‘So hard to say goodbye to yesterday’: Life and death after high school

Only a few knew that he had joined the military.

None of them knew he was at war in Afghanistan, serving in the Canadian offensive called Operation Medusa.

It was September, and long ago they would have been gathering by their lockers and returning to class, back when each school year felt packed with meaning, the days inched along, and the future was not even in the frame.

School ends. Life emerges.

Moments happen, perhaps even in public, set against a flag-draped casket; or in a private, dark crisis of the soul.

That day, in September 2006, was a moment when their collective sense of mortality was shaken.

You might be interested in

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

But it was not the first time.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

The years teach much which the days never know. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You got this,” 17-year old Sonja McPherson said, her eyes lit with intensity, staring into the face of 15-year old teammate Marlene Springer.

This was on a school bus rumbling across Hamilton to a track meet one afternoon in 1991.

“Remember,” McPherson continued, “they’re worried about beating us. We are MacNab. We are the Lions.”

Meanwhile, back at Sir Allan MacNab high school off Magnolia Drive on the west Mountain, young minds wandered in and out of focus, cluttered with calculus and cytoplasm, “data processing,” free trade, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and memorizing Macbeth’s lines: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.”

On the bus, faces weren’t buried in iPhones — they didn’t exist for another 16 years — although cassette-playing Walkmans were common. Teammates could listen to new songs like Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway,” without appreciating the irony that their lives had barely begun.

It is just one group of students, from a school that three decades ago drew from a middle income neighbourhood.

Their parents were born in Ontario, or emigrated from countries like Jamaica, Hungary, Italy and Ghana, and worked as pastors, teachers and physiotherapists; mechanics, nurses, carpenters and steelworkers.

But all these years later, the roads travelled by the teens represent universal rhythms of life; typical and unusual, tragic and redemptive.

There is heroism in their stories, but no villains, apart from fate.

Where are they now?

Where they never quite expected.

And some who burned brightest are gone too soon.

Mark Graham’s bare chest glistened under the stage lights. He wore only a towel around his tapered waist, dancing to Michael Jackson’s new song “Remember the Time.”

It was 1991, and Graham was a six-foot-four star MacNab sprinter. He was one of a dozen members from the high school track team performing a medley of Jackson’s songs together in an airband contest, all dressed in Egyptian-pharoah-themed costumes.

“In Grade 12 Mark was a specimen, carved like a Michelangelo,” said hurdler Rachel Dei-Amoah.

Others in the ensemble included sprinter Tirus Tyler, who had Jackson’s moves down cold and was the lead, and Geoff Brown, Graham’s wingman on their 4x400 metre relay team, playing a soldier, holding a German shepherd on a leash in lieu of a lion.

They couldn’t learn the choreography from YouTube, that was still 14 years away. You had to do it from memory, or catch the video on TV and tape it on the VCR.

After winning the city airband title, they donated most of the first place prize money to charity, and spent the rest on a party at teammate Jeremy Kowalchuk’s house.

Kowalchuk was among the boys who squared-off against Graham in the “Mr. MacNab” pageant. No one stood a chance, not after Graham recited poetry, and brought down the house crooning an a cappella version of Boyz II Men’s new single “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”

I thought we’d get to see forever/But forever’s gone away/It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday

One day in class, a teacher told them: “Take a look around you. By the time you are 30, some of you will not be around anymore.”

Claudio Balice, a shot-putter on the team, heard the message but couldn’t take it seriously.

“The sense of invincibility creeps in,” said Balice. “It’s like, ‘yeah, whatever, tell me another one.’”

For some teens there is epochal significance to a single year of high school, especially when they are part of a musical, club, or team. On MacNab’s track team, coached by Dan Clark, there was a mix of ages and abilities, and it offered a sense of belonging.

“The team was my everything, and Mr. Clark was an inspiration,” said hurdler Paula Sinclair. “I was quite overweight when I joined in Grade 9, and Mr. Clark never once said I couldn’t do it.”

They had different backstories. Sprinter Sonja McPherson, like Graham, had immigrated from Jamaica as a child.

“There was diversity but we worked toward the same result,” said McPherson. “It moulded me for the rest of my life, how to carry myself.”

