Culture
For Don Waddell, leading Blue Jackets through Johnny Gaudreau tragedy is an echo of the past
In the hours after the Columbus Blue Jackets announced that star forward Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew had been killed, team president and general manager Don Waddell said he received 500 or so text messages.
One hit him even harder than the rest. It was from Graham and LuAnn Snyder.
On Sept. 29, 2003, the Snyders’ son, Dan, was critically injured when a car driven by Atlanta Thrashers teammate Dany Heatley was involved in a single-vehicle crash. Snyder died six days later.
More than 20 years later, the family is still in touch with Waddell, who was the Thrashers’ GM at the time. The message they sent on Aug. 30, the morning after a car struck and killed the Gaudreau brothers, wished the organization strength and had a simple message to Waddell: that there was no doubt he could lead the organization through this tragedy, just as he did the Thrashers.
“I think it’s important in those moments that you feel some support or love from somewhere,” Graham Snyder told The Athletic. “Because the emotions are just so high.
“When I woke up and first heard the news and saw the headline and started reading … it took me about a minute and I said, ‘Oh, my God. It’s Don again.’ I knew he had moved to Columbus.
“I thought, ‘Oh jeez, Don, how are you going to get through this?’”
Once again, he must lead a grieving organization through so much pain. And yet also, at a time when hockey does not feel remotely important, he must somehow, someway, try to get it ready to play hockey again, too.
“Nobody wants that job, but he certainly helped us, and the organization did,” Graham Snyder said. “I just felt we had to reach out to him. Because who can think about going through that twice in your life?”
The message hit home.
“When Graham and LuAnn reached out to me that Friday, it meant the world to me,” Waddell told The Athletic. “Because the family went through it, losing one of their two sons, that’s never easy for anybody. How they dealt with it and how we’ve stayed in touch over the years, it just meant the world to me to hear from them knowing that as parents who went through it, (they) felt we handled it as well as we could of and supported them.
“They’re good people.”
Graham Snyder has vivid memories of speaking to Thrashers players after his son’s death in 2003 and wishing them the strength to carry on.
“I remember going into the Thrashers dressing room in Atlanta, and I don’t know, there was some strength that came from somewhere,” Snyder said. “Just a calm that came over me and I started talking to the team about what needed to happen and that we were there for them.”
As Snyder remembers it, the support from people around the sport was so important.
“One of the things that kind of got us through it, and it’s what is happening right now in Columbus and around the hockey world, people are really, really coming together,” Snyder said. “I think it’s like no other sport. The hockey world is so connected and so tight.
“That’s how they’ll get through it now, with the support from others in the hockey world.”
The Jackets have felt that.
“Yes, 100 percent,” Waddell said. “It’s pretty evident by all the players that came out to the funeral — a lot of players that played with him but also a lot of players that didn’t play with him. This has had an impact not just on the Blue Jackets but the whole National Hockey League. And for that matter, the whole country. I’ve heard from so many people that didn’t know the Gaudreau family but saw all the stories and just wanted to be supportive and ask what they could do to help out. It was touching.”
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The idea now is to honor Johnny Gaudreau’s memory by playing for him.
“If it’s anything like it was in Atlanta, the emotions will carry them through for a while,” Snyder said.
Right now, the Jackets are surely still in a fog of pain and shock. But they need to find the strength to move on.
“We’re all devastated for the Gaudreau families,” Waddell said. “You don’t ever think that parents should be burying their kids. There isn’t a moment that goes by that you’re not thinking about the families.
“From a team standpoint, we know it’s going to be hard. But we also listened to (Johnny’s wife) Meredith when she talked at the church. She knows that Johnny wants the best for us. I know guys have talked about it, that he would want us to go out and do what we’re capable of doing and try to win as many hockey games as we can.”
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Getting the players as much help as they need is paramount.
“Everybody grieves and mourns differently,” Waddell said. “You don’t expect that people can get through this by themselves. The union (NHLPA) has been great. They’ve offered up multiple grief counselors.”
Waddell added that starting this week through Ohio Health, the Jackets also have people on-site who can speak with players.
It will be a difficult process in the days ahead.
“We have to try and figure out how to get through the healing process and continue to move forward,” Waddell said.
And as Waddell noted, the Blue Jackets just three years ago lost young goalie Matiss Kivlenieks to a tragic death as well, an event that still scars many in the organization.
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It’s no easy path here. But just the hope that somehow everyone will find the strength.
“This was a senseless and cruel way for people to lose their life,” Waddell said.
It is a tragedy that will forever be with so many affected. But somehow, through that, the Jackets will honor the spirit of a player beloved by teammates. And within that, they will want to continue to help a grieving Gaudreau family in any way possible.
The Snyders felt that from the Thrashers 21 years ago.
“They were so much behind us and supportive,” Snyder said. “It was truly amazing and truly touching.”
(Photo: Kirk Irwin / Getty Images)
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
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