‘I don’t think we will ever be healed:’ The Arizona Coyotes say goodbye to Leighton Accardo

Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.

One more game. That is all anyone wanted to give Leighton Accardo. One more chance to hold a stick. To see Oliver Ekman-Larsson do the things that made him her favorite player. One last time to play the game she loved and for those who loved her to see this freckle-faced young girl flash her rosy cheeks and toothy grin.

Nov. 24, 2020. That was the day the Arizona Coyotes were going to go to Leighton’s home and give her that final game. For them, it was about giving their friend a memory that may have been among her last on this earth.

They never got that chance.

Leighton died just hours before the final game. She was only nine.

“You feel like she got cheated out of life,” Coyotes coach Rick Tocchet said. “Just to know her, I have never seen a girl so happy. She’d have a month of treatments and you could not tell she had treatments. She’d be smiling on the ice like it was no big deal. That hits you.”

Hockey is how the Coyotes came into Leighton’s life. Cancer is what allowed Leighton to come into the lives of the Coyotes. She grew up playing youth hockey and developed a close bond with Lyndsey Fry, who is also the Coyotes’ radio analyst. The former United States women’s national hockey team forward also had Leighton as one of her students. Fry was one of the first in the organization who learned of Leighton being diagnosed with cancer. It is why she and Matt Shott, the team’s director of amateur hockey development, brought gifts with every hospital visit in those early days. They chose Leighton as the team’s Hockey Fights Cancer ambassador.

She signed a one-day contract. She was in a pre-game meeting. She smiled when Ekman-Larsson said hello to her. She took the ice with them ahead of the national anthem.

Leighton became more than a young child the Coyotes met for a single night. She became part of their family. They met several times before her passing and wanted to meet one more time. Thinking about those memories and the ones that could have been is why Saturday afternoon at Gila River Arena will be bittersweet. It’s when the Coyotes will hold a ceremony inducting Leighton into their Ring of Honor. She becomes the first inductee in team history who was not a broadcaster, executive or player.

Everyone is preparing for an emotional day.

“She said it from the start that she wants this to be a celebration of her life. I don’t think Leighton would like anyone crying for her,” Coyotes defenseman Jason Demers said. “She would want us to be happy and to skate hard.”

Leighton Accardo skates with Lawson Crouse before a 2019 game against the Flames. (Norm Hall/NHLI via Getty Images)

The moments Carly Accardo is alone are the ones she hates the most. She starts thinking about her little girl. The one she carried for nine months. The one she lost way too soon. She and her husband, Jeremy, both feel the same way whenever they are the only person in a particular space.

This is the pain when you outlive your child.

Carly is honest and raw while possessing a vulnerability that is regal in its own right. She is like this during the entirety of a 48-minute conversation about her daughter, the things that made her special, the darkest days of her life and how their family was able to say goodbye.

“It’s been a roller coaster. I don’t think we will ever be healed,” Carly explained. “It’s this constant battle. You want to live for your three kids. Then you feel guilty for living without Leighton. I just make sure that the kids and I and Jeremy always talk about her and remember her. … But that battle, I think, Jeremy and I will be dealing with this for a long time.”

Jeremy Accardo might be a familiar name to some. He was once a closer for the Toronto Blue Jays, but he is now the assistant pitching coach for the New York Mets. Playing for the Jays and living in Toronto is how he fell in love with hockey. Carly is Canadian and has always loved the sport. Their young family’s introduction to the game began when their oldest son, Larson, started playing. Pretty soon, Leighton was taking to the ice, but as a figure skater.

From the rink to the diamond, Leighton did everything with passion and heart. (Photo courtesy of the Accardo family)

She loved being on the ice to the point she wanted to give hockey a try. They had her skate around in her brother’s equipment to make sure this was what she really wanted and it definitely was. Carly still has these photos and videos on her phone of Leighton being covered in dirt and eye black from playing baseball on a Saturday only to be in a glittery figure skating costume on a Sunday.

Those early days are when they met Fry, who is also the Coyotes’ director of external engagement and female hockey. Both Larson and Leighton were enrolled in one of Fry’s camps. Leighton was four while her brother was five. They were easily the youngest at a camp for 10 and 11-year-olds. Leighton was six when she started playing travel hockey with the Arizona Hockey Union in Gilbert. She was about to embark on a new journey by joining the Arizona Kachinas, the girls’ youth hockey organization associated with the Coyotes.

Then came the stomach pain. Pain that only got worse following the early solutions to suppress it. Pain that eventually led to a night shift doctor’s request for a CT scan.

“I will never forget the look on that doctor’s face when we walked in,” Carly said as her voice begins to crack. “He said, ‘I hate days like this.'”

There was a mass on Leighton’s abdomen and on her liver and lungs. She needed to go to a children’s hospital immediately. She needed specialists. Within hours, Leighton was admitted to the Phoenix Children’s Hospital for a biopsy on her tumors.

“It’s hard because you are trying not to scare your child because they get really scared. Same with her siblings,” Carly said. “We did not want them to see Jeremy and I freaking out. You have to walk away every time you get upset. I remember that Friday night, it was 11 p.m. I was standing in the hall with one of my girlfriends and I said to her, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ She said, ‘I don’t know. It’s the definition of a nightmare.'”

At first, Leighton did not understand what was happening. She knew she was sick. But she also knew it was the biggest weekend on her calendar. She had a baseball game, a softball tournament, a figure skating competition and hockey tryouts. Leighton asked the doctors when she was going to be released because she had to get to hockey tryouts and they told her they could not let her leave.