Clark worked deals to make sure everyone could afford buying orange and blue uniforms and K-way windbreakers. Other teams recognized MacNab’s brash colours instantly.

And everyone knew Graham, who was making headlines in the Hamilton Spectator and was months away from competing for Canada in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as the youngest runner on the team.

Other MacNab Lions fed off his aura, although McPherson already had confidence to burn. Seconds before the starter’s gun would fire, she would shed her warm-ups, crouch in the blocks, and feel it with all the certainty in the world: “No one can beat me.”

At one meet, she and 4x100 metre relay teammates Dei-Amoah, Christine Bisnauth and Melissa Craig competed against boys when their names had been mistakenly left out of the girls’ qualifying heat.

“We said sure, we’ll run against the boys,” said McPherson. “And the guys on our team were like: ‘Yeah do it, take them!’ And we did. We beat them.”

Less flashy but just as intense were distance runners Dan Edwards, Gord Hysen, and Monika Kalmar.

When Edwards joined in Grade 9 he was a quiet boy, and too small for other sports, not yet five feet tall and weighing 85 pounds. The track team felt like home.

In addition to running he eventually competed in pole vault, a hair-raising event that seemed to attract a different breed. His mom couldn’t bear to watch. He got tagged with the incongruous nickname “Mad Dog.”

Hysen doubled as unofficial team photographer, always snapping pictures. He would develop the film in the school’s darkroom, and hang prints on the wall of his room at home.

He was thoughtful, with a dry sense of humour. Everyone would be chatting, and Gord would chip-in with an observation and break everyone up.

As for Kalmar, friends saw her as reserved, and sweet, but she was also competitive, and a perfectionist who modelled, took part in fashion shows for charity, and won the Miss Dominion of Canada pageant in 1991.

Kalmar was among those who went on a road trip to a track meet in Myrtle Beach, S.C. She suntanned during the day with Melissa Craig, and at night they snuck out of their hotel room to socialize with American college boys.

At the meet, just before the 4x400 metre relay, Edwards was terrified to learn he was needed as a fill-in to run the third leg. Graham, the anchor, told him: “Mad Dog, just hand me the baton. That’s all you have to do.”

When the exchange happened it didn’t matter what place Graham was in, it was over: his long legs ate up track, running like the wind to victory.

“There was serious bonding on that team,” said thrower Claudio Balice. “You’re cheering everyone on, or you’re with a teammate heaving his guts at practice from training so hard.”

At one meet, Rachel Dei-Amoah injured her hamstring and dropped to the ground in tears. Balice ran to help, wrapped her leg, and helped her around so she could run again that day, the moment foreshadowing his future occupation.

In the spring of their senior year, Graham and Geoff Brown said farewell to high school track on top: “MacNab relay team smashes 24-year old city record,” read the headline in the Spectator.

And then came the grad dance. Kalmar and Balice had been dating for months and went together. (Her father, who was originally from Hungary, worked at Bill’s Garage in the east end; his father, from Italy, owned Cosmo’s Garage on Chatham Street.)

Melissa Craig took Mark Graham as her date. Her aunt made her a purple dress for the occasion. They sat at a table with teammates including Gord Hysen and Tirus Tyler.

“You wanted to go to grad with someone who meant something to you,” said Craig. “And Mark meant the most to me as a friend.”

No one had smartphones on which to scroll or take photos. There was no social media for posting anything.

Faces, images, were captured in memory. And if you had thoughts about the evening, you told someone in conversation, or kept them to yourself.

At the end of the season, Melissa Craig’s name also made the sports pages of the Spectator, for setting a city long jump record.

The next time her name appeared in the newspaper was 14 years later, when she was quoted on her reaction to the news that her grad date had been killed on the other side of the world.

All that had mattered was the next class, competition, or get-together.

Back then, the fall season was a beginning, not an end. A sunset symbolized nothing more than a shining gift to complete the day.

But life tumbles forward and certainties fade.

“Time/why you punish me,” sang Hootie and the Blowfish in 1994; “Time/why you walk away/Like a friend with somewhere to go.”

In her yearbook grad write-up, Melissa Craig quoted the pop group Depeche Mode: “It’s time to pay the price/For not listening to advice.”

