Syracuse, N.Y. — Go ahead and zoom in. Closer. Get a good look at Chris Gedney, holding his little girl as ocean waves batter his lower body and barely budge him.

His 6-year-old daughter grabs the back of his neck as she places each foot in her father’s palms. His forearms hardly wobble as he lifts her up, then down, until her feet touch the water.

What did Dad used to say?

“Elevator up!”

“Elevator down!”

Ellianna bursts into laughter in between sips of lemonade, rewatching a DVD of a 2011 family vacation in Cape May, N.J.

We think we always knew the football icon from Liverpool. But few have seen Chris Gedney like his first wife, the woman holding the camera.

Kathy Patton-Gedney can tell you about the moments like this, when he was a gentle, caring father of four. But she can also tell you about his emasculating, life-threatening disease, the pills and the alcohol. How all these forces conspired to exacerbate his emotional problems until the day he took his life.

Interviews with family members, friends and former co-workers, messages from Gedney and a review of police and medical documents obtained by Syracuse.com, help explain what has seemed inexplicable since last winter.

They show how one of the most popular figures in Central New York privately fought a decade-long struggle that ended on the afternoon of March 9, 2018 with a gunshot to the neck.

Gedney killed himself the way he did, friends and family say, because he believed something was wrong with his brain after taking thousands of hits during his football career. He joined a lawsuit against the NFL in 2012. His brain was shipped to Boston to be studied for chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

In the wake of Gedney’s death, former Syracuse football players held private meetings to discuss the message in it, whispering their worries about the hidden cost of the game they chose.

As for now, Kathy’s sitting at the kitchen table in front of a basket full of sympathy cards, weighing the hidden side of Gedney against the image.

Here’s a note from the chairman of the Chicago Bears, tucked under one from the daughter of Coach Dick MacPherson and countless more from neighbors and friends. That Chris Gedney is unmistakable.

The home-grown, Syracuse University All-American who played six seasons in the NFL before returning to his alma mater to work in fundraising and to broadcast football games on the radio, a hometown hero who had it all: six-figure salary, attractive wife and four children -- Annaleigh, Chase, Montanna and Ellianna -- in a big house in the hills of Onondaga.

And yet, Kathy can’t tell you everything. There are parts to this story that remain a mystery more than a year later. There are things she will never know. Police never found a suicide note.

She’s left to tell her youngest daughter the truth about her dad, eavesdropping as Ellianna swipes right on an iPad, a blur of memories. The child points to a photo.

“That’s my dad’s grave. He died. This happened because he was sick. I was crying.”

What should Kathy tell her?

That a man expected to display machismo carried an embarrassing health condition called colitis?

That a man who wanted nothing more than to enter a room and feel loved was wounded by a divided family?

That a man required to project enthusiasm and make Syracuse University donors feel important sometimes found it hard to get out of bed to go to work?

What should Kathy tell her?

***

It is 11:04 a.m. on Jan. 18 last year. In 50 days, Gedney will be dead.

He told a friend he has been staying in his father’s basement, down in what they called the cave, a windowless room with a double-bed, dresser, bathroom, fireplace and Netflix.

Gedney is desperate to wrest control of his life, to rid his body of addictive painkillers so he never has to spend another night in the cave.

He’s on naltrexone to fight addiction and five other drugs to combat symptoms of withdrawal. As instructed, he slipped his buprenorphine — a powerful narcotic used to treat opioid addiction -- under his tongue.

Then, he texted his friend.

OK: the race has begun. I just did the dissolve under the tongue. 32 mg total. Feel calm and relaxed. That’s it. Have to fight through everything else … I cannot drink ever again and I cannot use pain pills ever again. God give me the strength to remain true to this …

Ten days later, Gedney texted the friend he was opioid-free for the first time in more than two years. Then he relapsed. The next morning, he sent out a cry for help.

I am at the end of my rope. I think I need someone here. I feel like I want to blow my brains out to end this crazy cycle. Can’t take this any longer. Sorry to let you down.

Sorry? Scott Schwedes didn’t want to hear sorry. Not after talking him off the ledge so many times. Sitting in church, Schwedes crafted his response. Hang on, he wrote, I’ll be there in 20 minutes.

