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By LANE DeGREGORY, Times Staff WriterDylan Crane's family and friends remember a 13-year-old who taught them about courage, faith and wisdom.
ST. PETERSBURG - They couldn't talk, most of them. They were too shocked or sad or hysterical to get the words out. So all night Wednesday, all day Thursday, the middle school students sent messages through cyber space.
"How could this happen?"
"Why did this happen?"
"Where was God when Dylan died?"
"That's what most of us kept asking each other," said 13-year-old Jacob Stewart. "I mean, that's what we're all trying to figure out. But there is no answer really. I guess that's what makes this so hard. None of us had ever lost a friend our age."
Dylan Crane died Wednesday afternoon at All Children's Hospital.
The 13-year-old had spent the last nine months making a documentary about his struggle with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.
He started his film, My Cancer Miracle, as a seventh-grade project. It was shown on TV during last weekend's hospital telethon and it won first place in the region for Florida's student media awards. Last week it took first place in a national competition in Indiana.
Even after he was too sick to talk, Dylan kept speaking to thousands of people.
"His courage was so inspiring. He never lost faith," said Jacob, who was in drama classes with Dylan at John Hopkins Middle School.
"We talked about him every day, how brave he was, how much we missed him. None of us ever thought he wouldn't be coming back."
Jacob stopped and sniffled over the phone.
"Sorry, my throat closed up," he said. "It's just that, we all want him around still. But I'm sure Dylan doesn't want to be back here with us. He's up there now, humming on the streets of gold."
* * *
More than a dozen of Dylan's friends were on a school field trip in New York City when they got word.
They had just finished seeing Wicked on Broadway and were singing and dancing out the theater door. A girl turned on her cell phone and saw the text message. She started shrieking. The singing stopped.
"These kids are basically such happy people. They never thought he would really die," said film teacher Dan Yeazell, who helped Dylan make his documentary and was chaperoning the New York trip. "So when they found out, they started crying and hugging. He touched all of us in ways we're not even aware of yet."
Rather than teaching Dylan, Mr. Yeazell said, the seventh-grader taught him: about perseverance, faith and keeping things in perspective.
"He was so determined, no matter how much he was hurting, to finish that video to help other kids, so they would know what it's like to have cancer," Mr. Yeazell said. "I just feel so awful that he never got a chance to see his trophy."
* * *
At the hospital, folks were having a hard time talking about Dylan.
The doctors, nurses and therapists see hundreds of sick and dying kids every day. But they said Dylan had a special light, an aura you could almost feel.
"He was very wise, and he had this incredible intensity," said Betsy Vaught, who massaged Dylan and gave him touch therapy in intensive care.
"He told me he was going to change the world. And you know, he did. Everyone who ever met him, or even heard about him, has been changed in some way. We feel lucky to have been in his presence."
* * *
Dylan's mom, Carole, talked to her son just after he left her.
She packed his clothes, his computer and his camera and left the hospital, where they had lived together the last two months.
"We're going home now," she told Dylan. "But this time you're leaving your body here. Do you want to ride in Dad's car or in mine?"
When she got home, a shaft of the day's last light filtered through the blinds and spilled across the dining room table. It shone on the CD of Dylan's documentary.
"That was him," she said. "He got home before me."
He packed a lifetime in his 13 years.
"It's almost as if he knew he had to get everything out of life while he could," Carole said. "He sang on stage. He danced ballet. He played piano and acted in plays and made movies. He visited London and Paris and he got straight A's, even this year, with everything he was going through."
Dylan didn't want a funeral, his mom said. So she's not going to have one. She and Dylan's dad, Simon, are planning a private service for close family and friends. A celebration of his life. Everyone who wants to will get the chance to talk about him.
* * *
Christian Lewis already knows what he wants to say.
He has been Dylan's best friend since second grade, and knew him better than almost anyone. When Dylan wasn't in the hospital and didn't want his parents to know how scared he was, or his doctors to know how bad he was hurting, he and Christian would climb into Dylan's backyard treehouse and talk and talk and talk.
"For, like, three hours or more, we'd just talk about whatever," Christian said. "Dylan could talk about anything. He could do anything. We made movies about clowns attacking and old hobos in trash cans and we wore witches' wigs and crazy costumes, just for fun. He could program all this cool stuff on your computer.
"He could make his videocamera do all these special effects. Even when he was in the hospital, he would find stuff on the Internet for my geography projects and he'd give me advice about stuff with my family, and he even wrote some of my reports for me, copied them, I mean, because my handwriting is so bad."
Just after his 13th birthday, Dylan told his best friend, "I don't want to do this any more. I just want it all to be over with."
Later, when Christian got a guitar for his birthday, he wrote his first song.
"I called it, The Dylan Song , and I tried to play it for him," Christian said. "But after the first five words he laughed and stopped me. He thought it was too corny. And I guess it probably was."
At the celebration service, he said, he'll tell everyone that Dylan should be remembered as "a funny genius."
Christian paused, thought a few seconds, then reconsidered.
"Actually, I guess that's how I would want him to be remembered. But Dylan never thought of himself as funny, and he would never call himself a genius.
"He'd just say he was human. Dylan thought he was like everybody else. But he wasn't. He was better."