Justin Brown, head coach of the Trion (Ga.) High School football team, retreated to his windowless office in the football field house on a Monday afternoon in late November.
Alone, he let the silence sink in.
There was no "click-clack" of cleats on the tiled floor in the locker room. None of the players were bragging about who they kissed over the weekend. Nobody talked about trap blocks, screen passes or tackles.
For Brown and his 5-5 Bulldogs, the high school football season ended on a Friday night four weeks ago, and the first Monday after a season ends always feels unsettling.
"Some guys came up to me Tuesday in school and said they didn't know what to do (the day before) without practice," Brown said. "You get so used to that routine. Then it stops. And we all wish we were at practice.
"It takes a few days to get back into life."
The locker-room chatter and the afternoons spent teaching tackling on the field and developing a game plan with his coaching staff help Brown escape from personal tragedies that never quite go away -- like a faint ringing in the ears that becomes audible when a room goes quiet.
Brown's own brush with death, the tragic loss of a spouse and the tender final years and days with his mom are never far from his mind, especially when he's alone in silence.
Life is filled with difficult fourth downs. And as Brown, who's not yet 40, preaches to his team, football helps teach lessons on how to regroup and finish the game.
TUESDAYS WITH MOM
As a child, Tuesdays were special to Justin. The other six days all led up to one, whole day spent with his mother, her day off.
"When you wanted to have a friend sleep over, you wanted them to come over on Monday so it could continue into Tuesday," Brown said. "It was our run-around day."
And running around often meant piling into the car and heading about an hour north to Chattanooga, because it was Donna's free day. She'd pile the boys -- Justin and his younger brother Garrett, and maybe a friend or two -- into her red Chrysler New Yorker with burgundy interior. Then, she'd tune the radio to KZ106, Chattanooga's classic rock station.
Donna would run her errands, but every trip also had at least one highlight for the boys. Sometimes it would be a special meal. Other times it might be a trip to the mall, or maybe a movie.
"Looking back, I took a lot of it for granted," Brown said. "We had a lot of great conversations in that car. A lot of good times."
CRUMPLING CRASH
Brown lived at home after graduating from Trion High School, where he was a star athlete. (He held the school record for tackles in a game with 23.) Brown lived with his parents while attending Floyd Junior College in Rome, Ga.
One November morning in 1993, he was driving down U.S. Highway 27 on his way to class at Floyd when things went awry. Brown fell asleep at the wheel of his Pontiac Grand Am just south of the entrance to Berry College. His car crossed the median and slammed head-on into a full-sized pickup truck.
"There was a girl two cars behind me, and she got to a pay phone to call my parents," he said. "My parents rushed down to Rome and saw my car still on the road before they saw me. They thought the worst."
His days of playing tackle football were over. So were his days in the gym playing pickup basketball or wrestling with his brother. He said doctors had to put him back together, "like Humpty Dumpty."
Brown suffered a fractured cheekbone, a broken left foot, a fractured right hip, a broken collarbone, several breaks in his neck and 50 stitches in his face. He spent a week in the hospital and remembers either his mother or his father -- usually both -- spending the night with him there.
On the day before Thanksgiving 1993, Brown returned home. He didn't walk through the door, though; he wheeled into his brother Garrett's bedroom. Garrett's room had a couple advantages for convalescing. The bed height matched the wheelchair, allowing for easier transport for the three months he'd spend in the chair. And of equal importance, Garrett's room had a VCR.
"I was basically bedridden at first," Brown said. "Mom would bring me my medicine, bring me dinner. She was very supportive."
The accident left him time to think about his past, and his future. He looked back on his glory days playing recreation-league sports -- when his mother would drop him off at practice and stay the entire time -- and later staring under the lights of Trion's football stadium.
He thought about the journey ahead, from a wheelchair to a walker, from a walker to a cane, from a cane to a normal stride. He pondered his future. What about college? What about coaching? Would he have a wife and kids someday?
Tears flowed. Sometimes he cried as his mother held him, nurturing and comforting as only a mother can.
"That was a refocusing time for me," Brown said. "I was refocusing on being thankful for life, and being thankful for your family."
It took time, but Brown's family helped him heal. Faith kept him going, and two joys were on the horizon -- a wife and coaching football. Eventually, they both became important parts of his life.
But one he would lose in a single, stunning night.
SUDDEN DEATH
On Nov. 4, 2006, Brown was living in Temple, Ga., and on the coaching staff at Villa Rica High School. The eighth-ranked Tennessee Volunteers were playing in Neyland Stadium against No. 13 Louisiana State in the CBS featured game of the day. Brown watched part of the game from a hospital room.
Earlier in the day, Brown took his wife to the hospital. She'd been suffering from a horrible migraine headache. A complication with medication dispensed to Amy at the hospital started a chain of events leading to her unexpected death.
"The nurse came in to check her vitals, and she didn't have any," Brown said. "That's when things changed. They rushed me out of the room and there's a 'code blue.'
"I saw her before they came in the room, and I knew she was gone."
Brown, by then a father of two, saw his life change in an instant. He looked at his wife and no longer saw her beautiful eyes looking back at him.
"You go to the hospital, thinking, 'I'll spend the night, we'll go home in the morning and I'll go to the coaches' meeting on Sunday because we have a big game against Carrollton the next week,'" he said. "It didn't happen like that."
