Zac Easter was 24 years old when, in December 2015, he took his father’s shotgun and turned it on his own chest. For years, Zac had been in a downward spiral that he blamed on the many concussions he’d suffered while playing football from youth through high school in small-town Iowa. He came to believe – correctly – that he was suffering from the same degenerative brain disease that had pushed many longtime NFL players to suicide.
After he died, his parents found Zac’s journal as well as an autobiography he had written that detailed his demise. The story of Zac Easter is a deeply painful tragedy of a young man’s descent, but it’s also a story about vital topics in today’s America: About parenting, about violence, about mental health, about toxic versus traditional masculinity – about what it means to be a man in 21st-century America.
With his memory failing him, Zac figured writing things down in a journal could only help. At times, the journal seemed like his best friend – the only one other than his girlfriend Ali he could open up to. One night in the spring of 2015, he pulled out a pen and at 9.40pm started scrawling on the lined pages of a black spiral-bound Five Star Mead notebook.
“I guess today really wasn’t that bad,” Zac wrote. “Instead of taking the antidepressant I went and refilled my Adderall script. Popped two 30 mgs and I felt like I was at least able to get myself to do something productive. Still had the mood swings throughout the day but at least got a nice euphoric feeling listening to music, cleaning, and playing Clash of Clans all day. My dad actually called me today and wanted to chat … I went for a 20 min jog today, just like usual, I got dizzy and walked about every other minute. I went like 1.4 miles in 20 mins. Pretty sad since I used to do like 4-8 miles at a 7 minute pace give or take … that makes me depressed … I feel like I’ve gained 10-15 pounds uncontrollably. The impulse binging needs to stop, but I don’t know how when I don’t even know I’m doing it.
“Even with two 30 mg Adderall in me and about another 10 mgs I poored out and snorted, I still got lost all around Menards and the Dollar Store … IDK what it was but I felt like I kept walking all around the store and passed what I was looking for several times. I straight up felt confused on what I was looking and kept forgetting even right after I looked at my list. I only went for like 3 things too … I only have about a 3 minute memory after that I’m fucked. I even took three wrong turns on the way home. Shit happens I guess.”
The next day, Zac was driving to Indianola from Des Moines, a 30-minute drive that he’d made hundreds if not thousands of times before. He was almost in a trance and nearly hit a car. He got lost on the way to his parents’ house.
For hours at a time, starting that senior year of college and going into the summer after graduation, Zac would go online and research the post-concussion symptoms that he thought were wrecking his life. He wondered whether this nightmare was the price of playing football, the sport he’d loved his entire life – the sport that, let’s be honest, he still loved, even if it contributed to his ruin. He kept reading about this scary-sounding degenerative disease of the brain that presented like Alzheimer’s but appeared in ex- athletes from contact sports decades before Alzheimer’s would typically set in. It sounded like a scientific word salad: chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He couldn’t even spell it correctly, but the symptoms all sounded familiar: Memory problems. Personality changes. Mood swings between depression and aggression. He read about former NFL stars who’d been diagnosed with this terrifying disease, but only after they died, often by suicide. Zac watched a PBS documentary about NFL Hall of Famer Mike Webster, who was essentially Patient Zero in the developing public health crisis surrounding this brain disease among former football players.
“Some days I feel like IDK who I am anymore,” Zac wrote. “I’ve noticed I’m relying on drugs to try and be who I want to be. I need to stop, but at the same time I’m like Fuck it … I wont lie, I feel kind of scared and depressed about my future. I found some info online about CTE and got scared … I just wish I could be my old self and understand whats going on.”
His old self seemed to be a ghost, replaced by this new person he didn’t particularly like. “My motivation has been slacking and I feel pretty depressed. I feel like I need to abuse Adderall to get anything done as far as talking to ppl. My impulse control seems to be getting worse. I just want to go on huge food binges and I can’t stop. Also have been feeling very impatient with people and feel like I just want to snap something. I miss the old Zac.”
On the night of his 24th birthday, Zac Easter and his cousin Cole Fitzharris met at the Sports Page Grill in Indianola, ordered Coors Lights, and waited for Zac’s parents to arrive. Zac was nervous. His cousin could hear it in his voice. By this point, June of 2015, not quite six years since his final football game, Zac had become convinced that his five diagnosed concussions (plus who knows how many more that were never diagnosed) across a decade of using his head as a weapon had triggered his downward spiral.
Meanwhile, Zac’s parents believed their son was on top of the world. Somehow, through a combination of hard work and faking it, he’d just graduated from college, and even made the honor roll his final semester. Last they heard, he was considered a star in the Iowa National Guard, maybe even bound for Army Ranger school if things broke the right way. They approved of this relationship with Ali, and they loved the fact that it was inching toward something real and special. A full life awaited their middle child.
But his parents were buying into the mirage: the degree, the girl, the job, the stability. He’d just asked his first postgraduation employer for some time off from work when his parents arrived for his birthday dinner. Zac took an anxious swig from his Coors Light, gathered himself, then told them he needed to talk.
“Something’s been going on with my head,” he began.
From there, he laid it all out: He was quitting his job because he needed to focus on his health. He was often tired and dizzy and nauseated. He got headaches all the time. Sometimes while driving, he’d go into these trances; he’d snap out of it when he drove his car into a curb. Panic attacks came without warning. He had started writing down a long list of questions for his doctor; one of them was “Do you think I’m showing signs of CTE or dementia?” In fact, he already knew the answer to that one. He had just visited a doctor who specialized in concussions and who told him that, yes, he very well might have CTE.
His parents were stunned. They knew some things were off. Sometimes on the phone it sounded like Zac was talking with marbles in his mouth. And they’d noticed that his bank account, which they still had access to, was suddenly hemorrhaging money. But mostly, they just assumed their son was a young man grappling with the growing pains of adulthood and independence.
Now, though, he was telling them that he might have a mysterious brain disease that afflicted NFL players, haunting them for decades after their careers had ended. One psychologist even told Zac that he would end up penniless, homeless, and in a mental institution. Not could. Would. Zac had walked out of that guy’s office terrified.
Myles Easter Sr had seen the news reports of ex-NFL stars whose lives unraveled post-retirement and ended in suicide. Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, the Sunday gladiators who once were the apotheosis of all that he worshipped about the game of football. But Myles never really believed this disease existed. To be honest, even the mention of it kind of disgusted him. CTE was an excuse, he had always thought: a bunch of millionaire athletes who’d had it made, who blew through all their money, who fell out of the limelight, who got depressed, who then killed themselves. But now, hearing his own son – still just a kid, no jaded pro, someone who had never played a day of football above the high school level – say that he might have CTE?
“It just caught me so off guard,” Myles Sr said later. “I was honestly dumbfounded.”
The dinner table went quiet. Then, Brenda, Zac’s mom, broke the silence.
“Well,” she said, “let’s fix it.”