Tyler Parsons was in a dark place. The darkest, actually. And the rising sun was doing nothing to brighten his mood.

Completely undone by anger and anxiety and depression, he was slumped in the passenger seat of his mom Kim’s car and bound for Detroit Metro Airport on the Fourth of July.

But Parsons never reached his destination.

Because Kim – upon hearing an emotional outburst from her son, including chilling rants about suicide, about his desperate need to make the pain stop – was so alarmed, so upset, so scared, that she immediately pulled over.

Parked near the airport, planes flying overhead, she told Parsons that she would not be dropping him off.

Meaning the young man would miss his early-morning flight to Calgary, where he was scheduled to participate in the Flames’ development camp.

“He goes, ‘I have to go, Mom,'” said Kim. “I said, ‘I don’t care. You’re not going. Call the guys who sent you the ticket and leave them a message that you’re not getting on a plane.’ That’s exactly what we did. I called the (Flames) and said, ‘I’m not putting him on a plane … when he’s feeling like this. And then for him to be in a hotel room by himself for a week? No.’ We turned around and we went home.

“That was kind of the breaking point.”

Parsons doesn’t dispute the stunning sequence of events. In fact, he was the one who broached the topic the other day.

“It’s super hard to explain,” he said. “But people who have been in that state, they would know. I don’t think if I went on that plane it would’ve been good. I would’ve freaked out. I felt like a monster.

“I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. I’m better now. But before all this happened, I thought mental health and all that stuff was a bunch of bullshit.”

Over the course of two candid conversations, Parsons offered details of his breakdown following his first season of professional hockey. And later, on a team-mandated day off, he phoned to say he was willing to answer more questions.

That’s how adamant he is that his struggles be publicized.

“I’m not going to sit back here and hold it in when my words, my story, can change somebody else’s life,” said Parsons. “If I can help somebody get out of that state, possibly save their life … because there were many times when I was in that state that I didn’t want to be alive.

“Especially in this position as a goaltender, you get hit in the head a lot and things get knocked loose sometimes. It’s OK to feel like that. Sometimes we’re only human and we slip into those thoughts, kind of get into our own heads. Then the mental health issues start.

“One thing builds into another. You start with a small issue, and it seems to just build up and build up and build up till it becomes physically and mentally painful.”

As soon as the Flames learned of Parsons’ troubles, they’d issued another plane ticket – “They were all in,” said stepdad Al Williams. “Not one person was mad” – and made it clear that they would provide the full spectrum of support.

Which they did.

When Parsons finally made the trip to Calgary for the camp, he stayed off the ice. Productively, he began sitting down with mental health professionals.

“That’s when things started going in the right direction … it was my first step to getting better,” said Parsons, who turned 21 earlier this week. “Those problems can be eliminated like that” – he snapped his fingers – “and more people need to open up about it. If you’re feeling down in the dumps, talk to someone. I finally spoke up. I felt like I had a thousand pounds lifted off my shoulders.

“Recognizing it and kicking it in the butt right away is real good to do.”

A young Tyler Parsons with his mom, Kim.

Parsons himself discovered he wasn’t alone after watching Daniel Carcillo’s video about head trauma and treatment. It stopped him cold.

“He was in the same boat as me – he had a concussion that pushed him into a mental health state,” said Parsons. “That was a changing point. I don’t know if you saw it or not, but that video pretty much explains exactly how I felt.”

He said that he, too, has suffered concussions, including one last season. (“As an athlete, I know you’re not supposed to put your injuries out there. But this isn’t an injury. This is your life.”)

With the Flames’ blessing, Parsons spent a week in the summer with a chiropractic neurologist in Chelsea, Mich., finetuning his equilibrium and vision. He continues to do the prescribed exercises.

“I came out of there feeling amazing, better than ever,” he said. “I’ve never had a better mentality in my life.”

Relaxing after an on-ice session at the Saddledome, Parsons was chatty and confident, engaged and upbeat. It was almost enough to make the details of his difficulties, critical only months ago, seem far-fetched. He agreed.

“I feel great. I feel better than ever – 100,000 per cent,” he said. “If I wouldn’t have opened the doors and started talking, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair right now doing this interview. I probably wouldn’t be playing hockey.”

