A tragedy: Man Backs over Daughter

Bridget Anne O’Connor

November 1965 – April 1967

Beautiful little “Bridget” died in April of 1967 after being inadvertently backed over by her father. “Bridget was 1 ½ and her sister was 3 years-old when this tragedy happened. Her sister wrote to us to help our website visitors truly understand how the devastating the loss of a sibling can be. She wants other victims to know how vitally important it is to keep siblings and other children involved in the grieving process. We want you to read her story to learn about the ramifications these events have on the entire family. The secrecy surrounding this event prevented healing and divided her family.

Her story won a national prize and she offered to let us publish it on our website. We hope her story will help others as they move thru the difficult grieving process. Her advice to parents is to not keep the death of a sibling a secret or an event that is not discussed. Don’t let that child just disappear.

FINDING BRIDGET

The gravedigger jabs his shovel into the lush grass of the cemetery. “This is where most of the babies are buried. When the shovel hits metal, that’s where a disc marks the plot.” Thunk! He is stabbing all the dead babies, I think to myself. Emily and I cast quick glances at each other, the looks polite girls give each other when they don’t want to show how horrified they are. Thunk! “She’s number thirty-six; should be right around here.” Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! The gravedigger pushes a sinewy forearm across the top of his head to plaster a few damp wisps of hair back into place. We pretend not to notice the dark circles of sweat under his arms. He leans on his shovel and considers his watch, his face a map of a life spent working outdoors. “I got someone to bury in half an hour over there” — he jerks his head toward the newer section of the graveyard, “so how about if you gals come back in a couple of hours. That should give me time to find your sister’s grave. You’ll see which one it is. Number thirty-six.”

Emily and I nod and stumble back to the car. We’re drained from the drive across New York to Ithaca in the throbbing August heat, let down by the delay in finding Bridget’s grave. We knew there was no headstone; the gravedigger had told me that much over the phone, when I called from California to start planning our quest. He’d said he would look up her gravesite and show it to us when we got there. But people kept on dying, and the old man was too busy burying people to find where Bridget was buried. That Bridget’s grave is unmarked is not surprising. Our family is full of secrets, and this death is only one of them. I violated the O’Connor family law by telling Emily, born three years after Bridget died, that our sister had even existed.Once we are out of the gravedigger’s earshot, our tension squeaks out in fits of giggles.

“Were you thinking the same thing as me?” whispers Emily. “He was stabbing the dead babies!” Spasms of laughter grip us, escalating as soon as we are safe in the car. We can barely breathe, we are laughing so hard. I wish I could cry, but the grief is waiting for a better time.  My father killed my little sister Bridget. It was an accident. She was playing in the mud under his car. He didn’t know she was there and backed over her. She was one and a half years old. These are the facts. This much I can simply recite to people. I tell them, too, that we were never allowed to
talk about her but I did anyway, swearing my friends to secrecy.

What I don’t tell people is this: when I do remember Bridget, I wonder what she looked like dead. I sent away for her death certificate, checking around the room as I opened it, though my parents were half the country away. The certificate names the cause of death as laceration of the brain. “Was she squished?” a little voice inside me asks. I must have seen her. I was there. So was the rest of the family: my brother Bobby, eleven months older than I, and my young parents, made older before they had a chance to become wiser. My older brother Bobby and I have had clandestine meetings, sharing what we remember about Bridget, since we were in our early teens. From the basement Bobby unearthed a stash of old slides, some with Bridget in the picture. He kept them in a box under his bed, and we took them out and squinted at them against the light when we were alone in the house. I remember being at the sink on that day-we-must-forget, washing dishes with my mother. Mommy looked out of the window and gasped, “Mike!” I followed my mother out to the driveway and saw Bridget lying there in her red sneakers: two red stop signs, run through. I don’t remember any blood. Was there blood? I want to know. Some young part of me wants to know, and some younger part of me won’t tell.