Craig dreamed of being a police officer, but after high school got sidetracked, quit Mohawk College after one semester, and married young.

“Boys were more important than school apparently,” she said. “Not a smart move. Should have stayed in school, and lost the boy.”

She eventually remarried, and has three kids ages 23, 20, and 8, and works at a Hamilton Honda dealership.

Geoff Brown worked straight out of high school, first laying floors, then in an auto garage, and ultimately in information technology.

In his teens he didn’t know what he wanted to be, and didn’t dwell much upon it.

All he planned for was the next race, or sun-baked summer training sessions with Mark Graham, when they weren’t hitting golf balls in Olympic Park on Scenic Drive near Graham’s backyard.

Brown is 49, and has a son and daughter who often hear him emphasize the value of continuing their education after high school.

Sprinter Marlene Springer attended school in Alberta with hopes of a career in music therapy. After four years she returned to Hamilton to be with her dad, who had divorced from her stepmom; she had lost her mother to cancer when she was 12. She has two daughters and works in administration with Metrolinx.

Paula Sinclair, the hurdler, got her masters in education degree, has a daughter, and teaches while also owning a physical rehabilitation business; sprinter Rachel Dei-Amoah had once hoped to be a physiotherapist like her father but works in finance and has two kids; relay teammate Christine Bisnauth attended university in the U.S. on a track scholarship, and went on to a career with a bank as a consultant. She recently got engaged.

For her yearbook grad write-up, Monika Kalmar, the runner and model who had dated Claudio Balice, wrote: “Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and forget the world around me but someone showed me dreams do come true. Someone taught me how to be free. It’s just hard to let go. Thanx Claude ...”

In first-year at the University of Guelph, Kalmar had an 87 average. She was on a path to become a veterinarian, her dream since she was a child, when she would try nursing wounded birds, hamsters, and rabbits back to health.

She was also fighting breast cancer. She was diagnosed at 18.

Balice heard she was sick. In the summer of 1993 he called his former MacNab love. They rode his motorcycle down to Hutch’s on the Beach Strip. She told him about the cancer treatments.

He figured she would make it.

When he learned she was in palliative care he didn’t know what to do. Balice had been volunteering at McMaster Children’s Hospital, where a nurse gave him advice.

“She told me I had to give Monika time to die. And I’m like, what the — she’s going to die?”

That fall he saw her two days before she was gone.

She was 20 years old.

None of the others could believe it. But there they were, at the funeral at St. Stephen’s Hungarian Roman Catholic Church on Barton Street East; Balice, Geoff Brown, and teammate Jeremy Kowalchuk the pallbearers.

“She was a beautiful person,” said Brown. “Of all the people that shouldn’t leave this earth, it’s her.”

“She was so smart, and genuine,” said Sonja McPherson. “And so young. It changed my thinking that we were going to live forever.”

“You live in regret for not talking to people you lost contact with who were close to you,” said Melissa Craig. “You regret not giving them a simple ‘hi.’ It was the same when my brother passed away. He was 49. You regret what you wish you could have done.”

MacNab dedicated a new trophy called the “Monika Kalmar Dedication Award for Track and Field.” It has been presented to a student every year since. Her picture is on the plaque, along with her name and “July 27, 1973-November 22, 1993.”

Balice went on to become a captain with the Hamilton Fire Department. The job fit.

He never learned to go halfway with anything, and that included playing injured in sports. His mother used to warn that it would catch up with him.

“And now I’m 49, and I see my surgeon tomorrow about my hip ... You pay the piper. There’s no way around it.”

He has four kids, and remarried after going through a protracted and draining divorce.

One day, while on a medical call for the fire department on the Mountain, Balice bumped into a family member of Gord Hysen, the runner with the quirky sense of humour who took pictures for the team.

That’s when he heard what happened.

Hysen had worked as a trainer with the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team, and as a fitness coach. Always in top physical shape, he was hired for modelling jobs, and appeared in magazines and in TV commercials.

In his early 30s he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. At 35, living in Toronto, he was drinking heavily.

One night, he posted dark, desperate messages on his Facebook page. His sister, Genea, said that’s when the family called 911, and police officers took him to a hospital.

Later that night, she said, he walked out of the hospital and stepped in front of a train.