That was Mother’s Day weekend in 2019. The following Monday is when Leighton was taken in for her biopsies. The doctors gave her parents a diagnosis on Tuesday and Wednesday with Leighton starting chemotherapy treatments that Friday.

“She told them, ‘I promise I will come back if you let me go,'” Carly recalled. “The doctor said, ‘I am so sorry, but we need you here because we need to make you better.'”

Leighton needed surgery. She would do chemotherapy in Phoenix and fly to New York City to have procedures done. The first time she and her family flew to New York, the Coyotes paid for her travel. Carly said that the team told Leighton that they wanted her to feel comfortable upon making what would be the first of many cross-country treks.

Carly and her mom had flown to New York to be with Leighton during her latest round of tests. They came back home to Phoenix when they received a call from Leighton’s doctor that she was dying and that it could happen in the next month. It forced a decision no parent should ever have to make.

“Jeremy and I made the decision not to tell Leighton that she was dying,” Carly said. “We did not want her to be scared. That would have been awful. We did not want her to think she had failed.”

They kept the news close, telling only friends and family in order to provide an opportunity to see her one last time. Several family members traveled to Phoenix to say goodbye. Carly said it was that Monday when Leighton had a blood test done and Leighton’s oncologist told her mom that her daughter could pass away later that evening.

Carly and Jeremy made their daughter a bed on the couch. That was where Leighton slept every night and Carly stayed by her side. But on that Monday evening, the entire family was on that couch. Leighton was surrounded by her parents, her siblings – Larson, Leeanne and Locke – along with their two dogs.

At one point, everyone was asleep except Carly and Leighton. Carly laid next to her daughter and watched her heartbeat. She watched as it started to slow down.

“At 4:15 or 4:30, I closed my eyes. I woke up five minutes later and her heart was not beating. It was like she was waiting for me to close my eyes,” Carly said. “The silver lining that her surgeon told me was that liver failure … it would be peaceful and she would fall asleep. Leighton was always good at finding the silver lining. That was her silver lining as she passed.”

Later that morning, the Coyotes received text messages that Leighton was gone. The day that was supposed to be about their friend having her final game was the day they said goodbye. The entire team was on standby. They wanted to do something but they also wanted to be respectful. A few hours later, Carly reached out to the organization to say that they still wanted the team to come by their home for the game.

Texts began furiously flying around. Soon, everyone from players to management to the team’s broadcasters all made their way to Leighton’s house. For them, the mission was simple: Do whatever you damn well can to make this family and her three siblings have at least one second of happiness in what is the most painful day of their lives.

“For those two hours we were there, there was joy,” Tocchet said. “There was a celebration of telling stories about Leighton and coming to the rink.”

Demers was unable to make the game. He had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and was in quarantine. He said the day Leighton died was a tough one. He wanted to be there for her and her family. But he used the day to reflect and think about Leighton and hoped that she passed peacefully without any suffering. He thought about how she could now play all the games she wanted while smiling down on those she loved.

“It was a difficult day and a lot of tears were shed,” Demers said. “After coming to the realization she was in a better place, I realized she probably would not like that I was in tears and that we should celebrate her life and be happy and try to touch as many people as she touched. It put a lot of things in perspective.”

Ekman-Larsson has met several young fans over the years. It always means something whenever he hears such nice things. Hearing that from Leighton, however, resonated because he was hearing it from someone that he says was stronger than him.

“I still look back at that day,” he said. “My mom passed away four years ago and I have been going through something similar as her family. I can kind of relate a little bit. But, at the same time, being nine years old. It is not supposed to be that way. … You have so many thoughts that come up when you are driving home that day. You are feeling good about the fact you were able to help or could put a smile on her face or her family’s face. But it’s one of the hardest things I have ever done.”

Coyotes team president Xavier Gutierrez said what made Leighton’s experience hit home with so many people was the fact so many people have gone through and are still going through difficulties during the pandemic. That is why when members of the organization presented the idea of inducting Leighton into the Ring of Honor, Gutierrez said it was an easy decision to include Leighton’s name in that pantheon of franchise greats.

“We always want that reminder,” Gutierrez said. “We also thought about how wonderful it is that this is a young girl who is part of our youth hockey program and that we can help honor her and keep her memory alive to open the door for other young girls. … She was a member of our community. She was a member of our organization.”

Ekman-Larsson said he has already thought about how he would prepare himself and the team for Saturday. How they would handle the emotion of that moment. How they want to honor their friend with more than a ceremony. How they want to win for her and her family. How they want to battle like Leighton did. How they just want the day to be a celebration of life.

Carly said several members of the Coyotes’ organization were at Leighton’s celebration of life. She gave a speech in which she shared how parents who have lost a child have a fear that their child will be forgotten. And that is what made the club’s decision hit home in a way that the Accardo’s were never expecting. It’s knowing that their daughter made an impact that allowed her to have a legacy cemented for everyone to see for the rest of time.

“It is amazing. It sucks but it is amazing. It sucks because it is happening because Leighton passed away. But it is amazing she had this much of an impact that they wanted to honor her this way,” Carly said. “There are a lot of our friends who are going. All of us are going to have Kleenex packed. It is going to be sad. But it is going to be a good celebration of her life.”

(Top photo: Norm Hall/NHLI via Getty Images)