Seth Walsh’s Grandmother: “He Was A Sweet Kid Who Found The World Cruel, But He Didn’t Understand Cruelty”

The Los Angeles Times on Seth Walsh, the gay 13 year old Tehachapi, California young man who tried to take his own life September 19th, and who was declared, eight days later, on September 27th, brain-dead, taken off life-support by a bewildered family, arrangement made for Seth’s organs to be harvested. His mother, Wendy, remains distraught, overwhelmed by grief, and Seth’s friends on their parent’s instructions, are not talking. But his grandparents, 65 year old Jim and 69 year old Judy, are talking, determined they say to make sure that their grandson is not only remembered as “the gay kid who hung himself,” so they tell the Times stories about Seth, about his love for their dog Bambi, who like the Jonas Brothers, and trips to Magic Mountain. “When he smiled, he smiled with his whole face,” says Jim. “His eyes twinkled. It wasn’t just the smile. You got it from the eyes and the beaming of the face. He really meant that smile for you.” They say Seth’s favourite songs were Nat King Cole’s Smile and Bobby Darin’s Beyond the Sea, and that he listened to Mozart in the shower, and that so gentle a child was Seth that he preferred to “relocate bugs” rather than kill them. But they also tell a tale so sadly familiar, of a young man forced to endure cruelty and hate, tortured daily, because, as his grandmother says “He was harassed because he was gay.” Could anything have been done differently, changes made to protect Seth and guarantee he could live in a world free from fear? If this were a perfect world, yes, absolutely, but it isn’t perfect or even close. The Walsh family will try to understand and move forward, but it seems unlikely they will, Seth’s grandmother Judy saying “I had no idea there was that much pain inside of him. He was a sweet kid who found the world cruel, but he didn’t understand cruelty.”