In the next house we lived in, a house I don’t remember, my father took Bobby and me out to the backyard and told us, “Don’t talk about Bridget anymore. It hurts Mom too much.”  Eyes locked downwards, we two nodded silently. We obeyed, and for nearly a decade did not mention Bridget, not to each other and not to Mom and Dad. We moved often as my father finished graduate school and became a college professor. I had one new friend that I shared my family secret with in each place we lived. I don’t know why, but I always had to tell someone. The telling of the
story became a secret within a secret, my own precious puzzle box.

As a teenager, I broke the taboo of silence around Bridget with my parents and asked what had happened. They thought I might have forgotten my sister. My mother told me that she had been afraid the ambulance would drive right by because people often missed our country driveway. And sure enough, though she waved desperately, the ambulance shrieked past, my mother’s hoarse screams overrun by the siren’s banshee wail. From there, my parents’ stories diverged. Mom glared at my father through tears. “He was running out of the house to take the car away from me, so I couldn’t take the kids to the park.” I wanted to ask why, to know more, but didn’t want to risk having her
pierce me with those glacial blue eyes. My father slumped in his chair. “No, that’s not true, that’s not what happened!” He shook his head slowly, and I could barely hear his voice when he spoke. “We were so happy that day, until the accident. We were finally getting our bills paid, we were catching up.”

In this scene I am fifteen, and they have never had this conversation. They have never talked about Bridget.
Where did they keep their grief? How did they toil through each day together as a married couple, have two more children — how did they plod through twelve years with this secret stone in their hearts?

Ten years later, I asked about Bridget again. In my mid-twenties and looking for reasons for the depression that gripped me at certain times of the year, I called and asked my mother for Bridget’s birth and death dates. Muffled sniffles stole over the phone line, as Mom tried to pretend this was an everyday phone call. She said she couldn’t remember when her third child was born, when she died. There is no granite marker to remind her, only a metal disc stamped with the number thirty-six, buried beneath years of thatch.

Emily and I drive back into town, discussing whether to buy Bridget a headstone. We stop at a florist on College Hill to buy flowers for the grave. Without consulting each other, we both know that baby white roses are the perfect choice. And when the shopgirl asks if we want baby’s breath, I say to Emily, “That sounds appropriate.”
The shopgirl raises an eyebrow as Emily stage-whispers, “You mean, as in ‘baby’s last breath?’” Em has read my mind the way only a sister can. As we leave the florist, we sink into the  worst gallows humor. Emily nudges me. “Let’s buy her a headstone. It can say, ‘The Secret is Out!’”

We snort, wiping tears from our eyes. I drive home the finishing coffin nail. “Let’s have it say, ‘Killed by my father and all I got was this stupid headstone!’”

It’s time to return to the graveyard. Our manic giggles have faded. I can almost hear a soft hiss as the adrenaline leaks out of us. Jokes about “the scene of the crime” no longer bring taut grins to our faces. We used to feel it was a crime: not running over the child, but burying our right to grieve, even our right to know what happened.
As we drive back to the graveyard, Emily breaks our silence only to wonder if the gravedigger has come through. He has. Divots of earth lie scattered all around the area. Many of the babies’ graves have no headstones, flowers, or other signs of visitation. So many people are trying to forget. Some families grow closer, reach out to each other through tragedy. In my family we all grieve in separate cells, emerging only for our, “I’m-fine” white-knuckle dinners. I kneel and pry back several thick clumps of grass to unearth a tarnished brass disc with a faint “thirty-six” pressed into it. The story of Bridget is real; here’s her grave. I imagine a headstone that reads, “Bridget Anne O’Connor, November, 1965 — April, 1967.”

Finally, I cry. There isn’t much to do at a gravesite but cry and remember. Emily has nothing to remember, and I have very little. I tell a story of when our mother was pregnant with Emily. Mom’s friends frequently teased me with, “Now you won’t be the baby anymore!” “I’m not the baby, Bridget’s the baby!” I wanted to protest. But I knew better than to say anything. After a good cry, Emily and I take pictures. While she poses, hands displaying the flowers
with self-conscious bravado, I snap her picture. Then it’s my turn to play Vanna. The pictures say, “We were here, here with you, sister. We acknowledge you, Bridget, and grieve for your memory.” I wonder what Bridget would have been like, what we would have been like as sisters. She never had the chance to annoy me, nor to become a friend. She never had a choice between tattling on me or covering up for me. Did I like her? Was I was nice to her?
What would our family have been like if I had crawled into the mud under those wheels instead? You can never be as good as the memory of the one who died young. You can never compete with the one who was never a snotty teenager, who never got arrested, ran away, or had the wrong kind of boys calling on the phone. In my mind Bridget is the perfect one, pristine as a white rosebud, tightly furled. Our photographs are all we have of her: pictures, and one baby rosebud we each take from her grave.