The next morning, a Sunday, Brown delivered the most difficult speech he'd ever have to give. In the living room of his three-bedroom, ranch-style home -- with a red couch and two matching sitting chairs that Amy had selected -- Brown told his children, Brett and Casey, and stepson, Austin Mitchell, that their mother had died.
"You have to look at your 6-year-old and a 4-year-old and tell them that she's not coming back," he said. "That's the worst thing I've ever done, was telling my kids that."
Amy was a stay-at-home wife. She handled the bills, the housecleaning, the cooking, the laundry, the errands. She also bathed the kids at night so Brown could play with them when he got home and tuck them into bed.
All of those duties suddenly became Brown's responsibilities. Family members drove down to help him out, as did some of his friends.
Brown waited until the week of Christmas 2006 to put up the family Christmas tree.
"Then the d----- thing stayed up all of the next year," he said. "I didn't have the heart to take it down."
The decorated tree remained as a symbol of a family that had dwindled to three -- a grieving father and two motherless children.
They had trying times. Some folks in similar situations might have turned to the bottle, or pills, but not Brown. Instead, he huddled up with his circle of friends and family and found counseling for the kids.
"I'd wake up in the morning and Casey would be on the bed watching, as if she didn't know if I'd wake up," Brown said. "When Brett would get in trouble at school you'd wonder if he was lashing out or being a 7-year-old boy. Those are things I've had to weigh."
Brown coached track and field in the spring and football for one more season. Then he returned home to coach at Trion, to be closer to his family and to continue rebuilding his life.
He married his new wife, Lacey, last May.
A football maxim is that pain is temporary. With Brown, it sometimes feels like pain follows him around.
A STAIRCASE OF LOVE
Brown's mother, Donna, became ill in 2004 and she couldn't immediately rush to his side when Amy died. She began suffering from pulmonary fibrosis -- an irreparable scarring of the lungs -- even though she never had smoked.
Later, doctors diagnosed her with peripheral artery disease, which reduces blood flow to the limbs. After that, she had 10 amputation surgeries, including losing both of her legs up to the hip.
Still, those health problems never kept Donna from taking the annual family vacation to Panama City, Fla. Every July the family would rent a beach-front condo for a week.
It went well for years until Donna lost her legs and became immobile. She became anxious, Brown said. She didn't want to go to Florida last summer. She didn't want to burden her sons and her husband, Marty.
But the guys insisted.
"We's stayed at this place for a lot of years, but she wasn't sure about going after her first amputation," Brown said. "It had about a dozen (stair) steps to get where we needed to go.
"We would have to carry her up in the wheelchair. I grabbed the handles and Garrett grabbed the seat, and we took her up the stairs."
"... She didn't make it through the entire week, she was hurting so bad," Brown said. "That's when we all realized thing were turning for the worse."
Donna fought. Like a good football player, she battled. She had captained a team of family members who loved her for decades. She knew her boys would do well. They're both coaches -- men with strong arms and strong wills.
Another stay in the hospital loomed for Donna, but she never allowed her spirits to sag.
"She's got no legs, really struggling at times, and nurses would come check on her, and she'd always ask first how they were doing," Brown said. "For the shape that she was in, she never changed."
NO PEP FOR A RALLY
The Trion students gathered in the gym.
A pep rally had been organized before the Bulldogs' game against Armuchee in the second week of the 2014 season. A win could continue to build community support around the Class-A football team.
They had defeated old rival Gordon Lee 21-15 the week before and started on the path to a potential playoff spot. Things were going good for the team.
But not for Brown. He entered the gym filled with teenagers on that Friday afternoon just after seeing his mother go through another agonizing surgery.
He didn't seem like himself as enthusiasm mounted in the gym, assistant coach Jason Lanham noticed. Brown had a reason. His mother's condition had deteriorated. That morning, for the first time, the doctors had used the word "terminal."
But as the head football coach, Brown was expected to grab the microphone and inspire the students to help his team beat the Indians. He was trying to be brave, but the words -- and enthusiasm -- were choking in his larynx.
"I could just sense that he wasn't his normal self," Lanham said. "He's the rah-rah guy who gets the kids going. He didn't have that in him."
Lanham improvised because Brown couldn't speak.
For his part, Brown felt empty, with his mind contemplating more important things than a football game.
"When he had the mic, like he always does, I sensed something I'd never seen. It was total hesitation," Lanham recalled. "He was just totally overcome with the emotion ... that he was going through with his family.
"He didn't have it in him to speak."
The Bulldogs won that week's game, 34-7. The team had a chance to earn a trip to the playoffs in the final week of the season, but a home loss to St. Francis ended their hopes.
Then, three days before Thanksgiving, Donna died. She was 63. She was laid to rest the day before the holiday.
For the second time in his 40 years, Brown buried a woman he loved.
"Amy's death was like a tidal wave," Brown says now. "When it hit, everything got scattered all at one time. With Mom, (it was) more of a rainstorm that just keeps coming.
"In either situation, life still moves, life still happens."
The smell of sweat will return to the fieldhouse next spring practice. Cleats will click on tile floors again in Trion's locker room, and the players' chatter will penetrate the doors into the coach's office.
Then coach Justin Brown, both battered and strengthened by life, will take a deep breath, walk out onto the Bermuda grass field and put a whistle to his lips -- exhaling the pain of his past and sounding the start to a new season.
Contact David Uchiyama at duchiyama@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6484. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/UchiyamaCTFP.