The most traumatic thing that ever happened in my life was the death of my mom. On July 20th, 1966, Mom, Grandpa, me, my sis-Kim and 3 cousins went for a picnic at a spot beside a bridge that was part of Hartwell Lake. We'd been there many times before. I had just turned 7, Kim was 4. Towards the end of the day, mom went for a swim across the narrow channel. She came to the surface and waved at us, then went under again. She never resurfaced. Of course, by the time grandpa realized something was wrong, it was way to late to do anything, even if we'd known where she was. This whole day, the memories, the feelings, the fear and pain are still very clear to me. As a child, I guess everyone wanted to "protect" me & Kim, so we were never allowed to see any info about this. I saw the newspaper article for the 1st time when I was in my late teens, maybe even early 20s. I grew up feeling as if there was some big secret associated with her death and always had lots of questions that I couldn't get answers to.I was at a family get together last weekend and wound up staying after with my cousin-one of the ones who was there that day-and we got into a discussion about mom and that day. She told me that at the time, they had been told that mom, when she dove down and went to push back up off the bottom, had actually gotten her foot stuck in the remnants of an old bridge and couldn't get loose. I'd never heard this before. She also stated that since we're in a drought and the lake is down 25 feet, she wants to go back to the site and see if she can find any thing there that mom could have gotten caught on and see for herself. I relayed this info to Kim, who was up for the weekend, and we decided to go, just the 2 of us, and check it out.
It has been years since we've gone there, but we went straight to it. The river is nothing more than a trickling creek now, probably no more than 6 inches at the deepest. The road and bridge are completely out of the water...weird looking, especially when compared to my memories. We walked down the bank, trying as best we could to remember where we were that day. We didn't see any old bridge exposed, but we did find some concrete chunks that looked as if they were once part of a road, and we found some planed, rotted old boards. Was that the bridge? Is that's all thats left after 42 years? I dunno. The pain was raw but Kim & I talked a lot, shared a lot while we were there. It's painful still, but it has to be faced-and altho I wasn't sure this was a good idea, I'm glad we did it. At one point, once we located where we believe we were that day, I started taking pics of Kim sitting on a rock, looking back towards the bridge. Then, it hit me like a lead weight. Mom's body was found about 10 feet from the shore in a small crevice, just large enough for a body to fit. Where we were at that moment was 10-12 feet from the bank in the area that she would have been in when she drowned. I mentioned this, so we started looking around. We found a huge granite rock outcropping and below and slightly under was a small crevice that would just be large enough for a smallish body-and mom was small. I felt a jolt go through my body when I realized what we were probably looking at.
I know this may sound a bit morbid, but it's hard to understand unless you've been involved in the same kind of situation. Maybe we were looking for a connection, maybe for some answers, maybe for more closure. Maybe we were just trying to understand why it happened and how.
Kim, I know you'll read this...I had bizarre dreams all night last night and mom was in them. This bothers me because it tells me that I haven't worked through all my grief. But, realistically, I'm not sure I ever will.
