Wiedmer: Tucker's Trek gives glimpse of 13-year-old's caring legacy

First, the worst. The unimaginable. The inconsolable.

Because you just don't tuck your perfectly healthy 13-year-old son into bed nine days before Christmas, return to find him lost to the angels the next morning and swiftly pick up the pieces.

You just don't.

You just can't.

So when middle son Tucker passed away on Dec. 17, Steve and Kim Hunt and sons Spencer (16) and Cannon (9) needed time and help and love and friends - loads of each - to somewhat rediscover normal.

Tucker's Baylor School family was similarly distraught.

"We have counselors on campus," said Baylor junior school headmaster Mike Drew. "But we brought in extra grief counselors, especially for his seventh-grade classmates. Though Tucker was only on campus a year and a half, he left a significant impression on everyone in the school. I really miss him, and everyone else does, too."

But how to channel that sadness and emptiness and helplessness into something positive was a trickier matter. Especially less than five months after his death, which remains a painful mystery.

"We wanted to do something special," Drew said. "But we didn't want it to be a day of mourning and sadness."

Blaes Schmissrauter, who taught Tucker at St. Peter's Episcopal School, and Wendy Ransom, a longtime Hunt family friend, had an idea.

They decided to stage a one-mile "Tucker's Trek" through the Baylor campus. Donations would go to Emily's Power for a Cure Neuroblastoma Fund, for which Tucker was planning to raise money by participating in the Music City Half Marathon.

"He needed to raise $1,200 in pledges to race," Steve Hunt said. "I'd say, 'Do you think you can do that?' He'd look at me, pat his behind and say, 'See this? This is all you're going to be looking at on race day, so you better start training.'"

It is at this moment that Tucker's Trek becomes two stories, each equally heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Emily, you see, was Emily Ransom, Wendy's daughter, who lost her life to the rare cancer neuroblastoma at the age of 2 in 2006.

The Ransoms and Hunts are so close that Jon Pat Ransom, perhaps Tucker's closest friend, said of the relationship, "When my sister died, he was a great distraction for me and his younger brother was a great distraction to my younger brother [Max]."

Another story: When Tucker suffered a bad fall on a ski slope a couple of years ago and had to be rushed to a hospital for a possible broken neck, the X-ray showed a necklace he was wearing honoring Emily.

When Steve asked how often he wore it, Tucker answered, "Always."

Given that alone, Tucker's Trek felt right on so many levels long before the event took place on May 14.

"We just decided that it would be a celebration of Tucker's love," Schmissrauter said, "and a mile run for the miles that Tucker didn't get to run with us in April at the Music City Marathon."

To be but 13, the carrot-topped Tucker loved so many different things.

"Tucker was a good artist, a good writer, an athlete - funny but unassuming," Drew said. "I taught him in a class and he thought about a lot of things most seventh-graders don't think about."

A single example of his diversity: On race day the Baylor campus was filled with tunes from Tucker's iPod, everything from Bob Marley to Bill Withers to Coldplay to Jack Johnson.

Race T-shirts were centered on Marley's "One Love." Kim and Steve crossed the finish line to Withers' "Lean on Me."

"One of our best memories as a family," Steve said, "was going to a Jack Johnson concert together in Atlanta. Tucker wanted me to buy him a Johnson hoodie that night. I told him no, that I'd buy him an overpriced T-shirt but no hoodie. He said he didn't want anything else. Later that night I got it for him. We buried him in that hoodie."

But the memories can't be buried. There was his unwavering affection for all things Baylor and the Georgia Bulldogs, despite his father and brothers pulling for Tennessee.

There were the two fingers he crossed during athletic events, the symbol that told his friends and family, "I'm ready to go, I'm focused." As Drew ponders a special way to honor Hunt, a statue depicting Tucker and his crossed fingers might be a good place to start.

His father recalled his first big wrestling tournament, the one where he won his first match and lost his second.

"Tucker was the same after each match," he said. "He shook the hands of his opponent and the opponent's coach. He had a smile on his face after both matches. Tucker just had a great big heart and was a buddy to everybody. He loved being a part of a team."

He had at least 600 buddies show up for Tucker's Trek. They raised more than $10,000 for Emily's Power for a Cure. Drew said the event was so well-received that it will become a 5k run next year.

"In a way it was so, so sad," Kim said. "But then you started looking at pictures from the Trek, and there were so many people with smiles on their faces. It's been so devastating losing Tucker, but it's been so rewarding to see so many people remember him."

Said Jon Pat of his late best friend: "Tucker always made you keep your chin up and look on the bright side."

Judging from the success of Tucker's Trek, he still is.

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