Leaving a lasting memory

As friends and family mourn the death of Tim Hagerman of Scarborough, SMCC prepares to retire his basketball jersey.

Timothy Hagermen is flanked by his parents Reis and 

Catherine Hagerman in a photo taken during his 2007-2008

 tenure playing for the Southern Maine Community College 

Seawolves. Hagerman died of cancer in December at the age 

of 26, and the school is planning to retire his No. 44 

jersey next month. (Courtesy photo)

SCARBOROUGH — A young man who left this world too soon will be remembered at every future home game of the Southern Maine Community College Seawolves, whenever people pass his framed jersey inside the HUB Athletic Center.

But he may live on in other ways, as well, thanks to the life he touched the most – his bride of 14 months.

On alumni night, Saturday, Feb. 11, between the women’s and men’s varsity basketball games (at approximately 3:30 p.m.), SMCC will retire the No. 44 worn by Timothy Hagerman, who in 2007 and 2008 helped the school charge to back-to-back Yankee Small College Conference championships.

Although Hagerman’s life may appear to be shrouded in tragedy – diagnosed with a mysterious cancer one year ago at age 25, just four months after marrying his college sweetheart, and dead 10 months later, on Dec. 26 – his memory remains a beacon of inspiration to those who knew him.

As a testament to Hagerman’s impact, consider this: Retiring an athletic number is rare enough that SMCC has done it only once before – in the early ‘80s, when the No. 24 of Mark Dudley was take out of circulation – and, yet, Hagerman holds no statistical records. He was a good athlete, but no superstar. In fact, he was the backup center.

So why honor Hagerman? Athletic Director Matt Richards, who also coaches the Seawolves team, says it is all because of Hagerman’s peers. Of the 19 men who played alongside Hagerman, 16 made it to his wake. All of them insisted on retiring his number.

“If you could have seen how moved the alumni were, you’d realize that Timmy’s time at this college affected a lot of people,” Richards said. “It helps to explain why his loss is so huge.”

"Timmy was one of those guys that pumped life into your team," explained Richards on Monday. “Whenever I felt like a game was going flat, I always put Tim in. Whenever we had him on the floor, it seemed to lift everyone and the energy really rose in a way it never really has done since.

“He was full of energy. He cared for his teammates, and always strived to make himself and others around him better.”

“He always wanted to do things the right way,” agreed Mike Walker, Hagerman’s best friend and a fellow 2004 graduate of Scarborough High School, who now owns the Big 20 Bowling Center on Route 1. “He did that, but he did it in a way that, no matter where he went, even if it was the Mobil station down the road, he was the center of attention – not like he was a big shot, it was just his personality.”

“I think whenever someone passes people will say that they ‘lit up a room,’ but he literally did,” said Hagerman’s wife, Molly. “He didn’t have a shy bone in his body. When I first started dating him, I told my parents I’d never met anyone who could talk to anyone, of any age, for so long.

“I mean, he could talk to a wall, really,” she said Friday, able to offer a smile despite a short marriage that skewed decidedly to the “in sickness” portion of her vows.

There is a story, Molly Hagerman says, that describes best the character of the man she expected to grow old with. In his final days, weak from chemotherapy and the pain of the cancer that had spread into his gut, and weary from the constant stream of visitors that forced the hospital to get him a larger room, Hagerman had tried to get out of bed.

Thinking her husband needed to use the bathroom, she shooed everyone out. As his wife went to help him up, Hagerman realized they were alone. Why was that, he asked? She explained and he said, no, that was not why he’d struggled to his feet. He’d simply noticed her grandmother in the sea of faces the surrounded him and, seeing no other seats available, he’d meant to offer her his place on the bed.

“Even in this foggy confusion of being in and out of consciousness, he was such a gentleman,” said Molly Hagerman. “He was just a good guy.

“The thing about Tim that made me realize that we would be so compatible was our love of family,” she said. “He thought the world of his parents. He’s so like them and his two younger sisters. So giving. They’ve taken me in like a daughter, and they have from the very beginning. That has helped me immensely.”

It’s a tragedy when anyone dies young, but the outpouring of emotion for Timothy Hagerman was something out of the ordinary. Visiting hours at the funeral home saw a non-stop stream of well-wishers. The 60-plus arrangements delivered there, the directors at Conroy-Tully Crawford said, were more than they’d ever processed before. At least 800 people attended the standing-room-only Mass of Christian Burial at Holy Cross Church Dec. 30.

Even now, Molly Hagerman says, she gets sympathy cards from people who met her husband only once, who can’t seem to help confiding in her that, one conversation in, they knew her husband had been “something special.”

Timothy Hagerman was born July 21, 1985, in Malden, Mass., to Reis and Catherine Hagerman. He was raised in the Old Mill Brook neighborhood of Scarborough and went on to become a four-sport athlete in school. In college, his 6-foot-6-inch frame made basketball his natural focus.

It was through his Seawolf teammates, twins Matthew and Coleman Findlay, that he met Molly, who attended classes at St. Joseph’s College in Standish, where Ries Hagerman is dean of students. 

