Baby Sister’s in His Heart -- and Music

He started playing the piano at 3, not being groomed as a Mozart in short pants, but merely as a child of Tom and Sheryl Lazare who would appreciate the fine arts. And he became one. He became one of those children for whom music was not a discipline, but a voice that spoke to him and to which he could speak back.

And so it was nothing for Lyon Lazare to spend three hours a day, off and on, playing piano. By 9, he was starting to think more consciously of technique. By 10, he was taking lessons from an acclaimed pianist. And if only to prove he wasn’t trying to be Mozart, Lyon took up golf before he was 8 and now is a scratch golfer.

For Lyon Lazare, life as a young artist was a blast.

And then, on a May day in 2002 while the family was prepping for a garage sale at their Villa Park home, darkness fell.

Seventeen-month-old baby sister Anya slipped away from view, made it through a back gate, fell into the family swimming pool and drowned. Then 11, Lyon remembers the days immediately afterward through a gauzy lens. Family members bonding in their grief. Looking at pictures of Anya. Thinking of her. Lighting candles to commemorate her number of days of life.

“She was very close to him,” Sheryl Lazare says. “When she started walking, she was at every single golf tournament he was in, and after he’d finish the round, he’d take her on the putting green.”

And, of course, there was the piano. “When the kids would practice,” Sheryl says, “Anya would come and want to sit and participate in the sessions.” The family has pictures of her on Lyon’s lap, banging away on the keyboard.

In his grief, Lyon then learned another immutable truth about those blessed with music in their souls: Even when you think you’re alone, it’s there.

As accomplished as he was at 11, Lyon had never written anything original. He was a pianist, not a composer. It had not occurred to him, he says, to make his own music.

“A few days later, all of a sudden it hit me,” he says this week as he talks about that somber period. “I sat down at the piano and started playing. That’s when I started composing.”

The result of that session, and many that followed, will be on display Sept. 5 at Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Many of Lyon’s compositions -- all inspired by his sister’s memory -- are the heart of a musical fairy tale called “Sapphire” that he helped formulate with his musical mentor, Ethan Dong of the Opus 119 School of Music in Irvine.

Lyon, 15, and his 13-year-old sister Foya will play piano and join some 50 other musicians in presenting the musical. In addition to the evening of his music, Sheryl Lazare will address the audience about the importance of home safety, the centerpiece of the Anya Foundation that the family established after her death.

Like many creative people, Lyon has trouble explaining exactly how the muse worked as he sat at the piano, thinking of his sister. He didn’t sit down to compose in her memory, he says. Nor did he ever imagine a story set to his compositions. Nor a concert venue.

The first thing he wrote he titled “Missing You.” It just came out. “I would just be sitting there a few minutes thinking and, bam, I started playing notes and it continued to build into a piece.”

He went to bed late that night but awakened at 6 the next morning. “I went back to the piano and finished the piece,” he says. I ask if he can explain how or why it happened, and he says, “I probably was just coming from feelings in my heart.”

Are they inspired by Anya? “Every piece is still inspired by Anya,” he says, noting that he has about 20 works in various stages of completion. One work is called “Sunset” and was written one evening as the sun was setting, which was the time of day when Anya fell into the pool.

His parents, of course, heard his playing in the days and months after Anya’s death. “I knew it was his type of therapy,” Sheryl Lazare says. “I knew he was getting out how he felt and how much he missed her.”

She remembers being in other rooms of the house and being able to tell from the new compositions pouring from the piano if Lyon was remembering at that moment the good times or feeling anger or frustration at the family’s loss.

Through the music, Sheryl could picture Anya sitting at the piano or admiring one of Lyon’s golf trophies or waddling on a putting green.

Lyon says he wants to play professional golf some day. His piano practice time has grown from three hours daily to five. The family swimming pool has been filled in and now is a putting green. The work to spread awareness of home safety is a Lazare family mission, “so other people don’t experience the pain that we’ve gone through,” Sheryl says.

“Sapphire” now is envisioned as the opening of a continuing story line, as yet undeveloped.

Lyon and Foya are looking forward to performing. The family and Dong see “Sapphire” as a story that will celebrate Anya and move the audience.

And because of the songs it drew from Lyon’s soul, Sheryl sees something else in it.

“I see this,” she says, “as a gift Anya gave him.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.