You have to get rid of the notion that you’re LETTING ANYONE DOWN!!!! You may fail 10 times before you win. Don’t ever let that idea creep into your head again. It’s OK. You’re not on anyone else’s timeframe. You’re on your own timeframe.

Schwedes, the Jamesville-DeWitt graduate who went on to a record-setting career at Syracuse and played for the Miami Dolphins, knew what everyone did about Gedney.

Need a sideline pass or tickets to the game? Gedney delivered. Need the scoop on what’s going on with the football team? There’s Gedney, greeting you with a firm handshake and smile, giving you the time of day even if he didn’t have a minute to spare.

He bridged SU fans to its glorious past during fundraising events. He kept radio listeners optimistic about a losing program with one-liners often borrowed from his father.

He once spent halftime in the chancellor’s suite talking to an older fan, just because he thought it might be the ailing guy’s last time watching the Orange. He coaxed big-money donors but never thought he was too good for the rest of us.

He was the blue-chip recruit who spurned the major programs to stay home, a pass-catching tight end with athleticism rarely seen at that position.

Even an epic on-field moment -- stopped 3 yards shy of the goal line against No. 1 Miami in 1992 -- is a source of nostalgia for the program’s pinnacle since Ernie Davis. There was our Liverpool High School graduate shielding his facemask lying on the Carrier Dome turf, distraught at coming up short against the big, bad ’Canes in a 16-10 defeat.

Chris Gedney reacting after being tackled short of the goal line as time ran out in the 1992 game against Miami.

His gratitude extended into the community. Gedney, whose youngest daughter has Down syndrome, served on the board of directors for the National Down Syndrome Society and was involved with Special Olympics. He volunteered for a Crohn’s and colitis organization in Phoenix during his comeback from the chronic inflammatory bowel disease in 2000.

He wanted to inspire the kids who had to raise their hand a dozen times a day to ask the teacher if they could use the bathroom. He wanted to show them they could still grow to be strong.

Like Kathy, Schwedes also saw what nobody else did. Three or four years back, he said, Gedney reached into his office drawer for a big container of methadone, a pain-killer that can also treat drug addiction -- or become addictive if abused.

“I saw that jug no less than five times,” Schwedes said.

“I saw it in his office. He had it down in the filing cabinet in the bottom drawer. He showed it to me. I held it. It was heavy. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ "

George Mangicaro didn’t want to hear sorry, either, not after hearing the reason Gedney skipped his high school coach’s retirement party in 2014. Coaches George O’Leary and Doug Marrone sent in video messages toasting Mangicaro along with 300 others that night at the Holiday Inn.

And where was Gedney, the keynote speaker? The day before, he checked into Tully Hill, a rehab facility.

“Chris,” Mangicaro told him weeks later over lunch, “that’s been part of your problem. You always worry about hurting somebody else’s feelings.”

It was as true then as it was years earlier when Mangicaro shut the door of his office behind him, his star player torn over his college decision. Gedney could go to Penn State, which would be convenient for his mother living in Delaware. But his dad wanted the hometown team.

Gedney’s parents divorced, and Chris wanted to do better. He didn’t want to see his kids only in the summer, the way he was with his dad. Gedney, a friend said, wanted to be Clark Griswold driving the camper on vacations, zipping the family across the lake and renting a big cabin.

So imagine Gedney, three decades later, back in his father’s house. He’s ashamed of being trapped in a life he swore off 25 years ago, one without his wife and kids around all the time.

He can’t spend another night in the cave, so he spent the night at Schwedes’ house barely sleeping. He packed a bag to go back to Tully Hill the next morning.

Before leaving the house, Gedney handed his friend a bag of pills. Schwedes later told police Gedney was concerned about the anti-psychotic medication for depression his doctor prescribed.

“Hold on to this,” Gedney said.

“Just in case.”

***

Chris Gedney at Chicago Bears training camp on July 21, 1994.The Associated Press

In Chicago in 1994, Gedney broke his collarbone the first week of training camp with the Bears. Then plantar fasciitis struck. Later, he broke his leg. Those injuries healed; inside, a deeper pain burned.