The obituary said Gordon Wade Hysen died suddenly.

Several classmates were at the visitation. Gord was such a sweet and good guy, always the first to offer you a ride to a track meet.

Too many funerals for young friends.

It had been four years earlier, in September 2006, when Geoff Brown, Mark Graham’s old running mate, had been in Florida on his honeymoon aboard a cruise.

When the ship docked, he returned a call to his dad in Hamilton, who had been trying to get hold of him.

Brown hadn’t spoken recently with Graham, but their days of friendship and blazing trails were still fresh in his mind.

It did not seem that long ago when Brown had first met him, in Grade 11, when the muscular Graham seemed to him like a 16-year old kid inside a grown man’s body.

And now, on the phone, Brown’s dad told him the news.

The line went silent.

“Geoff — you still there?”

From Pte. Mark Graham’s diary, May 2006: “Think not of your neighbour down the street but your neighbour from another country. Think of their children and the plight they exist in each day. Remember this, as we soldiers go and do our jobs. Remember that we go, even in the face of imminent danger, of our free will ... Support us even in times of hardship. Without our nation’s support, we have no heart, no purpose, no soul. We, the Canadian soldier.”

After graduation, and competing in the Olympics, Graham attended university in the U.S. on a track scholarship, but injuries shortened his running career.

He had a young daughter, and worked in Hamilton as a fitness instructor, and coached runners at MacNab. He wanted to pursue a career in IT, but also yearned for the challenge and structure that track had once provided, and perhaps the camaraderie and teamwork he loved in high school.

He joined the Canadian military and was trained to drive a light-armoured vehicle that troops used in combat.

Before he shipped out to Afghanistan, he wore his uniform to a service at Stewart Memorial Church downtown, where his father served as a deacon. The pastor offered a prayer asking God to keep the soldier safe.

From Pte. Mark Graham’s diary, September 2006: “I’m here in Asscrackastan and currently writing you from my driver’s hatch. We are in the midst of conducting our largest operation to date. We are being told it’s the largest operation and objective taken by Canada since WWII.”

On Sept. 3, 2006, one month into his tour, his writing voice became urgent, with his unit under fire: “I’ll get back to you when I can,” he wrote. “Who would have thought I would have picked this time to write to you!!”

The next day, Sept. 4, shrapnel tore through Graham’s chest and pierced his aorta. The pilot of an American warplane had fired by mistake.

Thirty-five other Canadian soldiers were injured in the “friendly fire” incident.

Graham died on the spot. He was 33.

He was buried at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa, and one day, the park near his home was renamed Mark Anthony Graham Memorial Olympic Park. The inscription on the plaque reads: “Olympian-Soldier-Role Model. He saw the task ahead — heard the call — and did his duty.”

It seemed like the whole track team reunited for the funeral in Hamilton, where his casket was covered with a Canadian flag.

Tears flowed when the song “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” was played, the same one Graham had once sung at MacNab.

I’ll take with me the memories/To be my sunshine after the rain/It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday

Tirus Tyler, the fellow sprinter who had performed as Michael Jackson in the air band contest, gave the eulogy on behalf of his teammates.

“Mark had no false fronts,” Tyler told the congregation. “He treated us all as equals.”

In the church he presented a MacNab track relay baton to Graham’s seven-year-old daughter, “on behalf of his teammates, as a symbol of all the great things we shared.”

In high school, Tyler always had energy to burn, and seemed able to spread it around, lift your spirits, and make you laugh; your bad day got turned around in a hurry.

Ten years after Graham died, Tirus Tyler left them, too, taken away by cancer. He was 43.

After Mark Graham’s funeral his teammates gathered at a Kelseys on Rymal Road. It had been awhile. They talked for a long time.

“It showed the bond we still had, it was like a day hadn’t passed,” said runner Christine Bisnauth. “And it was extremely sad. Mark was a legend, and a real hero in our eyes.”

One of those who had been too upset to show at the church, was Dan Edwards; “Mad Dog,” the distance runner and pole-vaulter, who grew from five feet tall in Grade 9 to over six feet when he graduated from MacNab.

He couldn’t handle it. Graham had been the nicest guy, a gentle giant.

And Edwards’ life was already in a bad place.