A highly regarded prospect, Parsons endured a challenging rookie campaign in the Flames’ system. He played primarily for the ECHL affiliate in Kansas City, but he also stopped pucks in Stockton of the AHL.

When he returned home to Detroit, he was in rough shape.

“Him and I have always been super close and I noticed him distancing himself from me,” said Kim. “I was (thinking) maybe he’s at that age where he’s becoming a man and he doesn’t really need Mom, that he doesn’t want to text Mom all throughout the day. That was hard for me.

“I thought maybe it was just the stress of playing, with so much weight on his shoulders. I was, ‘OK, he’s going to be home and he’s not going to have the stress of hockey.’ But when things came to a head and he said everything that he was feeling at that point, that’s when we realized it was more than just stress or him just growing up.”

Remarkable is Parsons’ about-face this past summer. If he wasn’t fine, do you think Mom would have turned him loose for another winter away from the nest?

“He’s always been a happy-go-lucky kid, a go-with-the-flow type of kid,” said Kim, “but he’s more motivated, more positive, than I’ve ever seen in his entire life, I’d say. Absolutely incredible.”

Armchair psychiatrists may feel compelled to draw a straight line from Parsons’ upbringing – being the son of a teenaged single mother, growing up in some of the roughest neighbourhoods of Detroit, facing financial hurdles – to his mental well-being.

Kim scoffed at the notion.

“He was more loved than anybody,” she said, voice cracking. “I love that kid with my heart and my soul. He’s my life, you know, and he always has been.”

Parsons, too, refused to make the connection.

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “My background hasn’t led to anything that’s happened to me. I think my background helped me into a stronger person.

“If I didn’t have that … I don’t know if I’d be making this phone call right now.”

But when he takes a seat in any dressing room – with the usual sprinkling of small-town kids and farm boys, of Europeans and U.S. college players – he knows his story is unique.

Right from the start.

Kim, pregnant in Grade 12, had always been a high achiever – National Honor Society, homecoming queen, student council. “And then there was Tyler,” she said, with a laugh. They lived with her parents and her two brothers, who are only a few years older than Parsons.

Contact with the father, 17 years old at the time of her pregnancy, was minimal.

“Tyler knows his dad,” said Kim. “But, growing up, Al was Tyler’s dad – he was the father figure.”

Al entered the picture when the boy was 6. And while Parsons speaks reverentially about his stepfather – affectionately (and accurately) known as Big Al – their relationship was a work in progress.

“It’s kind of funny,” said Parsons, grinning. “I did not like my mom having any boyfriends, so I would set up little traps in the house just to try to hurt him, so he’d get out of there. I’d put spikes in the carpets, so he’d step on them. All kinds of stuff, just to get him away.

“I don’t think I talked to him for a long time. Never said anything to him. Then one day, we were sitting in the dining room, and he got up and stubbed his toe, and I just absolutely started dying laughing. I think I loved seeing him in pain.

“That was the ice-breaker. From there, we started kicking it.”

Al was there when Parsons was a roller-hockey defenceman. He was there when the kid tried goaltending. (Borrowed gear. Shutout. Naturally.)

He was there when the boy, at 9, pulled on skates for the first time – and the adjustment wasn’t only Tyler’s.

“I was more of a football guy,” said Al. “I just jumped (into the world of minor hockey) feet-first and grew to love it. It was something new. When the ball got rolling, we just fell in love with it.”

Registration fees, however, are not cheap. Nor are pads or supplementary ice sessions or goalie coaches or hotel rooms or restaurant meals. Costs ran to $11,000 some years, according to Al.

(“I look back now,” said Kim, “and I’m like, ‘How did we afford to do that?'” Added Al: “Me and Mom haven’t even been on a honeymoon yet. Our family vacation and our honeymoon were hockey tournaments. But we wouldn’t trade it for nothing. It’s been one hell of a ride.”)

Along the way there had been hard choices.

Travel baseball or travel hockey – but not both.

Continue living in an apartment and enroll in AAA hockey? Or move into a house and hang up the skates?

But hockey trumped all, even when cash flow was a trickle.

“Around here, you don’t play hockey unless you have money,” said Kim. “It’s more of a wealthy-people sport. A lot of kids make the team because Mom or Dad is doing business with so-and-so or Mom or Dad is doing this for the team. There was nothing I could do to buy Tyler’s way onto the team. He had to work and earn everything that he had. It says a lot about him.”

