“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” Rumi
“What profit is there in gaining the whole world if you lose or forfeit yourself in the process?” (Luke 9:25, Inclusive New Testament)
Bobby died that night on Avon Mountain. It was one day after he called me.
I’ll never forget August 15, 1979. It was hot and sultry, not uncommon for August in New England. I was at work at the Pepperidge Farm Mail Order Company in Clinton, Connecticut, going through a particularly grueling morning when, at 11:15, the receptionist buzzed me. My brother, Bobby, was on the line. “Ginge,” he said, his voice strained, “can we have lunch? My girlfriend won’t see me.”
I cradled the phone in my neck, trying to sort through papers while I listened to my brother. My boss came into my office motioning that he needed me right away. “Bobby,” I said, “I’m not even eating lunch today. It’s crazy around here.”
“But I need to see you,” he said. Ten years my junior, Bobby treated me like a second mother and often turned to me for help. “How about next week? Can we meet then?” I repeated how impossible it would be to meet that day.
“Okay,” he said, sounding disappointed. “If you don’t have time, I’ll wait.” There was a pause. He said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “I really need to see you today. But if you don’t have time, I’ll wait.” I went about my day, thankful that I had time to do my work without interruption.
The next morning the phone rang at 5:30 a.m., startling me awake. Through my half asleep state, I heard my mother’s voice, breaking. “It’s about Bobby… He was killed last night by a drunk driver on Avon Mountain. Dad is on his way to identify his body at the morgue.”
An unexpected sound escaped from my mouth to voice the shock, the pain and yes, the denial. No, no, it can’t be true, I thought. These things don’t happen to us, they happen to other people. I was numb. The memory of the previous day’s conversation came flooding back to me in a rush–how could it be? I didn’t believe it. I started screaming. My screaming woke up my stepdaughter, Amanda, who ran in crying, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t stop screaming. Oddly, it occurred to me that I had never screamed like that before. It surprised me. I didn’t know I had it in me. Haphazard memories flooded in of Bobby’s life and our relationship. I was the oldest and he the youngest in a family of four children. As I was often left in charge when my parents went out of the house, I had been his second mother. So we had a bond that came from the lullabies I sang to him as I rocked him as a child, from the stories I read to him. He turned to me for emotional help often, as he had turned to me yesterday. And I hadn’t been available. It was the screaming of guilt, flying out from deep within.
I was unable to take in the enormity of Bobby’s life ending. A cold dread enveloped me as we drove the hour to my Grandfather Pop’s house that morning where the family gathered. We all sat there, alternately staring in disbelief and holding each other. We were crying, broken, bereft, but still not quite believing. The details of the accident started dribbling in—a drunken driver . . . 60 m.p.h . . . killed instantly.
The doorbell rang. It was my friend Pam with a casserole of macaroni and cheese, freshly baked from the oven. We hugged, wordless. I thanked her for the act of kindness. After I helped myself, I took a bite and found I couldn’t swallow it. How strange—my most rudimentary of human reflexes was suspended.
The phone calls came in from people far and wide. Loved ones, friends, acquaintances, Bobby’s friends . . . all unbelieving . . . could the worst be true?
Bad news travels fast.
People came from Bobby’s circle, which extended beyond our town to the medical school community where he had finished his first year that June. Friends came from Amherst College, his alma mater, and from Kingswood-Oxford School, a private school all four of us children had attended, and where Bobby had taught math and science during the two years before medical school.
My father came in after he had identified Bobby’s body. Now we knew it was true. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cry either. He crumpled into Pop’s favorite chair. The silence dragged on. It was as if the rest of us weren’t there. He was in his own world and we were cut off from him.
I watched the second hand on Pop’s grandfather clock tick away, for hours it seemed, as people came and went to offer comfort and support. When would this day ever end? When it did, would I wake up and realize this was a bad dream?
I sleepwalked through the two days before the funeral. My son, Tad, came home after climbing Mt. Washington with his dad, Tom. My heart broke open again as I told them what had happened and saw how upset they were. On the day of the funeral, my friend, Susan, drove three hours to be there. She was standing in the church driveway as we drove in, her face full of compassion and concern. We didn’t say anything, we just held one another. Walking into the church, I was stunned by the numbers. The church held 2,000 people. So many were here mourning one so young.
The words the Episcopalian priest spoke that day were simple but challenging for me:
Our prayers this morning for Robert Burrough Swain III express to God our gratitude for this open, lovable, committed young man . . . But there is another intercession that I fear each of us must offer in a manner that best suits himself or herself. Intercession is needed for understanding and explanation of this tragic event. Why did this have to happen to Bobby? Is there no standard of fair play in life? Has God no control over the world that He so lovingly created? Has He no heart that can express itself in what for Him would be some insignificant event, but for us a catastrophe? Does life end just like that with nothing permanent or different left in the world because Bobby was here?
