Hilinski's Hope: On Grief and a Family That Shows the Meaning of True Strength
Sports Illustrated
The house where the Hilinskis have chosen to start over sits on the banks of Lake Murray in Irmo, S.C., past where their street dead ends, nearby a thicket of towering white oaks. The building’s insides have been gutted, same as the family that bought the place in January. They ripped up the floors and tore up the kitchen and stripped away everything but the foundation. Time for a complete rebuild, in both a practical sense and a symbolic one.
For now, the house is uninhabitable, except for one room that’s tucked upstairs and left untouched by the construction. It’s where Mark and Kym Hilinski run their foundation, Hilinski’s Hope. Where they raise both cash and mental health awareness. And where they remember Tyler, their middle son, one of three boys, all college quarterbacks, from a close, bonded, upper-class family. Tyler is the one who died by suicide two years ago next month.
This room is crammed with reminders of the life that Tyler lived. That’s him smiling at a pool in Mexico during a family vacation in 2018, him wearing No. 3 as Washington State fans carried him off the field on their shoulders following a comeback win the previous fall, him sitting atop a brick wall in Greece earlier in college, staring down at the ocean, his whole life spread before him.
I’m standing next to Kym in that room on World Mental Health Day in October. We had driven to the lake house from the family’s temporary quarters, two apartments in the same complex located between Irmo and Columbia, where their youngest son, Ryan, is a freshman quarterback at South Carolina. He wears No. 3 in Tyler’s honor. He lives with his older brother, Kelly, who had planned to do the same for Tyler, the middle child of the three Hilinski boys. Kelly had decided to help Tyler manage his schedule, maximize his gifts on college football fields, maybe play in the NFL.