To keep the kid on the ice, Al, a long-haul trucker for a construction firm, took on extra shifts – not that he bitched about it.

“I’d work 13, 14 hours a day and hurry up and get home and drive him right to practice, stay at practice, come home, go to bed,” he said. “I’m going to these hockey games with my girlfriend and my girlfriend’s kid and (my buddies are) like, ‘Why are you spending so much time with this kid? He’s not yours.’ And I’m like, ‘What does that matter? He’s a kid. He’s a great kid. I want to be there. I want to be there for him and support him.’

“Eventually, all the phone calls stopped – ‘Hey, Al, you want to go out on the weekend?’ – because they knew what I was going to say. They all learned what my first priority was.”

Parsons remembers the time Al’s pickup was stolen out of his grandparents’ driveway. Gone were a cherished keepsake – the dog tags of Al’s grandfather – and all of the 12-year-old kid’s equipment … in the middle of the season.

“My parents didn’t have any money to buy me new pads – it definitely sucked,” said Parsons. “So two coaches … got me the best pads they could get me. I was grateful for that. My parents were young and they worked their butts off to put food on the table and to pay for my hockey.

“We lived paycheque to paycheque. For goalie gear, my parents did the best they could – I thank them for that. I’d come to the rink and all these kids would have these nice things. But I liked using the old stuff – it’s easier if you use the new stuff. Taking that harder route is better and it makes you a better person.”

The harder route, in that area of Detroit, included the schoolyard. Fortunately for Parsons there was a handy mentor – Al, who happens to be barrel-chested, shaven-headed, bushy-bearded, tattoo-sleeved, street-hardened.

As someone who served as a bouncer for 13 years at some of the city’s rowdiest bars, as someone who, by Parsons’ estimate, has put up his dukes a couple of hundred times, he let his stepson know how to carry himself when things turned nasty.

Which, on one occasion, meant slapping out a bully, who was two years older and picking on a friend.

“Just going through that stuff as a young kid, it helped me mature and just see the world in a different way,” said Parsons. “Look at some things kids go through – like the passing of family members, living in bad areas – and then you have people who never have to deal with that. They grow up, rich family, and they never really have to have those problems.”

All the while, Parsons, sparkling in net, was moving up the ranks.

When he turned 15, he decided to audition for the big time – the Little Caesars minor-midget outfit. At the last minute, though, he had a change of heart.

“Tyler’s like, ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go,'” Kim recalled. “And I was, ‘Why don’t you want to go? This is what you’ve been talking about doing.'”

The truth eventually emerged.

“He basically didn’t want us to go broke trying to afford hockey.”

But right around then, Al landed a better job, getting the graveyard shift for Chrysler’s in-house trucking company, meaning they could afford top-flight hockey and their own house.

“It all worked out the way it was supposed to,” said Kim. “We told him, ‘Go and try. If you make a team, we’ll do whatever we need to do to make it work.’ So that’s what we did.”

Not only did Parsons make it, he led the squad to the state tournament. This appeared to be shaping up as a turning point – the moment a kid muscles his way onto the hockey map. Instead, it was nearly the end of goaltending period.

“I hit a wall,” Parsons explained. “I wasn’t talking to any (junior or college) teams. I had it in my head, ‘I’m just going to win the state championship and call it quits and go join the military.’ I would love to fight overseas. It gives me chills just thinking about it. The life I lived kind of coded me for that.”

Little Caesars did earn the crown. But before Parsons could enlist, Mark Hunter, in town scouting for the London Knights, was introduced to Al.

“I’m like, ‘Holy crap. No way,'” said Al. “We talked and he wanted to invite Tyler to camp. They invited us up to a hockey game (in London) in the playoffs. So we went and as soon as we walked into that arena, Tyler looked at us and said, ‘I’m playing for this team.'”

That, of course, is exactly what happened.

An amazing turn of events for the player. But hell on the folks. Vividly, Al can remember driving the boy to his billets in London and saying goodbye.