I can’t answer your questions. I can only ask the questions that I seek answers to. But they come crowding in upon us at a time like this—confusing, depressing, and endless questions. And I am sure that none of us can, this morning, find any answers to them. But this flood of questions can perhaps force us to take that leap of faith into the unknown, trusting our deepest emotions and convictions regarding the shape of that creative power that designed the universe.
I did not trust my deepest emotions and convictions about God.
I didn’t even know what a leap of faith was. When I left the church to go home after our family gathering, I had no resources, no previous experience to help me to cope with tragedy. I was stripped bare. Nothing in my belief system offered me comfort or solace. I didn’t have a personal relationship with God. I’d never felt so low. In the months ahead, the depression lasted, punctuated by loud outbursts and fits of crying. My family, my friends–everyone was estranged by my anger, even my mother. I sealed myself off from the world I had known.
In the next year I was to experience two more deaths–the deaths of my father and my marriage. I even contemplated suicide, angrily planning to drive my car into a cement abutment on Route 95. My mother called my therapist. I was angry with her for doing that, not even seeing how concerned she was. Either I was angry or I was crying. My anger erupted everywhere. And then there were the long moments of uncomfortable silence when I was alone in despair and it made me crazy. I took long walks on the beach near my home on the Connecticut shore, planning how fast I would drive my car into that cement abutment. I was convinced no one understood or cared about me.
I cut off all my relationships—nobody could approach me. I was hanging on to life by a thread–obsessed by the thought of death and angered by incredible loss.
In retrospect, I see now that this was the beginning of my spiritual journey. It was in this darkness, so bleak, this emptiness, so vast, where I began my search for a personal relationship with God.
Dear Virginia
Words cannot describe my emotions, I am crying as I read this. You are one strong, confident, brilliant woman and I knew it the day I met you the first time. What I did not know was you write so amazingly well. I am ordering my copy of the book today and will bring it next Friday hoping to get it signed by the author graciously.
Best regards
Anila
Dear Anita,
Thank you so much for your empathy and kind words.
I would be happy to sign your book!
Virginia
My dear Virginia I had no idea that you have gone through so much. Meeting you at our prayer group was a blessing for me. You never spoke of your pain yet knew all of mine. I am on that spiritual journey and I have peace in my heart and soul. I continue to be in remission. I see it as Gods will. I hope to see you soon. You are such an unassuming and strong woman. God bless you.
dear Cheryl
You are so much in my thoughts and prayers! and now I am in yours! how wonderful!
What a blessing! Let us speak about a time to get together!
in Christ,
Virginia
Thank you Virginia for letting me share your grief and sorrows as John of the Cross did on an another dark night.
In the Light,
Clarence
Dear Clarence
I so appreciate your words of comfort.
thank you for your presence in my life.
In gratitude
virginia
Our journey in this life is short indeed; but God doesn’t make mistakes. We don’t have the answers or the wisdom to obtain them so all we can do is trust & try to understand. Many have lost loved ones so we wait for the day (that noone can predict) when we, too, will leave this planet.
Carl Benander (Kenya-1998-2001)
Dear Carl,
Thank you so much for your global view. It helps me look at this from a different perspective.
Have you had someone die young in your life? How did you handle it, if so?
all the best Virginia
I’d like to describe an experience I had as a young child that definitely tore me apart. It wasn’t till many years later that I realized that that event had become an “breaking open” event for me.
Making Room
Somewhere inside the thousand mirages of time the delicate membrane tore exposing its transparent layers to children much too young. If an image is an incantation then on that day the dirge began its deep, pulsing lament and the flashback I carry is so charged with grief that even now, a sudden trigger instantly hurls me to the old front stoop of a hot sunny morning. It was June 29th, 1955. I was ten. Our family lived in a tiny house on a dead-end street with lots of kids and fathers in blue collars who worked in factories. There were no fences and all the neighbors looked out for us. Summer reverberated with sublime spontaneity as we frolicked in yards, in the surrounding fields and woods, on St. Michael’s playground and yes, even in the street.
I was running from Kathy’s yard across to our own when Mr. Wolf, our milkman, and I simultaneously heard the scream. Mr. Wolf slammed on his brakes and leapt from the huge refrigerated truck. I stopped short and cringed in horror. A phantom, earth-shattering wail gushed from somewhere deep within the bowels of the earth, drowning my whole world in its deluge. The left rear tire of the milk truck had crushed a small blue bundle. It could have been a rag doll but somehow I knew better.
