When Damien Memorial School senior Ethan Dayton steps to the dais May 26 to deliver his valedictory address, he’ll do so with the wisdom of a young man who has not only reached a worthy academic milestone, but one who has seen his way through a personal journey of grief, love and self-discovery.
A straight-A student, an athlete of surprising range (he excels in both wrestling and figure skating) and a community-minded volunteer (he and his father, Earl Dayton Jr., have a standing appointment to cook and serve dinner at the Next Step shelter in Kakaako the third Sunday of every month), Dayton is every mother’s dream.
The sad irony was that in the difficult transition from child to adolescent, Dayton found himself without a reliable maternal figure. His parents had separated when he was 9 (they would divorce seven years later), and Dayton and his older brother Earl III stayed with their father. Dayton says that by the time he reached puberty, contact with his biological mother had diminished to just an occasional call or text.
"Our family felt unbalanced," Dayton says. "There was a lot of emotional ache and stress."
That changed when Dayton’s father met and married Sandra Hanakahi, a divorced single mother who was ready for her own fresh start.
In Hanakahi, Dayton found the sort of consistent love and support for which he had been yearning. Hanakahi attended all of his wrestling matches, skating events and speech and debate competitions. She paid for his violin lessons. She loved him as her own.
Then two years ago, Hanakahi woke up unable to move her legs. After a battery of tests, doctors diagnosed her with small vessel vasculitis, a rare disease that attacks the skin and other organs.
As the disease progressed, Hanakahi suffered nerve damage and painful lesions and spent long months in the hospital.
The family rallied around her. Dayton would rush to the Queen’s Medical Center immediately after school so his father could go to work. He’d return to a usually empty house, sometimes well after midnight.
"She wouldn’t give up unless we told her it was OK to give up," Dayton says. "But I loved her so much it was hard to do that."
Hanakahi died June 16, dealing Dayton an emotional blow from which he has only recently begun to recover.
Now, with graduation at hand and freshman year at prestigious Carleton (Minn.) College on the horizon, Dayton says he will take the lessons of the last year with him wherever he goes.
"I had to grow up pretty quickly," he said. "My identity was built around being a model student, but this experience humbled me. I learned a lot about what is really important."
———
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