On our way out, we pass the gravedigger. He turns to his next task in the endless line of the dead, nodding at us before he disappears into a green outbuilding. Emily hands me her rose to hold while she buckles herself into the driver’s seat. She and I are but two travelers on the road that winds forever through these acres of grief and secrets.

Cameron James

The 18^th of May, 1994, started like any other day for the Norton family of Seattle. Dee was in the middle of the very early morning shift of his job as a reporter for The Seattle Times. Jackie, his wife, was buried in work at the exchange student office at the University of Washington, and Jana, their daughter, was busy tutoring math and English students at Shoreline Community College.

When an editor discovered some facts were missing from a story left by the overnight crew, he sent Dee rushing to the county courthouse to dig out the missing facts from a file there. He grumbled to himself that this was becoming too common an occurrence.

Quickly dealing with the paperwork to request the correct file, he speed read the papers until he found what he needed to make the story complete, took some notes, returned the file to the clerk and raced to a pay telephone, jammed a quarter in the slot and dialed the city desk number.

At that point his family’s life went to hell. Nick, his editor and sometime flyfishing companion interrupted Dee’s rapid accounting of the no longer missing information. “Forget that. There is a problem with C.J. You need to go to your son’s home. Do you want me to send someone with you?”

Nick said nothing more, giving no details of “the problem.” Dee, sensing the worst, replied that he would pick up his wife and daughter on the way. He phoned Jackie and repeated Nick’s words. She shrieked, “Oh no.” She said she would call Jana. He tore from the courthouse filled with dark dread.

Wheeling his big van through traffic toward the university campus, Dee’s head filled with images of the blond three-year-old grandson who at times scowled just like Dee’s dad. C.J., short for Cameron James, was the focus of the lives of every member of the Norton family. And their only grandchild. The big, strong and bubbly guy spent about half his time with his grandparents and aunt to avoid day care bugs.

With Jackie in the van, silence overwhelmed them. There were no words to express their dread. It was the same when Jana and her electric wheeled chair joined them for the trip to the suburb of Lynnwood and the Amberwood Apartment complex where Dee’s son Cam, his wife Carol and C.J. lived. Words were unneeded. Fear overpowered them.

Their worst fears were confirmed when they carefully rolled into the parking lot. After parking, they saw C.J.’s prized possession, a tiny new bicycle with training wheels, bent and twisted under the back of a scruffy white delivery truck.

Their faces were awash with tears as Jackie and Jana found Carol and Dee found Cam. Blubbering through his sobs, the muscular Cam said he had returned from running an errand, watched and waved to C.J. and his buddy Andrew and turned when C.J. said, “Daddy, I love you.” Cam was off work recovering from a construction job injury.

C.J. told his dad he and Andrew were “racing” their bikes side by side amid the other kids using the parking area as their playground.

Cam said he walked through their unit’s sliding glass patio door, poured a cup of coffee and whirled to the sound of a metallic scraping sound in the parking lot. It happened that quickly.

“My baby was dead under that damned truck,” Cam bellowed. He said he had raced to scoop up C.J. But it was too late. Father and grandfather glared at the truck that had not only backed over C.J. but then, according to authorities, drove forward over him a second time and narrowly missed Andrew.

Dee moved toward the truck where medics were huddled at its rear open door. He was quickly intercepted by a Washington State Patrol captain and led to a far corner of the parking lot, obviously concerned about an angry confrontation.

Reality crept into his mind as the captain explained, “The truck driver is in the back of his truck and in very bad shape. He has five kids of his own. He is going to the hospital.”