The driver vaulted back up into his seat, sobbing uncontrollably, as the neighbors debated whether it would be better to back up or pull forward. Either action, regardless of how precise, would cause more damage, so Mr. Wolf again plummeted to the cobblestones, braced his spine against the bottom edge of the enormous vehicle and began lifting. Tears and sweat streamed down his swollen face as moans sporadically escaped his lungs. Even the boiling air around him seemed to strain as he put more and more force behind each attempt to raise the massive vise. It was in those few seconds as the bulbous veins in the man’s neck prepared to burst that recognition dawned. Jimmy! Jimmy Fa’ get! (fa-jay’)
Our neighborhood instantly deployed like a well-coordinated unit. Their heartbreak didn’t mitigate their ability to act, as little Jimmy lay prostrate, running out of life. My aunt Laura, a former WAC, surged to the scene with towels and a sheet while my Great-Aunt Angela approached the tiny house she rented to Jimmy’s family. My mom and Shirley attempted to corral the kids into our backyard so we couldn’t see. We pretended to do as we were told. At some point as I continued to dart back and forth between houses, my body imploding with gut-wrenching heaves as I heard Mrs. Fa’get’s first screams. Her shrieks pierced the late morning as she ran frantically back into her house, crying for her husband’s shotgun.
Two minutes later the impossible happened! The truck rose. It rose! It had lifted just enough to allow Laura to slide the tiny lifeless body toward her, quickly swaddling him in towels. The ambulance was still on its way, but the car was ready. Miner’s Hospital was only two blocks away, so Angela gently guided Mrs. Fa’get into the back seat of her Buick and Laura, holding Jimmy, got quickly in beside her. They sped to the emergency room while we all stood in their wake, crushed into a nauseous, deadening silence.
Drenched by a dark wave, afraid and confused, I bolted forward racing toward that bloody vehicle, following, as they turned right onto First Street. I couldn’t keep up and stopped my pursuit in the alley behind The Hotel Gunter, gasping for air and sobbing uncontrollably, thinking of moms and dads and of pain, a pernicious, permeating plague of pain. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Fa’get as seconds ticked and terror escalated. I pictured her holding her blood-soaked son, unable to see his head, praying for a miracle, longing for her own demise if her pleas went unheeded.
Some fluid lingered behind. It pooled between the cobblestones right in front of our house along with pieces of a saltine cracker, the one my mom had given a gorgeous little boy in a sky blue jump suit a few minutes earlier. He had apparently dropped the cracker under the truck and had crawled under to get it just as Mr. Wolf was pulling away from the curb. Of course, this Super-Human fractured his back, collapsed onto the road in a fit of agony and soon went by ambulance to the same hospital.
A few years later when we heard of his death, the heaviness that had plagued my heart began to lift. What a gentleman! What a gentle man! He had suffered through a series of nervous breakdowns before his heart finally gave out. He had become a hero to me along with Jimmy’s mom and dad who chose to keep on living.
I have a black-and-white of Jimmy, standing by our front stoop wearing a cowboy hat. I don’t need a picture of the courageous man in uniform nor of all the scarlet liquid that created a permanent stain long after it had been washed away by the fire department. We found no trace of the saltine cracker though I searched every day for months. Mom was just being kind as she always was. She was our neighborhood’s greatest blessing, my greatest gift. I prayed with grave intensity that she wouldn’t blame herself. Seeing her cry had opened me to a universe that wasn’t as simple or secure as I had thought. Worlds within worlds had surfaced revealing an underbelly unstable in its grounding.
The Fa’gets moved on soon after. They had another child in another town, though I never saw them again. I felt that everyone responded exactly as they were meant to respond. I was proud of my mom and my aunts and of all my Welsh Street neighbors. Their courage and calmness gave me a new respect for grown-ups. I knew I would never have been able to react with such precision, with such dignity. I was allowed to fall apart. I never told the adults how much we had all needed them that day, how much I had needed them.
I’m sure my playmates were marked for life just as I have been, though we spoke very little about it afterwards. I imagine a shared torment, frightening visions of our own inescapable, indefatigable defeat. It’s astonishing to me that some of our deepest wounds, our most grievous tragedies don’t syphon off our blood supply or leave physical scars, yet they are permanently branded along with the sound of crushed bone against cobblestone and the horrific grunts of a human being lifting a two ton death trap. And I realized in my own immature way that that epoch of total emotional lassitude was neither the beginning nor the end, but had been experienced by humanity since the beginning of time. It was part of being alive, something we shared in common.
I scooted over on our small front stoop then, making room for a mother and her lost son, a husband who received the dreaded phone call, an unborn child who had a brother he or she would never know but would always know and especially for a kind-hearted man who was broken in two by an unearthly strength to save what couldn’t be saved.
Jody Walker
Dear Jody
Your story is profound, riveting. I am so grateful.
in peace,
Virginia
Virginia- thank you for sharing this, for being vulnerable to allow others to learn from and be inspired by you.
You have made tremendous impacts on the lives of many ( myself included) and may you always be comforted in times of need. Blessings- Erin
dear Erin
I am so thankful for your comment. It is a good time to hear from you as I am digesting my life differently at 80. I am grateful for your words of comfort, too, as I face physical challenges.
You have impacted me–seeing you keep on keeping on when your health would have stopped most people was a big one for me. Don’t forget your interview on Imagine Worcester and the World! See it again at https://www.wccatv.com/video/imagine-worcester/imagineworcester23
thanks again Erin!
Virginia