We need to talk about it: CUs Darrin Chiaverini, twin Ryan open up about loss

Editor’s note: This story deals with the subject of suicide. If you, or anyone you know, experience suicidal thoughts, you can contact the National Suicide Hotline by phone (1-800-273-8255) or text (send HOME to 741741).

The phone rang shortly after 3 a.m. Darrin Chiaverini, then a college football coach in Southern California, awoke to hear a chorus of screams on the other end of the line. His mother was in a panic after finding her son hanging lifeless from a tree in the backyard of her Ohio home.

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Chiaverini went numb. Did I really just hear that? he thought as he turned to his wife in disbelief.

Around the same time some 2,000 miles away in Chicago, his fraternal twin, Ryan, received a similar call. It was shortly after 5 a.m. CT when his phone rang the first time. When he saw the missed call was from his mother, he figured she would try again if it was really important. So he closed his eyes and rolled back over.

It rang again.

He answered and heard the same shrieks while his stepfather, Rick, cried uncontrollably in the background. His mother struggled to say much much more than, “He’s dead. He’s dead.”

Ryan dropped to his knees at the side of his bed, paralyzed by the shock.

Zachary L. Lovett took his life on the morning of Jan. 14, 2009. He was only 20 years old, and one of five half-brothers to the Chiaverini twins. Zach was the closest to them though. He grew up with Darrin and Ryan in Corona, Calif., shared the same room as Darrin and Ryan, was partially raised by Darrin and Ryan and had the same sense of humor as Darrin and Ryan.

And suddenly he was gone. No goodbye. No clear reason. Just gone.

“That phone call is as vivid for me now as the day it happened,” Ryan said.

No one saw it coming. Not then, anyway. But 11 years, 3 months and 28 days later, the Chiaverini brothers can still hear their mother crying on the other end of that phone, and can still feel every emotion wash over them just as it did that morning.

“You don’t forget something like that,” Darrin said.

It took a while before either could talk about it, before they could sort through the sadness and anger, and before they realized all their “what ifs” — What if they had done more? What if they missed obvious signs? What if they had a chance to talk to him? What if they had been there? — had no real answers.

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What Darrin and Ryan discovered instead during those years was perspective, and a mission they now hold dear.

Darrin, Colorado’s offensive coordinator and receivers coach, and Ryan, an Emmy Award-winning talk-show host in Chicago, have become staunch advocates for mental health awareness. They talk openly about Zach and about suicide with their football players and their audiences across the country with the hope that his story will chip away at the stigma still associated with mental illness.

They hope their words, especially in uncertain times like now, might be just what someone else needs to hear.

“It’s still hard to think about because I wish I could’ve done more for Zach,” Darrin said. “I wish I had been more educated on it myself, so I could help him through those situations.

“Talking about it has helped me mend some wounds.”

Ryan always tells people that he has five brothers. Not four. Five.

One of them is his best friend, his womb-mate born eight minutes later.

Three others, all younger, share the same father and are in touch regularly.

And the fifth, well, Ryan thinks about him every day.

Zach was 11 years younger than Ryan and Darrin. The twins were like father figures to him, in part because they knew what it was like to still have their own father. When their parents divorced, Eddie Chiaverini remained a fixture in their lives, even coaching their youth sports teams. Eddie Day, as he’s known on stage, was a guitarist for The Lively Ones, whose song “Surf Rider” plays in the final scene of “Pulp Fiction.” Eddie, 77, still performs as a lounge singer in California.

Their mother, Edna, led a hard life. She battled addiction and lost one child before having her twins. Only 10 months after Zach died, her husband, Rick, died of COPD. Edna suffered from — and beat — cancer twice, but the treatments sapped her immune system. She died of pneumonia in 2017.

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Rick was a manager at Home Depot and worked every day for 10 years. Near the end, when his lungs were functioning at only 16 percent capacity, he still showed up. He knew disability benefits wouldn’t have been enough to support his family.

Though Zach’s father was mostly absent after divorcing Edna, Rick embraced him as if he were his own. For the moments in between, Zach had his older brothers, who changed his diapers when he was a baby, allowed him to hang around when they played football and let him stay with them while they were in school and beginning their professional careers.

“He had the odds against him very young,” Ryan said. “We were his big brothers and his heroes, but sometimes he thought of himself as a disappointment if he didn’t live up to our accomplishments. That was hard for him even though we supported anything that he wanted to do.”

The Chiaverinis’ sports roots run deep and both Darrin and Ryan, now 42, benefitted from the gene pool. Darrin was an avid hockey player who earned all-county honors in baseball and later became a star receiver at CU. Drafted by the Browns in 1999, Darrin played four years in the NFL, including stints in Dallas and Atlanta, plus another three years in the Arena Football League before transitioning to coaching.

Ryan, also a hockey player growing up, was a walk-on safety and special-teamer at CU who later earned a scholarship. He shared his father’s musical talents but found his calling in broadcast journalism. Ryan was a sportscaster for Denver’s KUSA-TV before jumping to Chicago and becoming a co-host of “Windy City Live,” the daytime talk show on WLS-TV that replaced “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2011.

