Lyford's death gives us a tough lesson to learn

By JDS/Piscataquis Observer
MILO — A week ago the Penquis Valley High School gymnasium was the site of a pep rally for the Lady Patriots basketball team, as they got set to compete at the Bangor Auditorium for the first time in five years.
Friday was the day many in the community had hoped it would be back in Bangor to cheer on Penquis in the Eastern Maine Class C semifinals.
Instead, family, friends and community members joined together in the gym once again on Friday, Feb. 20, this time to remember and pay their last respects to a man who unfortunately died much too young.
Dylan Lyford, a 19-year-old chemical engineering student at UMO, died on Feb. 15 as a result of serious head trauma resulting from falling down a staircase, according to the state medical examiner. He was a freshman who had just graduated from Penquis Valley High School in Milo only months earlier.
First and foremost, my condolences to the family and friends that lost a loved one and dear friend in Dylan. I never had the privilege to meet the young man, but listening to people in town and reading his Facebook page only proved that he will be dearly missed.
“He was a person with a great heart for his friends, a great heart for life,” Rev. Michelle St. Cyr said of Dylan during the funeral service Friday.
It was hard to find a dry eye in the gym that day, as classmates from UMO and Penquis Valley, as well as family and members of the community came to remember the fun-loving young man always seemed to have a smile on his face.
“Our family is devastated,” said Dylan’s mother Susan Lyford in an e-mail to the Bangor Daily News on Thursday. “All we want is for people to hold on to the memories and remember Dylan for the child he was and the man he had become.”
The full details of Lyford’s death are still unknown. While the state medical examiner’s office said Lyford died from extensive head trauma, early reports also indicated that alcohol may have played a factor in Lyford’s death though the toxicology report has not come back yet to confirm that.
The news of Lyford’s death and the subsequent rumors of what happened led to numerous people demanding that the people who supplied alcohol to that party should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Whatever the family wants to do in this situation is their decision to make, a difficult decision I do not envy them in making.
What I do hope that comes from this is a lesson for all of us. Alcohol is ever-present in our society. Ads are everywhere for beer and liquor — the Super Bowl is known almost as well for its beer ads as the game, and Jack Daniels sponsored a NASCAR team last year. It seems kids each year experiment with things like beer, wine and hard alcohol like whiskey and vodka a little earlier than the kids before them.
It’s hard for me to stand here on a soap box and bemoan Dylan’s death as a careless action of a young college man when I was that same man doing much of the same things when I was 19 years old. Unless the medical examiners find more evidence in the coming weeks, it seems right now that his death was an unfortunate and terrible accident.
While I do not condone underage drinking, I find it hard to fault college students for having a few beers. They are at a young age where experimenting in beer and alcohol is socially acceptable, and it’s hard to imagine there’s a whole lot to do in Old Town and Orono (or any college in cold, snow-filled parts of our nation) for underage college students to do on a Friday or Saturday night in the winter besides staying cooped up in their apartment or dorm room.
I know this, because I’ve been there. I’d be willing to bet most of us have. There were the nights drinking at house parties at the University of Wisconsin that I got a little carried away and made a fool out of myself, only to pay the price with a ripping headache the next morning. But I, like many other college students every year, thankfully came away from those incidents with nothing more than a hangover.
There are students every year nationwide who are not so lucky. Students like Dylan, who for no other reason than just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, die in the most unfortunate of situations.
While what happened to Dylan is incredibly unfortunate and tragic, let us not learn nothing from his untimely death. Kids need to learn not only about the dangers of alcohol and drugs, but also to look out for one another during these times as well. Parents need to sit down with their kids and talk to them about alcohol and its dangers. Most importantly, we all need to sit down and look after one another.
As Susan Lyford told the BDN in that email, “All we ask is that kids learn when someone hits their head you don’t let them go to sleep. Call for help. Maybe someone will remember this and it will make a difference for someone.”
Dylan Lyford’s death was unfortunate, but we can’t let the opportunity to learn something from this go by, because if we do we would be doing an injustice to the young man.