“Mom fell apart,” Al said. “It was rough, it was rough. I tried to be strong, but you drop him off the first night and you’re pulling away, at 16 years old, man, that was hard, really hard. But we were fortunate, London’s only an hour and 45 minutes away from us, so we could go there pretty much any time we wanted. But to have him not at home? Mom struggled with it for quite a while. After knowing he was OK and taken care of, it made it easier for me. I don’t know if Mom ever got over it.”

In the OHL, Parsons showed off abundant puck-stopping talent – often with Al and Kim in the stands. They attended every home date, and also ventured into Sarnia, Windsor, Plymouth, Saginaw, Erie, and Barrie to get an eyeful of their boy.

Impressively, they deadheaded from Detroit to Red Deer – a 32-hour journey in Al’s truck – to see Parsons win the 2016 Memorial Cup. (The Flames drafted him four weeks later.)

Kim, Tyler and Al after London won the Memorial Cup in 2016. (Courtesy the Parsons family)

Off the ice, Parsons admitted there had been an adjustment, shifting from Detroit to London. “A different country, the atmosphere was different.”

He laughed.

“A lot safer – you could come out of your house and walk down the street and not have to worry about anything,” he continued. “A lot of people I met had a lot of worries and they’d talk about their problems. And it was like, ‘You don’t even know’ – just because I had to fend through it at such a young age.

“It’s more safe, more civil, I think, in any area of Canada. Health care’s different – it’s free here. A lot of families I grew up with, if someone dies (after a significant stay in the hospital), they lose their house. I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff happen in my life. I’ve seen a lot of terrible things happen to good people.

“Problems in your life are what molds you. I’ve been through so much in my life in such a short span that it grew me as a person.”

No amount of strength, though, can power a person through a mental health battle. Combatting depression cannot be a solo pursuit.

For Parsons, the symptoms had been something out of the ordinary, which is why his mood swings after the conclusion of the 2017-18 season were so jarring.

“When we saw this different behaviour, we were like, ‘Whoa. What is going on?'” said Kim. “I was trying to find an answer, ‘What is the reason?’ I started questioning myself. You start questioning everything.”

And when your son began to talk about suicide?

“I felt helpless. I felt completely helpless,” said Kim. “I can’t even put into words how I felt. It was heart-wrenching. Then I’m a nervous wreck. I don’t want to leave him alone. If he’s not answering (his phone) …

“That, as a parent, was probably my worst nightmare – it was my worst nightmare. Those couple of months were the worst couple of months of my entire life.”

Added Al: “It was horrible. He was never a sad kid. He was never depressed. He was always laughing, joking, screwing around. It was not him. After last season, the injuries he was dealing with, the pressure, he probably reached his limit. He just, more or less, had a breakdown.”

The lesson, according to Parsons, is simple – speak up. “I told my parents, got my treatment, got everything. I came a long way.” And he’s not ashamed of his plight. Rather, he’s embraced the role of messenger.

“Oh my god, yeah, it’s amazing,” said Kim, who manages a home for people with special needs. “Him wanting to help other people … it’s inspiring.”

Like many hockey fans, Kim watched TSN’s documentary about Joe Murphy, homeless in Kenora, Ont., after a seven-team career in the NHL. “I want to go find him and help him.” Of the Flames, though, she has no complaints.

“I couldn’t ask more from an organization,” she said. “I hear nightmare stories … but the Flames organization, I can’t even explain how grateful I am for the way they stepped up when he reached out and needed it.”

And now, even though their son is once again gone – September to May, destination unknown – he is actually, in a manner of speaking, back. His parents’ relief is unmistakable.

“Now? He don’t hold back. He’ll let you know how he feels,” said Al. “Man, he’s been a totally different person – for the better. Unbelievable.”

Parsons remains instantly recognizable – that hasn’t changed – because tattoos decorate much of his slender body, including one side of his neck. Featured are multi-coloured tributes to his mother and his great-grandmother. Drawn on his right hand is a skull.

Rubbing the knuckles, he said that it stands as a reminder, an acknowledgement.

“It represents my dark side, it represents the bad stuff I went through. It’s part of me – I went through it and it might be gone, but it’s still part of me. All in all, it’s been a crazy life. A lot of life lived in a short time.

“Most people think all these bad things in their life are happening to them. I think how people got to look at it is, the bad things in your life are happening for you. When you realize that, it really changes your perspective on life.”

(Top photo: Sergei Belski-USA TODAY Sports)