrother, Taj Williams, left to live with his biological mother after the accident. The 15-year-old was at home when the explosion stole his little brother’s life. Katherine says Taj assumed an incredible amount of guilt, which led him to take his teenage rebellion to the extreme.

"Stephen was trying to get Taj to go down to the park, or Andy or somebody. And he ended up down in the park with Wade and they ended up dead," Katherine says, trying to explain the impact the tragedy had on her stepson. "Taj was thinking, ‘I should’ve been there with him, I should’ve been playing with him, I should’ve paid more attention. ... I should have done all these things that I didn’t do, so I’m a terrible person.’ And we were really worried about him."

Katherine and Skip tried to enforce house rules and help Taj with his feelings, but he got tired of dealing with everything.

Stephen’s stepsister, 18-year-old Akilah Williams, wanted to have a place of her own while attending Western Washington University, so she also moved out shortly after the accident.

Katherine’s love for all her children is apparent when she opens her wallet and pulls photos of each of them out. She lays school photos of George, Andrew and Stephen next to each other on the table and smiles, pointing out how much they resemble each other.

The things George and Andrew miss the most are those moments of brotherly love — the times they would chase Stephen down and give him wedgies or sit on him until he laughed so hard he got sick.

"Stephen would never get out of my seat," George says. "So I’d throw him on the couch or sit on him." Despite being smashed by his brother’s 6-foot-2, 300 pound body, Stephen laughed and laughed and wouldn’t hesitate to initiate another match.

Katherine watched her boys roughhouse, but always made sure they had blankets and teddy bears to remind them of their softer sides.

Teddy bears crowd Stephen’s bed beneath his blankets. Katherine says he inherited everybody else’s bears because they knew he would keep them safe and that they could come and get one whenever they needed it.

Stephen had so many teddy bears that many of them are packed away in bins along with some of his toys, shoes, clothes and books. Katherine says she is not ready to let him go yet. She leaves most of his things the way they were before he died so that he knows he always has a place in their lives. She sleeps with his favorite blanket and keeps his favorite shirt beside her bed.

One of the hardest things about losing Stephen is that they had so many plans. She knew the upcoming year would be the last the family had together before the older kids moved out, so she planned to buy sleeping bags for each of the boys so they could go on a family camping trip.

Instead, Katherine is fighting for pipeline reform. She shakes her head in disgust, looking at a document outlining the number of deaths caused by pipeline accidents in the last 15 years.

"For some odd reason it’s hot this time, and I want to keep it hot," she says with determination. "It’s important because we’ve got people to take care of. It needs to be hot, and it needs to stay hot, and it should have been hot before my son died. It should have been important."

Katherine says the blame for the accident needs to be placed where it belongs.

"If somebody hits my car and I take it to a shop and the mechanic tells me my car is not safe to drive, but I chose to drive it anyway without getting it fixed and kill someone ... I’d be to blame," she says, her face tight, revealing the pain she still feels from her loss.

"It’s really important to me that the ethnic minority communities get involved in this," Katherine says. "My fear is that white, upper-class and middle-class America is going to get their pipelines taken care of and Native American, Chicano American, African American, Asian American communities are going to end up waiting for another accident to happen because their communities don’t seem to be important enough to deal with."

Katherine says she hopes the pipeline issue reaches beyond the next election. She says her vision for America is a place where corporate responsibility extends to every environment and every community.

She doesn’t want other families to face the grief her family continues to struggle with. While she continues to try to protect her other children, she says she realizes that they have to live their own lives and they have to experiment to find out about their environment and discover their limits.

"I like to say that people’s lives are stories that they write on this earth," Katherine says. Parents write the beginning of their children’s lives; children write the middle of their own lives and the end of their parents’ lives, she explains.

"Stephen was supposed to write the end of my life, but instead I wrote the end of his. And it doesn’t end full; it ends with a lot of promise and a lot of future and a lot of hope."

Spring/Summer 2000 - One Year Later

A Missing Link by Kari McGinnis

A Missing Link
by Kari McGinnis