Zach wasn’t the athlete that Darrin and Ryan were. He wasn’t passionate about the arts either.

He was unsure, as so many are at his age.

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“He was a 20-year-old kid. He wasn’t a man yet,” Darrin said. “He was still trying to navigate his life and trying to figure out what he wanted to do.”

After graduating high school, he worked briefly at the Salvation Army, took some courses at a junior college and toyed with the idea of joining the military. But he didn’t excel in the classroom. He was more the class clown, with a quick wit and infectious laugh.

He and Ryan would send each other text messages with clips from “Dumb and Dumber” and lines from “Tommy Boy.” The last movie they watched together — “Step Brothers,” with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly — had them laughing hysterically.

“Every time I watch that movie now I think about him because that’s the kind of comedy he loved,” Ryan said.

Zach’s upbringing had its trials, with his mother’s drug and alcohol dependence and his father’s absence. Yet he didn’t display what his family believed were obvious red flags for possible suicide. He never appeared to be depressed. He was sober when he died; his mother’s addictions deterred him from trying anything, Ryan said.

And he hated needles, so much so that he had his mother hold his hand when he had to get a shot at the doctor’s office. So surely he couldn’t have planned this brutal ending for himself, they thought.

But there were moments that now stand out to Ryan and Darrin.

“I think about Robin Williams a lot,” Ryan said. “Robin Williams was very similar to my brother’s personality as far as (acting) goofy and always trying to entertain people, but clearly in his quiet times he must’ve had some dark thoughts.”

Zach lived with Ryan and Darrin for much of his life. When Ryan was at CU, Zach stayed with him. When Darrin was drafted by the Browns, Zach and his mom moved to the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville.

The twins provided stability, but Ryan wondered at times if they were more of a crutch.

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“My brother and I really were always the ones that would bail him out of bad situations because we had the finances to do it,” he said. “He’d get caught shoplifting or doing some petty crime or something because he was trying to get new shoes from the mall and he couldn’t afford them.”

There were times when Zach would visit Ryan in Chicago, charm everyone with his humor and carefree demeanor then lose his temper over something seemingly trivial. When he cooled off — and he always did — he would often apologize and go back to being his normal self.

“Zach was a good kid, but he struggled with some things, like confidence and just emotional outbursts at times,” Darrin said. “Back then, there wasn’t as big a focus on mental health as there is today. So I think me and my brother and my mom, we just didn’t see it. We knew that he had issues, but we didn’t know that he was struggling to the point where he was going to commit suicide.”

When Zach’s flare-ups seemed to intensify and his behavior grew more erratic, Ryan phoned his mother and suggested they get him some help. His personality was changing. Little did he know that Zach was listening to the conversation on another phone in the house. Near the end of the conversation, Zach yelled into the handset, “Ryan, I’m not fucking crazy!”

That still eats at Ryan. As close as he was to Zach, he left when they were at odds.

“We weren’t on the best terms at the time, and that was something I struggled with for many years because I was showing him some tough love at the time,” he said. “That was really hard. It took me many years to forgive myself for that, and I think a lot of families go through guilt and shame.

“But honestly we didn’t really have warning signs that he would ever do something like that.”

The details of Zach’s last night, as relayed by his mother, led his family on a winding path of questioning, too. Because, for the most part, it was pretty normal. He supposedly had a big dinner and was in a good mood after visiting with friends the weekend prior. He did some laundry, scrolled through Facebook, downloaded some music and somehow, someway was so upset by something that he went into the garage, grabbed an extension cord and trekked through nearly a half-foot of snow to put an end to everything.

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Maybe he saw something on Facebook that upset him and he reacted in haste. Maybe there was something else, something deeper that had been bothering him. Looking back, Ryan wonders if Zach had been suffering from bipolar disorder. But no test could ever confirm or refute his theory now.

The last song he downloaded was “You Found Me” by The Fray.

Where were you
When everything was falling apart?
All my days
Spent by the telephone
That never rang
And all I needed was a call
That never came
From the corner of First and Amistad

Zach died with his home phone in his pocket.

“It was like he wanted to be rescued, but the cavalry never came,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s second phone call on the morning of Jan. 14, 2009, was to his producer in Chicago, where he was then a sportscaster. He relayed the news amid sobs, then hopped on a flight to Cleveland.

Darrin did the same from California, and four days later the family gathered at a funeral home in Berea, Ohio, for its final goodbye to Zach.

“It was an open casket, but I couldn’t even go look. I didn’t even want to look,” Darrin said. “Just because I’ve been to funerals and the last image you have of someone is in the casket. I didn’t want that image to be in my head so I just chose to stay away from that.”

Instead, Darrin kept the mental image of Zach’s blond hair. So blond it was almost white. He thinks about the times when he and Ryan would play football outside and young Zach would run around without his shirt, just wanting to play with his older brothers.

He thinks about how happy Zach seemed.

