To Heaven and Back (17 page)

I knew what I was supposed to do; I just didn’t want to do it.

In the years after my boating accident, I easily followed God’s edict of being joyful always, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in all circumstances. My experiences with God were a part of every breath I took (I even named my new bicycle
“Breath of Life”). I never stopped feeling gratitude for the blessings I had received; I just didn’t feel like writing about them. I did feel increasing guilt about not completing my task and for even thinking about it as a “task” rather than a privilege. I felt increasing guilt for not living up to what I imagined were God’s expectations for me. I felt mounting pressure to write my story, but I just kept putting it on the bottom of the nagging list of things that I needed/wanted to get done … organizing the garage, clearing the closets of no longer used clothing, getting Christmas cards out on time, being better about writing/calling my family, organizing photo albums, and so on.

I am quite good at procrastinating, so I kept living my life as usual until, quite unexpectedly in the spring of 2009, I was awakened in the early hours by an overpowering need to put my story into words. It consumed me entirely. I popped out of bed at four or five each morning (the only hours during which I could write without being interrupted) and marveled at how effortlessly the words poured out of me and onto the computer screen. I would feverishly write for a couple of hours before starting our family’s morning routine of getting ready for school and work. In one week, the first draft of this book was finished. I was emotionally drained, but quickly worked through a couple of revisions before losing motivation once again.

It was a busy time for my family and I let this manuscript languish for a couple of months while I
focused on the activities of our daily lives. Peter was finishing his second year in middle school. Betsy was finishing her junior year of high school and Eliot was contemplating his college choices while preparing for his high school graduation. Willie was temporarily living in Washington, D.C., enjoying all the city has to offer, and Bill and I continued to work while trying to keep everyone’s schedules organized.

Willie completed his time in Washington then returned to Wyoming to help celebrate Eliot’s graduation on May 29, 2009.

The brothers planned to leave Jackson Hole the following weekend to begin their next adventure; they planned to drive across the country and live together in Northern Maine while ski training for six months with the Maine Winter Sports Club. The day before their departure, Willie asked me about writing a will. He wanted to know who writes a will, why a person would write a will, and whether he should write one. He also wanted to know if I had a life insurance policy for him and, upon discovering that I had never thought of it, wanted to know how I could get one. He really pestered me about it. Although I felt strange having this conversation with a healthy nineteen-year-old, I assured him that I would look into the matter.

Emotionally, I am even-keeled and I have never been particularly emotional when any of my kids began something new or left for an adventure. I
have always been excited for them and have known that we would stay in communication. The morning my two boys left for Maine was different. Willie’s Subaru was overloaded with most of their worldly possessions and as I watched them making their final preparations I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I’m not sure why, but it reminded me of the day I took Willie to his first preschool class. On that day, which now seems like a different lifetime, he gave me a kiss, then confidently left my side and walked through the classroom door. As I watched him walk up the sidewalk and into his future, the symbolism of it all overwhelmed me and I shocked myself by crying most of the way home.

As the boys and I stood next to the Subaru saying “good-bye,” I kept telling them how much I loved them, told them to be careful driving, to call me from the road, and other such things mothers generally say in those moments. When we embraced, I started crying and almost couldn’t let them go. I remember holding Willie just a little bit longer than I normally would have, looking directly into his eyes and telling him how much I loved him and what an extraordinary young man he had become. I told them both how proud Bill and I were of them and what a great adventure they would have together. They drove off and, despite speaking with them many times each day while they were on the road, I still felt entirely out of sorts.

Perhaps I was uneasily awaiting a future that I had already seen.

The boys arrived in Fort Kent, Maine, and settled into a routine. They lived in the training center with several other athletes and were excited about the training program. They trained hard and shared a lot of laughs as they explored their new surroundings. Friends of ours, Sophie and Derek, whose children had attended school with the boys, own a fishing lodge not far from where the boys were living. The lodge is in Canada, on the banks of the Grand Cascapedia River. The pace of life there is relaxed and filled with activities like swimming, fishing from canoes, playing games, and making maple syrup hearts while telling stories around a
campfire. Sophie and Derek’s family spends time there each summer and the boys happily accepted their gracious invitation to visit.

On one afternoon, Willie was fishing in a canoe with Sophie and two of her beautiful golden retrievers, Rusty and Lucky. Sophie is an exceptionally loving and supportive person who enjoyed listening to, and encouraging, all of Willie’s many, many ideas for the future. Knowing that his life was more than full and usually moved at an extremely rapid pace, Sophie was surprised to see that Willie was a calm and graceful fisherman. He wasn’t bored and didn’t seem to care whether or not he actually caught a fish; he was simply enjoying the surrounding beauty and the ebb and flow of the river while chatting with her. Seemingly out of the blue, Willie asked Sophie what she knew about the soul. She went on to tell him that she believes the soul is the essence of being that has a direct connection to God. She told him that she believes our souls are timeless and come to earth in order to learn something new or otherwise attain spiritual growth.