The next year, while Kathy was pregnant with their first daughter, Annaleigh, Gedney started cramping, became easily exhausted in practice and experienced incessant diarrhea.

Ulcerative colitis sabotaged his life. Depression set in. He couldn’t go anywhere without mapping the location of the nearest bathroom. Prednisone provided relief, but by 1999, after signing with the Arizona Cardinals, his colon perforated. Doctors performed a pair of life-saving surgeries to his large intestine, rewiring his internal plumbing.

Down 40 pounds, he ordered doctors to bring a treadmill into the hospital room and started a comeback. He returned to the field, caught 10 passes and won the Ed Block and Gene Autry courage awards.

“He wasn’t sure who he was going to be without football,” Kathy said. “He wasn’t sure if people would celebrate him, if (football) wasn’t part of it.”

It all took a toll on their marriage. Just as they started losing hope it could work, their second daughter, Montanna Patton Gedney, arrived two weeks early, born Nov. 2, 2000, weighing 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

Kathy never felt her water break. For more than 24 hours Montanna sat low in her mother’s womb, bobbing like a cork as contaminants attacked her with no amniotic fluid for protection.

The doctor prepared Kathy for the possibility her third child was going to die. Kathy refused to leave the room, then winced as they plunged a needle into the top-front of the baby’s skull and gave her blood transfusions.

Montanna screamed the whole time.

“Sure enough,” Kathy said, “she is the fighter of the bunch.”

Their daughter’s birth renewed the family as Gedney’s football career came to an end. They moved to Ohio in 2004 to live on a farm with chickens, ducks, cats and horses. Gedney worked in the mortgage business and volunteered with the fire department, searching for a suitable substitute for the brotherhood football gave him.

He got hired as Syracuse football’s radio analyst ahead of the 2007 season and moved back home. Soon, he joined the fundraising arm of the athletic department.

Former SU football player Chris Gedney prepares to do a radio broadcast of the Insight.com Bowl between SU and Kansas State at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Ariz., in 2001.Frank Ordonez | The Post-Standard

Suddenly, Gedney was back in 1987, leading Liverpool to a sectional championship. He was back at Syracuse University, part of the only senior class to win five bowl games. He was back in his glory days, attending practices, flying on the team plane, banging on the window of the coaches’ box after big plays, texting his buddies in all caps “G-A-M-E-D-A-Y.” This can work, Gedney thought, maybe even salvage his marriage.

Instead of finding catharsis, though, he plummeted into a 10-year nosedive of depression. Gedney took a sedative, Ambien, but often was up all night. He’d try soothing himself back to sleep with pint glasses of vodka in front of the 3 a.m. “SportsCenter,” sometimes forgetting he’d let out the dog or turned on the oven.

“That was more crushing than anything else,” Kathy said. “When you open the curtain and recognize it’s not all you thought it was, that was hard, that was tough for him to take and depressing. This was supposed to be the golden ticket, and it didn’t end up being that.”

One Sunday in February 2013, he gathered his wife and four kids in the den next to the kitchen and told them he was moving out.

Later that year during Syracuse football’s bowl trip in Texas, he reconnected with Seely Anderson, a former co-worker in the mortgage business whom he had met after retiring from football.

They got a house together the following year and married in 2016. Mangicaro watched as Gedney hopped around on his sore ankles, dancing with Ellianna at the wedding.

“I’ve never seen him happier,” Mangicaro said. “A year and a half later, it all came tumbling down.”

After Gedney’s death, Seely retained a lawyer with experience in concussion litigation and moved to Idaho.

She didn’t talk for this story, but while accepting an award for him at an SU banquet last fall, she described her first impression of Gedney.

She had no idea he had been a football player when they met at a work conference. Instead, he constantly talked about his family, including his newborn daughter named Ellianna. Seely left the conference hoping her future husband would be just like Gedney.

“I still thank God that not only would I marry a guy like him, but I would be lucky enough to marry the Chris Gedney,” she said.

Then, she read an excerpt from an email Gedney wrote to Montanna a few years ago.

Remember what I’ve always told you. Never make yourself feel better by making someone else feel worse. Give more than you take, and offer more than you ask.

