A renewed passion for life

Here's a piece I wrote this week about something unusual that my son and I share. It appeared in the Journal Star on February 24.

University tragedies unite a mother and son
By Monica Vest Wheeler

My 25-year-old son Gordo and I have much in common. We're only children. We're Geminis with June birthdays. We try not to hide our green eyes behind glasses. We love history and collect far too many books. We share a quirky sense of humor and pun contests. We drive his dad and my hubby crazy.
Unfortunately, we just added a new commonality.

I graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana in 1979. On Dec. 13, 1977, the Purple Aces basketball team was killed in an airplane crash.

My son graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2005. On Feb. 14, 2008, five students were massacred and many others wounded.

My son and I share too much now, as our alma maters have senseless, shocking tragedies embedded in their histories.

I spent this past Dec. 13 coping with the 30th anniversary of the basketball team's demise, an event marked by a memorial at the university and a burst of news articles about what had transpired three decades earlier. I was obsessively tied to my computer reading every reference to the tragedy. I pulled out my yearbook to remember the faces of those whose lives had ended so horribly.

They had not changed. Obviously, I had.

Yet in some ways I hadn't, because I'm 19 again every Dec. 13. I remember the rain and "Happy Days" on the black-and-white TV in my dorm room. I remember the voices of passers-by outside my open door, and the odd noise in the distance. Thunder? I hadn't seen any lightning. I glanced from the TV screen to the window in search of the source. Nothing. Only the rain, that damn rain. Would it ever end?

Word spread about a crash at the airport. The noise I'd heard had been the plane hitting the ground after take-off. As a human being, I felt bad for whoever might have been injured or killed. As a journalist, I planned to watch the 10 o'clock news for more details.

And then there was a rumor that our Purple Aces basketball team was on board. And then there was confirmation on the news that it was the team. And then there was a rumor that the entire team had been killed. And then there was a rumor that the entire team had survived. And then, and then, and then. . . .

As we huddled around TVs, the official news came: All 29 individuals on the DC-3 had perished. There were no survivors on the muddy terrain. The rain continued to fall.

Life stopped that day in Evansville, as it did in a number of towns that had sent their talented young men to play on a team that a new coach was molding with great conviction and enthusiasm. Life stopped for all of us amid tears and a single question: "Why?"

This tragedy happened years before fax machines and VCRs. I dictated over the phone a story to my hometown Indiana newspaper about how the campus was coping with the tragedy. I appeared on the news months later when I was one of the students photographed while placing bricks in the campus memorial.

The tragedy also happened years before I fully understood that life isn't fair.

The same glue tied me to my computer on Feb. 14, this time muttering a prayer of thanks that my only child was not at NIU's campus and a prayer of strength for families who wished their children hadn't been there.

Life stopped that day in DeKalb, as it did in a number of towns that had sent their talented young people to the university. Life stopped for all of us amid tears and one question: "Why?"

My son told me he couldn't understand why that guy would murder those innocent kids. What makes someone do that? I still have no answers when airplanes fall out of the sky or when innocent people are murdered. There will never be a satisfactory explanation.

However, I'm somewhat comforted that we'll never stop asking why. That means we're still alive and trying to make sense of this world, that we're still compassionate beings absorbing and sharing. It was a Tuesday in 1977 that I learned more about life than I had in any classroom. It was a Thursday in 2008 that my son did the same.

Whenever people ask us where we earned our college degrees, their response will likely be, "Say, isn't that where . . .?" Yes, but our alma maters survived to teach the world a lesson or two about dignity, perseverance and resilience.

My son and I now have something greater in common: a renewed passion and appreciation for life.