Willie seemed quite interested in her thoughts, asked several more questions, then quietly seemed to contemplate what she had said. He then told her how happy he was and how grateful he was for the wonderful life he had lived. They soon paddled to where Sophie’s son was standing on the river bank and when they got out of the canoe, she marveled at Willie’s ability to seamlessly transition from their deep discussion of the soul to playfully hanging out
with his buddy. Willie awoke the next day and ate his usual five pieces of bacon, four eggs, two pieces of toast, and pancakes with homemade maple syrup before returning to Fort Kent with Eliot to resume their ski training.

In the early hours of June 21, 2009, I again felt an absolute compulsion to finish this manuscript and an intense pressure to complete my work. By early in the afternoon, I finally completed what I believed would be the final version of my manuscript. The intensity of the elation I felt when I clicked the “save” button and shut down my computer was something I had never before felt and have trouble adequately describing. There was an explosion of freedom within my soul. I felt light and happy and magnificent. I was filled with relief at having competed this task and grateful for the experiences leading up to it. I had been obedient to God. Life could not have seemed better.

I was still feeling lighthearted as my youngest son, Peter, and I were driving into town later that day. We decided to tease Eliot about something, so called him from my car. I must have accidentally hit the speaker button on my phone, for when the call was answered by an unfamiliar voice Peter was also able to hear that person’s words. We asked for Eliot, but the man on the other end of the call told us his name and said that Eliot could not speak. Although there had been no amusement in his voice, we thought he was trying to be funny. I hadn’t actually recognized the caller’s name, so I
thought it was one of the other skiers in the training program. I asked him to stop kidding around and give the phone to Eliot. He again said his name (it was one of the boys’ ski coaches), and told me that Willie had been involved in a roller skiing accident and was dead.

As I tried to control the rising panic that was beginning to cloud my brain and constrict my breathing, I told him to stop joking around, that it was not funny, and again asked him to please hand the phone to Eliot. This conversation repeated itself again and again as I immediately turned the car around and raced home. I really couldn’t even comprehend the words that he was saying. I ran into our house and screamed for my husband to “talk to this man because I don’t even know what he is saying!”

Our world was forever changed.

On the other side of the country, the same day had begun with a similar sense of joy. Willie spent the morning with Eliot, and then met their friend Hilary (another skier) in the afternoon at her family’s home in Fort Fairfield. They planned to spend the afternoon restoring a rusty old bicycle they picked up at a garage sale earlier in the summer, then roller ski for a couple of hours before having dinner with her family. If you are unfamiliar with them, roller skis are a dry-land version of cross country ski equipment. They look a little bit like very short skis, with ski bindings mounted on the top and polyethylene wheels at either end. An athlete can then use them to “ski” on pavement, with or without the use of ski poles. They are used by Nordic skiers to increase endurance, work on
technique, and develop ski-specific strength when there is no snow.

June 21, 2009, was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and it was a beautiful time in New England. As they skied past a cemetery, Willie told Hilary the story of how he had told me when he was very young that he would not reach his eighteenth birthday and of my coming to his West Yellowstone hotel room at 4
A.M.
the morning of his birthday just to hug him and verify that he was alive. They went on to talk about death and what it meant to each of them. He then became quite specific in describing his feelings about death and told Hilary what he wanted done in the event of his death. He was clear, for example, about his desire to be cremated. He expressed his opinion that using land for burial was not consistent with his love for the planet and his passion about being a responsible steward of the land.

As they skied toward their half-way point, they crested a hill overlooking a beautiful river. The sun was setting and the golden rays of light played on the water, the trees, and the distant hills, creating a magical quality to the scene as they stopped to take it all in. Willie’s final comment as they resumed skiing was, “If we died, wouldn’t this be an incredible last vision?” Less than three minutes later, Willie was dead.

Erik, a Fort Fairfield youth who had celebrated his eighteenth birthday just weeks earlier, had
decided to “just drive around” that evening. When his car approached the section of road upon which Hilary and Willie were skiing, they both heard the car engine and moved as far to the right side of the road as was possible. They continued skiing along the road’s edge and waited for the car to drive by. This is something every Nordic skier has experienced thousands of times during their off-season training. As they waited for the car to pass, they could not have known that Erik was distracted by his cell phone. For the almost-quarter-mile of clear vision of Hilary and Willie he would have had if he were paying attention while he was driving, he saw nothing.

Erik missed hitting Hilary, who was skiing behind Willie, by only a few inches. Startled, she looked up and watched in horror as Erik’s speeding car stuck Willie from behind. My beautiful son was killed instantly.