It was a beautiful Spring evening in
April 1969. I was 14. I answered the telephone. The call dramatically
changed my life and the lives of my parents, brothers and sisters.
The
caller was the night duty officer at the Ridgewood, NJ Police Department. He said
Marilyn had been in a car accident and is at Valley Hospital. I told him my parents are
visiting friends. He told me I needed to call my parents
immediately, and have them call him.
My parents call. They are going to the hospital. Mom tells me to call my
brother at college in New England. One of my other sisters comes home.
Another brother sits at the kitchen table with us. We decide to go to the
hospital, and then run the mile and a half to it as fast as we can.
At the emergency room they won't let us in. Through the glass doors we see
people rushing around. Somehow we know it's bad. We wait
until someone tells us to go home and wait for our parents. We cry
as we walk slowly home in the middle of the night, surrounded by darkness
and filled with fear.
At home I sit alone on our front porch and wait, alone in the dark still night.
I pray and pray, and ask God to please let her live, and just then a breeze
stirs the bushes in front of me, and I know my sister is dead.
Our parents return home hours later. Mom is crying. I see that Dad
has been crying too. I've never seen Dad cry. Our pastor is with them. Mom is taken upstairs. Marilyn is
dead. It was only a week ago that we celebrated her seventeenth birthday.
So began our journey engulfed in sorrow and pain. It was as if Spring itself
had died and the worst of Winters had enveloped us in a harsh and merciless
storm. The world as we knew it ended. Nothing would ever be the same!
It has been many years now since my closest sister, my friend, my
protector, was mercilessly torn from our lives. Decades have passed, yet it
can still feel like yesterday. How many years has it been? Fewer then the
number of dreams in which Marilyn comes home!
Marilyn's death tore our family, our parents, and her nine surviving
brothers and sisters apart like a tornado rampaging through a trailer park.
Her death defined our lives for years. It brought each of us such sorrow and
pain. It broke the bonds that tie a family together.
Birthdays, and holidays were never the same. At first there was an empty chair
at family dinners, and later one less chair at the table.
It would be years before we allowed each other to become too emotionally close.
In the years that follow we all moved away from the Ridgewood area. We spread
out across the country putting great distances between each of us. We
searched for happiness and tried to fill a void that seemed would never be filled.
Occasionally one of us travels to the Ridgewood area. We stand atop the
crest of a small hill, in an old cemetery. Across the road is the Junior
High where we sat in classes looking out across the street at the hill. We cry, as we did
then. Our tears fall upon her grave. The pain, deep in our hearts, surfaces
to envelop us in a shroud of sorrow.
Marilyn was killed by a Drunk Driver in Glen Rock, NJ, April 21, 1969.
Her best friend suffered massive injuries. She barely survived. We were told
she too had died about a year after the accident.
In 2001 I ran into her younger sister and learned her sister had not
died, and in fact had for the most part she has
recovered from her injuries.
The drunk driver, who was 19 then, walked away with minor injuries. Later I understand he
was offered jail or to go into the service. I don't know what he did. A few
months after the accident, he nearly ran me over as I walked across a
parking lot close to my home.
Marilyn's boyfriend joined the Marines, volunteered for Viet Nam, and
then volunteered to drive ammo trucks. He barely survived death twice when
ammo trucks blew up while he was driving them. After the second time he was
returned to the US to spend months recovering from massive wounds.
I've wondered at times if the driver has any idea of the pain he brought
upon our family and those who knew Marilyn. I wonder if he has ever did this
to
another family.
If you are going to drink, please don't drive!
