A Tragedy
Just after midnight on November 16, 2002, we were awakened by a telephone call. We didn’t make it to the phone in time to answer it and figured it was probably a wrong number or something. However, when the phone rang again, we knew it was something serious. It was Rita’s brother Mark, and when I heard Rita say, “Mark, please tell me it’s not true. Please, Mark. Tell me it’s not true.” I realized that something terrible had happened. I first assumed it was something about her mother or father, but after what seemed like forever for Rita to regain her composure, she finally said, “the boys are dead.” “The boys” were my three nephews who were 13, 10, and 7 years old at the time and lived in Milan, the town in which I was raised.
This is probably the worst experience I have ever been through. It occurred seven months before my mother passed away and a year after Amanda was born. Rita (especially) and I were very close with the oldest boy, who we took care of regularly when he was a baby.
I am not completely sure of the details, but from what I understand, an electrical fire started in a small attic space next to where the boys had their bedroom. They think maybe when the house had a new roof installed, a nail might have shorted some wires. The fire apparently smoldered for several hours during the evening. When it finally burned through the bedroom wall near the top of the stairs, a great deal of heat had built up and now, given ample oxygen, almost immediately engulfed the stairwell and much of the bedroom. At this point, the fire alarms went off, but the upstairs bedroom was cut off from the downstairs where Rita’s sister and her husband were sleeping. They immediately called for help but were blocked from going up the stairs. They then went outside and tried with a ladder to get to the only window away from the heart of the fire. They could not reach the window because the ladder was too short. Once they found something to elevate the ladder further, the fire was simply too hot even to approach the window; it melted the vinyl siding on their neighbor’s house.
This was a tragedy that one would like to think was caused by negligence, so you can tell yourself it couldn’t happen to you. However, it really seems like nothing could have been done. Everything that could have gone wrong did.
I hope that the boys were overcome by the smoke and passed out because they were burned beyond recognition. Some volunteer firefighters were burned through their protective gear trying to get to the boys. One was the brother of a high school friend who apparently went through many months of therapy trying to deal with what he saw.
My brother drove up from the Washington, D.C., area to help with things, and he wound up driving all of us to Michigan. On the way there, just as we were getting out of State College, I started having severe pains in my abdomen. At first, I thought maybe it was just from the stress. However, as the pain intensified, I asked Lee to pull into a gas station because I thought maybe it was severe gas pain. I could barely walk to the bathroom and realized I needed to be seen by a doctor. We were very close to the local hospital, so we took a detour there. I was admitted to the E.R. and informed that I had a kidney stone. I had never had one before, so I was not familiar with the pain. Fortunately, it passed quickly, the pain almost immediately went away, and it didn’t delay our arrival in Michigan too long. I had another kidney stone a couple of years later but have not had one since. It could not have happened at a worse time.
The aftermath of this is still an issue for me, and I assume for Rita. She regularly cried for a year, was then depressed for many more years, and was then upset that her memories of her nephews were fading.
I’m sure Amanda doesn’t remember anything about this as she was just over a year old. However, Caleb was four at the time. I’m not sure what he still remembers, but I suspect a lot. We talked to a counselor about how to help him deal with this as he was very close to his cousins. The counselor told us he was really too young to be concerned about his own death. However, he didn’t seem to be doing well, so we had the counselor see him a few times. It turns out that he wasn’t afraid of dying, but he was afraid that if he did die, it would make everyone very sad, and he didn’t want that to happen again. I’m not sure if this is the reason, but he has a tremendous amount of empathy now.
It’s hard to believe that David would now be **, Dustin **, and Anthony **. When you die, you stop aging; they are still children in the only memories I have of them. It was like my own children caught up to and passed their cousins as they aged.
I also suspect that this incident really altered the course of my marriage as I suspect that Rita’s sister and mother, who live very close to one another in Michigan, pushed very hard for Rita to move so our kids could somehow fill the void left by the death of my nephews.
I wrote much of this many years ago, but it still makes me cry as I edit it now.