Teenager's sudden death turns lives upside down

Dave and Jeanie Sharp had a good life, and they knew it. Healthy and happy kids, a nice home, a good job. It was so good, it was too good.

"What's going to be our trial in life?" they used to muse out loud.

Then their question was answered with the subtlety of a thunderclap. One moment they were enjoying a family outing in a national park, the next moment Dave was holding his son as he lay dying.

If this had been a movie, there would have been some dramatic clue of impending doom — background music, a foreboding scene or some ironic dialogue. Maybe life should offer at least that much when it's about to be turned upside down. But there was nothing. At the climactic moment, they were doing something as mundane as eating a taco salad.

The Sharps were sitting down to dinner at a campsite in Snow Canyon. Then there was running and screaming up the canyon. By the next morning, they were driving back to Salt Lake City with an empty seat in their car, riding in thick silence that was broken only by sobs, the thrum of the road and a feeble discussion of funeral arrangements and obituaries.

Colby, a 16-year-old student at Skyline High School, was gone.

It was only later that they would find irony and foreboding in something Colby had said. In the months ahead, when they would come to know their son more in death than they had in life, they would find more words and more irony that he left behind.

The Sharps have been reeling from their grief in the three months since Colby died from a fall in the cliffs of Snow Canyon. When the kids returned to school this past week, it stirred up the pain of their loss again. A young brother threw a screaming fit — "I want him back! I want him back!"

Jeanie went to school for a parents' meeting, but she was overwhelmed. She was sobbing before she reached the sidewalk and vomited when she reached her home.

"As parents, we automatically overnight became members of what feels like an exclusive club of those who have lost children," Dave says. "It's a club we don't want to be in, and no one who is not in the club can truly appreciate or understand our pain."

The club has grown this summer. It has been a summer of sudden loss and freakish mishap. A father watches his son walk 200 yards back to Scout camp in the High Uintas and never sees him again. A BYU student vanishes. Lightning strikes a 16-year-old boy in a park during a family reunion. A Boy Scout falls in Zion National Park. A high school athlete is hit by a baseball.