Still glaring at the truck, from Baby Diaper Service, Dee asked the captain, “where are the mirrors,” meaning the large round convex mirrors mounted on the top left rear corner of Federal Express trucks. Naïve, Dee thought they were required on all delivery trucks.

“They are not required,” the captain said. Dee, still glaring at the truck, vowed aloud, “They will be, dammit, if I have anything to say about it.” The captain said Baby Diaper Service and the driver would be issued citations because both side mirrors were unusable because of yellowing caused by multiple old cracks.

To himself, Dee noted that would be too late for C.J. He was forever gone from the Norton’s lives.

No more jumping from the kitchen counter shouting “Cawabunga.” No more saying, “Don’t see me” whenever a fascinated grandfather or grandmother whipped out a camera to snap a photo. No more sitting on the footboard of his aunts wheeled chair. No more showing his fascination with potato bugs when he helped his grandmother in the garden.

Gone was Jana’s anticipation of teaching her nephew beginning arithmetic and grammar. Gone was Jackie’s cookie-making helper and gardening assistant. Gone were Dee’s hopes of getting his grandson started fishing and then into flyfishing and to understand the importance of releasing his catch. Gone were all of the family’s hopes for helping its youngest member get off to a proper start so well begun by Cam and Carol. Gone was the face that grinned at Carol as he brushed his teeth.

The captain’s words—“They are not required”— burned in Dee’s mind. He didn’t sleep at all that night. Before dawn he gave up trying and went to his computer. He wrote C.J. a letter, explaining the family’s love for him, its hopes for his future and a pledge, a vow, to find meaning for his death.

The fury born that day and night became all-consuming about 10 days later. Cam and Carol had moved to another apartment complex. One morning Cam walked to his car and saw a Baby Diaper Service truck backing up its parking lot. Cam waved it to a stop and told the driver, “You don’t have to backup. There is a traffic turn around down there and there are two other entrances.”

The truck driver’s shocking response was “What’s it to you.”

Cam amazingly withheld his temper and bluntly told the driver in basic words why.

The driver said, “Oh, OK.” But the same driver backed the same truck in the same way the very next morning. It was obvious to Cam, Carol and the family that that driver and the company didn’t care at all that one of its trucks had killed.

Dee, Jackie and Jana had long discussions about how to deal with blindly back delivery trucks. When Dee returned to work at The Times more than a week later he found a personal note from its publisher, Frank Blethen. It said he would do anything he could to help the family.

Dee took that literally. After dealing with the early morning work as usual, he enlisted the help of Sandy, a top flight researcher in The Times library. As her work load allowed she promised to dig out every story and research report available on backing delivery truck crashes.

Then he began running up a long distance telephone bill, first calling United Parcel Service headquarters in Atlanta. After three calls with no response, he sent a letter and then a second letter. He hoped that because UPS was founded in Seattle, it would be willing to be helpful and supply information on its backing safety equipment and training.

Two weeks passed without any response at all from UPS. To hell with them, he said, and dialed for Federal Express in Memphis and was quickly connected to Don Tullos, its safety boss.

Tullos discussed at length how Federal Express came to install rear crossview mirrors on the back of its delivery trucks in the early-1980’s when they had a substantial problem with backing crashes. While attending a trade show saw a mirror that he thought might be adapted to solve the problem.

Working with Don Kolenda of K-10 Enterprises, the mirror—which became the rear crossview mirror—was adapted to the needs of Federal Express, Tullos said. He then had to overcome some opposition from within the corporation. Eventually he convinced its president to test the new devices on all delivery trucks in four hub cities for one year.

The result was astounding: a 37 % reduction in backing crashes. Tullos declined to give details, saying they were proprietary information that would help the competition.

At that point, the Norton family knew where it wanted to go: to the legislature with a proposed bill to require rear crossview mirrors on delivery trucks.

Even though Dee had covered some legislative matters and Jackie and Jana had lobbied for increased educational funding of disabled children, the family’s early effort was not very polished. And the opposition was tough. First, a lawyer/analyst for the Legislative Transportation Committee said the law we wanted was impossible. She said the commerce clause of the U.S. constitution prevented the state from adopting such a law and cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling as proof.