After her 12-year-old son died suddenly in a freak accident, an Australian mom of two found his exercise book in a bag by his favorite spot: the piano. He had started composing a song.
With the help of the internet, mom Amanda Brierley from Queensland had the song finished, and performed, by individual musicians and orchestras around the world in memory of her son.
Twelve-year-old Kyan died on Jan. 31 running errands with his father and his little sister, Lauren.
“On the way back, he was sitting in the car reading his Kindle. He got out to open the gate,” Amanda told The Epoch Times. “We think that he misjudged when to close the gate; we think that he got stuck between the gate and the car trailer.”
Amanda’s husband, and neighbors, performed frantic CPR. But after an hour, a doctor delivered the devastating news that Kyan was gone. “It wasn’t a car accident, it wasn’t like there was speed involved or they were on the road and got hit by a car; he was just opening a gate,” Amanda said. “I just couldn’t stop crying, I was just hysterical at that point. We all were.”
Still in shock, Amanda found Kyan’s unfinished composition hours later. The family, who hails from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, knew that Kyan had wanted to write music but didn’t know he had already begun.
Wanting to hear more versions of the half-written song, Amanda made her post public and asked the world to help. Submissions flooded in, and among them were versions of Kyan’s song performed by celebrated musicians and esteemed orchestras.
“I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna try my luck,’” said Amanda. “To my surprise, most of the orchestras I asked gave us a submission; they made their own arrangements and played it. That was incredible.”
The proud mom describes her late son as an “amazing human” and “incredibly switched-on,” with a sense of humor far beyond his years. Kyan loved Lego, Greek history, and mythology, and was fascinated by the human mind. He was neurodiverse, having been diagnosed with Aspergers and ADHD.
“That gave him hyper-focus,” said Amanda. “If he was interested in something, he would put his mind to it. That was evident when he learned the piano; he just was able to sit there, morning to evening, and play.
“We framed his neurodiversity as a superpower. The key thing is to give these kids opportunities, because they are really talented.”
Kyan found his love for the piano just seven months before he died. The family was on holiday, and there happened to be an upright piano in their rented apartment.
“He just started playing on it like kids do, just bashing the keys,” said Amanda. “By the end of two days, he had learned ‘Für Elise,’ just by using his iPad; he would look at YouTube tutorials.
“After that, he came home and he pulled out this very old kids’ keyboard that his great-grandmother had given him when he was much younger. It had missing keys, so he made cardboard cut-out keys to fix it. He started learning other classical pieces, which was really interesting to me, because I didn’t realize that he liked classical music.”
Amanda assumed it was a phase, but Kyan kept studying; a handwritten list she found after he died confirmed that he had committed 32 classical pieces to memory, with a few modern pop songs thrown in “to bring the crowds in,” she said, “so that he could then ‘educate people with the beauty of classical music.’”
A couple of weeks before he died, Kyan had asked his mother for piano lessons. One of the last photos she found on his iPad was the name of a piano teacher.
Amanda laments not recording her son playing the songs he knew. She thought they had plenty of time. Yet, the kindness of strangers in bringing his own song to life has been humbling.
“Every submission I hear, I have completely opposite and contrasting feelings,” she reflected. “I guess that’s how it will be; we‘ll never get Kyan back, but we’ll always have his music.”