***

The gravesite of former Syracuse football player Chris Gedney.Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com

Kathy remembers she didn’t scream when Montanna called last March: “Dad shot himself.”

Kathy quietly ended the call and turned to her co-worker in the main office at Walberta Park Elementary School.

“I have to go get Montanna,” she said.

She pulled up in front of Gedney’s house on Roberts Avenue, ran in and wrapped Montanna in a hug.

Three shotguns were found next to Gedney on the bed in the third-floor attic when police and paramedics arrived, police records show.

Seely was out of town but met with police 12 days later and handed over a bag full of 20 different medications he was prescribed, police wrote. Several fight depression and stomach issues. Another manipulates taste buds to make alcohol unpleasant.

Family members told police they were aware Gedney battled depression and alcoholism but never heard any suicidal comments. Gedney’s father, Tom, said his son was in Boston earlier in the week having a colitis-related surgery.

He spent a couple days at his father’s house recovering, then left around 8:30 that morning to go home. Tom texted Gedney around 11:30 a.m., to check in, and 3 minutes later received a final message from his son saying he was “just sleeping,” according to a police document.

At 2:43 p.m., a paramedic pronounced Gedney dead.

***

Here is a man just like Gedney. He sat next to him at a Syracuse-Army lacrosse game at the Carrier Dome 13 days before getting the stunning phone call from Gedney’s father. The man also blended in among the mourners at Gedney’s funeral March 15, 2018, at Most Holy Rosary Church.

They met at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, talked and frequently texted. He was Gedney’s AA sponsor.

The man’s drinking threatened his marriage and wrecked his family and career. He never attempted suicide, but he imagined drinking his life away until he realized it wouldn’t get the job done fast enough.

He wants you to know there are others fighting the same disease he and Gedney fought, that there are hundreds of meetings each month in the Syracuse area. Attendees could be a neighbor, a co-worker, a client. From a distance they have it all; inside, they are hurting.

“We can hide that. Some of us pretty well," he said. "The pain. The drinking. The shame. On the outside, everything can look good, but on the inside, it’s a war.”

***

The casket is covered by family members during the funeral for Chris Gedney at Most Holy Rosary Church in Syracuse on March 15, 2018.SYR

It’s five days after Gedney’s funeral, and Don McPherson, the Heisman Trophy runner-up for the unbeaten 1987 team, summoned a small group of local lettermen to the Genesee Grande Hotel.

There's Schwedes, the man who had a front-row view of Gedney’s final weeks. With him is Todd Kasmer, Gedney’s roommate for most of his time at SU. Robert Drummond and Jeff Mangram are here, too, listening as McPherson raises his voice.

“Too many of us have fallen,” McPherson told the group.

Gedney’s death sent shock waves through the SU community and started a conversation on how SU can improve relations with its football alumni. McPherson, dismayed how Gedney self-destructed in plain view, promised players their voices would reach the chancellor’s office.

They devised ideas there and at a second meeting at Prime Steak House later that spring. Was playing football simply the bargain they all agreed to as 18-year-old high school seniors? What does Syracuse and every other school in the NCAA owe its players? VIP access to facilities? Help with medical bills racked up 25 years after their final college game? Lifelong insurance? Anything?

Said Dan Conley, an All-Century team member who has undergone more than 15 surgeries since suiting up for SU: “I can share with you people aren’t comfortable talking about it for many reasons, including fear of not being employed.

“When (Coach) Mac died, I really went downhill. It was really the first time as an adult I felt depressed. It hit me much harder than I ever imagined it would.

“But then when Chris died, I just said, ‘Hey, enough is enough.’ It was a wake-up call for all of us to do a self-evaluation and find out how we can help ourselves.

“When you’re in pain, it makes you depressed. I know that because I’ve walked around with three ACLs, two shoulders that are just rotten with arthritis. I walk around everyday in pain, and it beats you up all day long. It is exhausting to walk around.

“When Chris passed away, I said I need to start taking control of my own life. I need to get things lined up for the future so that I don’t end up like Chris and make sure I don’t end up in dark places.”

Said Kasmer, about the Syracuse administration: “If it happened there, right under their nose watching … if they couldn’t see it there, how are they going to see it with me?”

