Life in a Garden of Memories
She remembers the good times, when her daughter was 5 and the twins 3, and the trip they took to Mexico. She remembers camping vacations, chasing the kids on the beach, and hearing their laughter like wind chimes on a summer breeze.
And she remembers the night of the fire, coming home to see red lights flashing in the darkness, the smell of burnt wood in the air, the terrible realization that something was wrong . . . and then hearing the words, as though from a dream-place, “The children are dead.”
Patricia Allwright accepts both memories in an even manner, one a part of the other, both sums of the total.
“I’m grateful in a way for the pain,” she says, sitting on a bench near the final resting place of her children on the grounds of St. Matthew’s Church. “To the degree I can feel pain, I can also feel joy. We can’t compartmentalize life, can we?”
The morning is gray with mist in the Marquez Knolls section of Pacific Palisades. It shines on the blossoms of the azaleas, drips from the leaves of an oak tree and enhances the brilliant green of ferns among the flowers.
This is a peaceful place, and Allwright, a dark-eyed 33, seems to have absorbed that tranquility much as a flower, properly placed, assumes the nature of its garden.
Not that it’s been easy. She and her husband have traveled to far places packing a dichotomy of memories with them, not running from grief but searching, in a way, for what they have ultimately come to accept.
The children are gone, but the sweetness of their lives remains.
Patricia and Steve Allwright were away for the evening of March 20, 1989, taking separate classes. She was at UCLA and he was studying to renew his real estate broker’s license. Their daughter, Candice, 7, and 5-year-old sons, Adam and Jason, were in the care of a housekeeper.
The nightmare arose out of innocent concern. The kids didn’t like sleeping in the dark, so the housekeeper placed a cloth over a lamp to soften the shadows of night. The cloth ignited, flames swept through the house, and the children perished where they slept.
“The year the boys died they’d have gone into kindergarten,” Allwright says as we sit in the morning mist. The comment is conversational, not high drama. Euphemisms are not allowed here. “I remember it all,” she explains, “because they were too precious to me to forget anything.”
The house was just a few blocks away from where the children’s remains are now interred. Its charred framework has since been removed, and the Allwrights are building a new house on the same site. Being close to the memory is part of the healing process too.
Her husband had arrived at the fire scene 15 minutes earlier. They embraced in tears and then walked into the still-smoking ruins of what had been their home and said goodby to their kids.
“That was important to me,” she says. “We saw their bodies but we weren’t talking to them. We were talking to the whole room. It’s like you see something but there’s a difference in the way you perceive it. There was a tremendous energy around us as we told the children we loved them and were so grateful to have had them in our lives.”
I ask, “Did they hear?”
She smiles slightly and says, “Yes.”
Children are the sweetness in a societal mix too often sour. They complete our lives the way stars complete the night and thrust our existence forward beyond the grave. Children are proof that we’ve been here.
To recognize that by whatever perception is to be filled with them. To have them taken so abruptly, and so cruelly, is to leave an emptiness that is cosmic.
I’m not sure from what deep source the Allwrights found strength to cope. They went on a five-month trip through Africa and Asia, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and talked and worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.
But, Patricia insists, they weren’t running from grief. What then was the trip all about?
“It was kind of a pilgrimage,” she says, not quite explaining the term. “The children were with us wherever we went. Wherever we saw beauty, we saw them.”
The morning fog lifts. We stand by the brass plates that mark interment. Friends of the children place flowers there and write notes. They tell Candice, Adam and Jason they’ll never forget them.
I wonder aloud why Allwright, two years after the fact, wanted to share the memory of a tragedy she has managed to face with such equanimity.
“This isn’t about me,” she says. “It’s about others who have lost someone. It’s about telling them it’s OK to talk about it. It’s OK to remember the good times, and it’s OK to face sadness.”
A Latin proverb says sorrow comes unsent for and pays no debt. But its redemption in this quiet garden of memories is in the offering a woman makes to us all, and it’s one I will remember for a long, long time.