“I lived in a suite with eight other girls and he came in with my brothers,” recalled Molly Hagerman. “He came in loud, like he always did, and wasn’t at all shy. I’d never met anybody who was so confident in himself, but not in a conceited way – just sure of himself.”

Later that night, he asked the Findlay brothers for permission to call their sister. Less than a year later, he had a ring and, unable to contain his excitement until a planned announcement at a family vacation later that summer, he popped the question at a Celtics game. Molly might have been surprised, except that three weeks after they’d met, Hagerman had entered her into his cell phone contact list not as “Molly Findley,” but “Molly Hagerman.”

“He wasn’t embarrassed at all for me to see that,” she said. “He was just like, ‘Oh, you know it will happen,’ and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, it probably will,’ and that I would be lucky if it did.”

Described as a “natural and gifted entrepreneur,” Hagerman later parlayed his SMCC business degree into multiple ventures. While working as a claims specialist for TD Bank, he founded both TDH Landscaping and Snowy Days Plowing. Even in his final months Hagerman kept busy, buying the DJ Triggs disc jockey business.

But Hagerman’s proudest accomplishment, his friends say, was his marriage, on Oct. 9, 2010.

“He had 17 groomsmen,” said Molly Hagerman. “He kept giving me name after name after name. And it wasn’t like I could limit it and say, well, you’re not that close to this one, or that one, because he really had genuine relationships with all of them.

“When he talked about his friends, he would tell me all these really detailed descriptions of their lives,” she said. “It was obvious that at some point he had really sat and talked with them. He really listened to people.

“Sometimes, people might have been like, oh, that’s Tim, he’s always the life of the party, he has a great time, he loves to be right in the middle of all of it, but he had such a sincere heart, too,” she said.

“He took value in all of his friendships, in meeting new people, and sharing what he had to offer to the world as well,” agreed Walker, on Friday, at the Big 20. “He took advantage of every opportunity to meet someone.

“That’s just how he was,” he said after a pause, barely able to suppress a smile as some personal memory of how their friendship worked, despite being “total opposites.” The lesson: “When you meet someone,” Walkers said, “you never know what they’re going to be. But he didn’t hesitate, he approached everyone, took a piece of them, learned from them. I just think that’s a good way or all of us to go through our lives.”

Whether a close confidant, like Walker, or casual acquaintance, Hagerman had an endless stockpile of special nicknames, bestowing one on seemingly everyone he met.

Doctors and nurses, too, got folded into Hagerman’s warm embrace, even when his health began to decline and frustration grew over an elusive cure. The problem, Molly Hagerman says, is that only about 2 percent of cancer patients have what’s known as “cancer of unknown primary origin.”

“Nobody specializes in it, and because it’s not lung cancer, or breast cancer, or testicular cancer, every treatment was a guessing game,” she said. “After his first stay in the hospital, he had such a bad reaction to the chemo he ended up in the cardiac ICU for almost two weeks.”

“Unknown primary” is so rare, in fact, that in July, when Walker staged a benefit at the Big 20, neither he nor anyone else could easily pin down the appropriate ribbon color. Turns out, it’s a black-and-white zebra pattern.

For Hagerman’s wide circle of friends, his death has not been easy to deal with. Many report being “heartbroken.” Such a horrible, wasting sickness, when a person is supposed to be at his most vital, is a hard hurdle to clear.

“It’s not something you prepare for,” said Molly Hagerman.

And with so few cancer support groups that also are peer groups, the grief that comes during and after the end can be unbearable. Even when Hagerman went into the hospital for surgery Dec. 3, most in his crowd confidently told themselves that, young as he was, he’d come through, bounce back, and become once again the leading light in all their lives.

It didn’t happen that way, and the result was like a “sucker punch,” said his wife. Still, she, at least, has found some meaning in her husband’s death. Raised Catholic, as was her husband, Molly Hagerman now says her husband must have been meant to have a short life.

“I think our faith really helped us a lot,” she said. “I feel lucky that we were able to meet so that, at the end of his life, he had a wife and he wasn’t just a single guy battling it on his own. I really think that’s probably why we were given to each other.

“We were the first of our friends to get married and it was almost embarrassing how many showers and engagement parties and pre-wedding, ‘last weekend’ parties we had,” she said, adding, “I think, looking back, that was part of God’s plan, so that Tim would have all these amazing memories before he got sick.

“I miss him every day, but the flip side is to never have met him at all, and I wouldn’t have wanted that,” she said.

And while Hagerman’s peers will celebrate his life by retiring his game jersey, Molly Hagerman intends to honor her husband’s memory in her own way.

“I’m going back to school,” she says.

Originally a second-grade teacher at Holy Cross, Molly Hagerman became a reading specialist during her husband’s illness in order to spend more time with him. During numerous consults and three extended hospital stays, in Maine and Massachusetts, the Hagermans met many in the medical profession who were helpful, but also some who were “not very compassionate.”

For that reason, she plans to enter the medical field, with hopes of working in an oncologist’s office, at least as a physician’s assistant, if not a doctor herself.

Molly Hagerman says she learned a lot from her husband about personal courage during his last year of life, not to mention a lot about herself and what it means to truly give yourself over completely to the care of another.

“He changed my life,” she says, simply.