“Even to this day, I still think about him,” Darrin said. “He’d be 31 now. I think about whether he’d have kids and if he’d be married.”

Darrin needed almost five years before he was ready to talk about Zach, and he hadn’t spoken publicly about him until recently. In the years in between, he started to read more about what Zach might have been dealing with. He began to self-reflect, too.

In football and most other sports, Darrin was trained to play through the pain, to be tough, to not show his opponent any grimace or agony. Emotions were signs of weakness, and weaknesses were career-ending flaws.

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“But that’s not the answer,” he said. “I think, looking back on it now, I wish I could have just been able to be more educated on it myself so I could help Zach through those situations so he didn’t think he had to do that to get out of whatever he was feeling.”

It wasn’t until Darrin started coaching at Texas Tech in 2014 that he began to open up. He talked to his players about Zach and encouraged them to ask for help if they’re feeling down.

At CU, the conversation has continued.

“I talk to them about being their own best coach by how they talk to themselves internally,” Darrin said. “I think it’s important because the kids are under a lot more pressure these days, especially college athletes.

“I think it’s our job as adults to help them through that and constantly talk to them about their mental health. I talk to my daughter and to my son about mental health all the time. ‘Hey, things are going to get tough, but we’ve got to talk about it. If you’re not feeling right, we need to talk about it. You can’t just suppress those emotions and think it’s going to be OK.’”

CU has lost many of its own to suicide, including Gabe Oderberg (2004), Heisman-winner Rashaan Salaam (2016) and Drew Wahlroos (2017). Running backs coach Darian Hagan also lost his 19-year-old son DeVaughn Levy to suicide in 2010.

In recent years, however, CU has established itself as one of the nation’s leaders in providing ample mental health resources and programs for its student-athletes.

CU was one of the first schools to hire a clinical sports psychologist for its student-athletes, back in 2012. Its athletic department now has its own wing dedicated to mental health — Psychological Health & Performance (PHP) — with multiple licensed counselors, a peer-advocacy support group, a leadership and career development program and a close connection to the Buffs4Life Foundation, a nonprofit that helps current and former CU athletes with financial and mental health issues.

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In 2018, shortly after Salaam’s death, Buffs4Life launched its “Never Again” campaign to connect former football players for support.

“I think we need to help our players and help our athletes, and not only be there for them but educate them on mental health,” Darrin said. “The tough thing for me, looking back on Rashaan, was I was coaching here (when he died). I could’ve done more to include him in CU and what we’re about because he was living a couple miles away and we never saw him around.

“I think that that’s on us as coaches. I wish we could have done more to help him, just like Zach.”

For the first five years after Zach died, Ryan kept quiet, too. He took a month of bereavement before returning to work, but didn’t talk about Zach. He didn’t want sympathy, because that would’ve made it worse, and he certainly didn’t want to be judged. There was that stigma.

“I wish I would’ve sought a therapist,” he said. “I think that would’ve helped a lot. But I never grew up in a family that did that. Our parents were old school and maybe didn’t know about that kind of stuff.”

Ryan shared his emotions only with his twin, who suggested he read Tony Dungy’s memoir “Quiet Strength.” Dungy’s son, James, committed suicide in 2005.

“There was a lot of shame when it first happened,” Ryan said. “Could I have done more for Zach? As much as I was helping him financially and trying to get him on the right path, maybe I could have done more. Maybe I should have helped them with this or maybe I should have sent more money.

“Reading the book helped me understand that it affects many families, and then educating myself more about it opened my eyes to a lot of different things. People from different socioeconomic backgrounds are affected by this. … It really angers me when people say, ‘Oh, people that commit suicide are cowards.’ That’s one of the most offensive things that I hear. And I’ll actually get really upset with people when they say that because they don’t understand. Until you’ve walked a step in somebody’s shoes that’s in that predicament, then you don’t know.”

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Ryan first shared Zach’s story publicly on “Windy City Live” in 2014. His producer pushed him to do it as part of an episode about mental health. Up until the moment he stepped onto the set, he wanted to back out.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done on TV,” he said.

But the weight was lifted.

Later that year, he wrote and recorded a song called “Chicago” as a tribute to Zach. The song, which incorporated many local celebrities in its video, was coincidentally released the day Robin Williams took his life.

Proceeds from the iTunes downloads went to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Ryan spoke at the organization’s Out of the Darkness Walk in Grant Park a month later and even brought his mother with him. He still has a framed photo of her from that day, wearing her AFSP T-shirt.

And in the years since, Ryan and Darrin have tried to keep the conversation going about mental health on TV, in the huddle and with those they’re closest to, with the hope their words can help mend someone else’s wounds.

“There are hundreds of thousands of families dealing with this, sadly, every day,” Ryan said. “It’s sort of like this fraternity or sorority that none of us chose to be a part of, but now it has to be our mission to help others.”

(Top photo of Ryan, left, and Darrin Chiaverini, right, with their half-brother Zachary Lovett: Courtesy of Darrin Chiaverini)

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