Mom Grieving 12-Year-Old's Sudden Death Asks Musicians To Help Finish His Song For Funeral

An Australian family, grieving the loss of a 12-year-old boy, is asking musicians to join hands in helping complete the child’s musical project before his funeral.

The boy, Kyan Pennell, died in a freak accident where he was caught between a trailer and a gate on Jan. 31. It was only after his death that his mother, Amanda Brierley, realized her son had been secretly writing his own musical composition, according to ABC Brisbane.

The mother told ABC Radio Brisbane that her son had been teaching himself to play the piano about seven months before he passed away. His passion for playing the piano started when the family went on a two-day trip that gave Kyan access to the instrument.

Kyan then went on to learn how to play more than 30 pieces of classical music mostly from watching YouTube tutorials before his death.

"He was neurodiverse and it gave him this complete superpower to just focus on something and do justice to it," Amanda told the outlet.

While Amanda and her husband, Ian, knew the boy was talented, they did not know he was trying to write his own music as well.

"The thing that has given us some little part of Kyan to hold onto is when I found this composition he was working on in the middle of a blank exercise book," she told the outlet. "I didn't realize that he knew how to write music.”

“He said he wanted to know how to get what was inside his head out on paper and he must have been learning how to do that,” the mother added.

Talking to News Talk 4BC's Neil Breen, Amanda said, “He’d mentioned he was composing and I didn’t think much of it but when I found it, I instantly knew this was the piece he was talking about.”

The bereaved mother put out a plea on Facebook asking musicians to help finish Kyan’s unfinished song. “This was just the intro, it is unfinished, he was building up to a grand mid-section and then would do an ending, but he never got to complete what was in his mind's eye. He imagined it to be performed by wind and string instruments, and of course his beloved piano,” Amanda wrote on social media.

The mother hopes an orchestra can finish her son’s piece and record it so that it can be played Sunday at the child’s funeral.

“It would mean a lot,” Amanda told Breen. “I can’t read music myself, I haven’t heard what he was composing. I just wanted anyone to be able to play it for us so that we had something we could remember him by and just a little insight into his mind.”