The players took their ideas to athletic director John Wildhack and deputy athletic director Herman Frazier on July 31. Among them: an outreach center near campus that provided resources such as medical screening, information on neurological testing, addiction therapy, spousal counseling and beds to stay overnight.

Wildhack supported the players. The group agreed to meet again last fall but canceled because of scheduling conflicts.

As a group, they have not met since. Wildhack declined an interview request for this story.

***

Former Syracuse football player Chris Gedney hiking Devil’s Bridge in Arizona in spring 1997 with his daughter Annaleigh.Photo courtesy of Kathy Patton-Gedney

Dangling above the windows are postcards scribbled with daily reminders nudging Kathy toward the future.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain … No one can stop you but yourself … Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

She kept them hanging in her dining room because there is no manual on how to move forward, with so much unresolved.

A brain autopsy done at Boston University’s CTE Center showed Gedney suffered from Stage II CTE at the time of his death, the hospital said. Stage II symptoms include depression, mood swings and short-term memory loss. It can also include suicidal thoughts.

“He would not have wanted even me, who he maybe didn’t even like at all at the end, ... to be hurting. He would not have wanted anyone to be hurting. Ever," Kathy said.

“He was searching desperately for a light. What he represented to so many other people, he needed someone to represent that for him. It’s unfortunate he didn’t find it.

“There are so many contributing factors to why he took his life, but I can guarantee if he could be here right now … if he could talk to himself, he’d be encouraging himself, ‘Hang in there. You can do this.’”

Kathy wants to be an anchor for her kids, and she is not alone. All it took for George Hicker, the former Syracuse basketball player and longtime booster, was one look at the four kids across the aisle at Gedney’s funeral to act. Each time he glanced left, Ellianna was staring back. He donated $100,000 to an escrow account for Gedney’s four kids. Ellianna will get most of it.

Kathy spent the past spring traveling up and down the mid-Atlantic watching her son Chase carve out his own path in a sport (lacrosse) and uniform number (88) different from his father’s.

She waited everyday at 3 p.m. for Ellianna to hop off the school bus and burst through the front door, now a teenager facing the rest of her life without her father.

What should Kathy tell her?

To flip through the Bible to Romans 8:28, the verse Kathy turns to for comfort? All things work together for good. For all those called to his purpose, all things work together for good.

When Kathy arrived here as a freshman volleyball player in 1989 and needed to get away from the angst of college or tough coaching, she parked her gray Volvo three-and-a-half miles from campus, deep in St. Mary’s Cemetery, and sat with her Bible on a hill next to two tombstones etched with the name Gedney.

Crazy, isn’t it? She had just met a Gedney, a 6-foot-5, hazel-eyed ball of energy who wasn’t bad to look at, either. He asked her out for a bite at Burger King, then a movie. One day, maybe, she would tell her grandkids about the time she went on a date with a football star.

Never in a million years could she think she’d return to the same hill in section No. 88 in the same cemetery Aug. 7, standing beside a third tombstone –- her ex-husband’s.

That’s when Ellianna dropped to her knees on the mound of soil covering her dad’s body, telling him what she really wanted to give him for his 48th birthday, instead of a memory box of ceramic hearts, was another hug.

What should Kathy tell her?

That someone’s best effort can be awesome one day and cruddy the next, like her therapist said?

That everyone makes mistakes, and tomorrow is a clean page, like her father said?

That we move through this world for a short time and to live to make everyone else’s journey more positive and fun, like she told herself, writing it on a Post-it note and sticking it behind the kitchen cabinet?

Or, maybe she needs to go back further, to the day Gedney first held Ellianna and knew the moment he laid eyes on her she had Down syndrome.

What should Kathy tell her?

That the neonatologist was right all along. That as Ellianna grows up and moves through this world experiencing her own elevator ride, filled with all sorts of ups and downs, she’d carry the best traits of her father.

“Your daughter is going to do everything in life she’s supposed to do," the doctor told Gedney.

She’s going to love, and to be loved.

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or chat online.

Contact Community Services: Suicide, crisis, and telephone counseling 315-251-0600.

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