Week 15-Utica OD " I don't think we'll ever recover...."

'I don't think we'll ever fully recover'
Saturday, Apr 22, 2006Cassaundra Baber Observer-Dispatch
WEST WINFIELD — One question resounded among grieving residents one day after the community lost three high school seniors to a car accident.
"I don't know why it had to happen here," said 14-year-old Grace Riker after attending a grief counseling session at Mount Markham High School.
As she shared a pepperoni pizza with her father, Ken, Grace talked about her field hockey teammate Jessica Dupres. Grace remembered how Dupres' support got her through an especially difficult sectional game.
"I remember her tapping my shoulder and saying, 'Chin up, chin up, we're going to win this,'" Grace said. "Every game she was like that. I was only a freshman. She was like a role model to me. I still can't believe she's gone."
The death of Dupres, Benjamin Stickles and Lynda Light is not the first such tragedy the rural community has had to cope with recently. Justin R. Williams, 20, a 2004 Mount Markham graduate and sophomore Christopher C. Pollard, 15, died Feb. 11, 2005, when the car they were riding in collided with a tractor trailer on Route 8.
"Certainly, the death of children is a horrible experience to go through, and I don't think you ever fully recover from it," said school district Superintendent Casey Barduhn. "And to have it happen again ... I don't think we'll ever fully recover."
Beyond the grief, the question of recovery — how, how long and when — will continue to haunt the community.
"These kids have had it so rough," said Judy Riker, Grace's mother. "We're just trying to be there to support our kids."
How to support, how much support and what kind of support has parents and youth leaders searching for answers.
"I don't know that anybody has the answers, and that's the danger," said Mike Bailey, a youth leader at Federated Church, where Stickles and Light were members of the youth group and Dupres was a member.
But, as they've proven before, the kids of West Winfield are amazingly resilient, Bailey said.
"A lot of times, we tend to think of (our kids) as kids and not people," he said. "You have to give them a chance to express their grief as they want to."
There already are signs some residents have created grief-managing mechanisms, he said. An anonymous griever laid a makeshift memorial against the tree on Saxon Road where the teens' car crashed. A white wooden cross scripted with red writing — R.I.P B.S., L.L., J.D. 4 20 06 — lay against the maple tree, which was embedded with shards of glass and stripped of several inches of its bark.
A candle and seven bunches of daffodils had been nestled around the roots of the tree, just inches beyond where tire tracks from the teens' vehicle marked the ground.
For Mount Markham freshmen Annalea Bucenec, 14, and Cori Ashley, 15, the deaths have made getting in a car a very different experience.
"We don't drive, but we ride with people, and it definitely makes us aware of what can happen," Ashley said.
But for others, the tragedy has made life a little more meaningful.
"Hug your kids and mean it," Judy Riker said through tears.


"I don't think we'll ever fully recover"? I would certainly agree that the families of the accident victims may never totally recover, but before the flowers have barely wilted the majority of their acquaintances will have pretty much managed to assuage their current grief, and within a scant few weeks they'll have managed to forget the whole incident. You think that sounds harsh? The girl quoted here seems not be too consumed by grief since as she is being interviewed she is eating a pizza! The school superintendent, Mr. Barduhl, said " "And to have it happen again ... I don't think we'll ever fully recover." , well, the fact that there was a crash just over a year ago that killed two students and now this most recent crash killing three serves to illustrate my point, that most of the people have so far recovered in so short a time as to not have learned anything from the previous tragedy. Had they really "never recovered" they would have wanted to learn whatever lessons could be learned from the last tragedy, and apply them so as to try their best to never have another incident like the first crash.

And the trite remark by a parent that "these kids have had it so rough" is so fatuous as to almost defy a response. It as if people think these accidents happen like some sort of a cosmic lottery, why do these kids 'have it so rough'? They lost their schoolmates because the schoolmates had an accident apparently because they were driving at a high rate of speed and lost control of their vehicle. That is a heartbreaking thing to have happened, but the fact that this has happened for the second time in just over a year says that the lessons to be learned from this tragic incident are not only not being learned by the students, but the parents haven't learned anything either.