He was never big on academics, it was all about running. After graduation Edwards worked at a Toyota plant, and over the years got promoted to paint shop manager.

In middle age he had health issues and grinded through a divorce that separated him from his two daughters for four years.

He suffered from a staph infection to his right leg that had gone undiagnosed, and learned amputation was a possibility.

His cousin, Kevin, died from suicide. Edwards started feeling like he was headed down that same dark road. He never told anyone what he was thinking.

But Mad Dog ultimately found a second wind.

He was able to keep his leg, and while his knee was shot to the extent he could never run again, he discovered hardcore cycling.

In August 2021, he made a two-week 1,400 km bike ride from Hamilton to Ottawa and Algonquin Park and back, to raise awareness and funding for mental health, and help break the stigma of talking about suicide and mental illness.

He rode for his cousin, and for his old friend and teammate Gord Hysen, who had also died from suicide.

Edwards wants more people to know there are options to help avoid self harm.

He remarried, and said he couldn’t feel happier with where his life is now.

“Honestly, I’ve got a wonderful wife who I bike and paddle with, and a dog that my life revolves around,” he said. “And a little house near Concession Street. I’ve gone through stuff, but come out on the other side.”

Sonja McPherson, the sprinter, had wanted to be a dentist, but took engineering in university, and ultimately built a career in quality assurance for a pharmaceutical company.

She raised a son, Rahim, by herself. He was a star football player at McNab who inherited his mother’s competitive swagger.

“Actually, I think it doubled in him,” she said. “He’s trying to whip me back into shape, and every now and then he’ll show me my running shoes.”

When she considers a defining memory from high school, she reaches for one afternoon 30 years ago.

It was a day when everyone on the team walked wearily into the MacNab gym after a hard practice outside. They set down mats and began the cool-down, stretching.

It was quiet at first, lying on their backs, faces turned up toward the lights high above.

And then came the smiles, and laughter. The talk started, one after the other, each of them offering feelings about the team, and life, this chorus of young voices baring all, unrecorded and unposted.

When a janitor finally poked his head in the door they were surprised to discover it was already after 7 p.m.

Time had passed slowly, and quickly, for the teenagers, joined together like one strong and vital beating heart, sharing a moment that would always be theirs.

Jon Wells is a Hamilton-based reporter and feature writer for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jwells@thespec.com

If you could go back in time 30 years and whisper advice to your teenage self, what would you say?

Melissa Craig: “Don’t worry about what other people think of you.”

Sonja McPherson: “Never lose that 17-year old confidence, no matter what life brings you.”

Rachel Dei-Amoah: “What my parents taught me: if one door closes, another opens up, and there’s always a different way to get to where you want to be. And success doesn’t look the same for everyone.”

Paula Sinclair: “Don’t quit on yourself. Perseverance is the key.”

Geoff Brown: “Continue going to school right after high school.”

Christine Bisnauth: “Try to be more patient, slow down and enjoy the moments.”

Dan Edwards: “Don’t force yourself to be something you’re not; wait to find out who you are.”

Marlene Springer: “If you see something you really want to achieve, reach for it.”

Claudio Balice: “Don’t ever put yourself in a position where you have to ask yourself, ‘what if’? Stop to smell the roses. And: Karma is real.”

Looking back on your expectations when you were in high school, has life turned out as you thought it would?

Sinclair: “Totally different. I expected smooth sailing; married, kids, family, and have a happy life forever. It’s been hard work. But a good life.”

Brown: “I don’t know that I had any expectations when I was in high school ... I’m comfortable with how my life is.”

Craig: “I thought life would be a lot different ... Everyone thinks there is an ideal person who you would be with. But life changes. And then again I also wouldn’t ask for it to be any different than it has been, because I have three great kids.”

Dei-Amoah: “I thought I would be in a different profession. Life has a funny way of letting you know what you are really made to do, and want to do.”

Bisnauth: “I’m happy with how life turned out. I never thought I would end up taking so long to get settled and married, at the same time, it’s been a good life and I’m grateful.”

Balice: “Are there still things that I wanted to do in life? Sure, but that’s the reality of life, you can’t do everything. I am further than I ever thought I would be, because I never planned for that future.”