Renter Who Moved Before Quake Haunted by Survival

It was a New Year’s resolution that saved Terry Gosier. Nothing grand, like a midlife career change or a move to Montana, but something simple: saving money.

On Jan. 1, just 16 days before the 6.6 earthquake, the nurse and graduate student moved out of her home in the Northridge Meadows apartments and into cheaper student housing on the other side of the Cal State Northridge campus.

At 4:31 a.m. last Monday, Terry Gosier’s former home, Apt. 238, was destroyed. Where her bed once stood there is now a gaping hole. Ceilings are waist high. The second-floor apartment is now on the first floor.

The mile move has saved $265 a month on rent and utilities--and perhaps her life. “I feel like the luckiest woman on the planet, the most blessed person in the universe,” she said.

Terry Gosier, 36, is the Northridge earthquake’s equivalent to the traveler who got off the plane before the crash, the investor who pulled out of the stock market before the 508-point plunge--in society’s eyes part psychic, part cheat.

At a time when Southern Californians are surrounded by destruction, stunned by death, Gosier’s story still has the power to chill: Sixteen neighbors died in a building she had just left. And it is just this view that gives her the greatest pain, brings tears to her eyes: Terry as Talisman, Good-Luck Gosier, The Woman Who Cheated Death.

“I feel sort of guilty for surviving,” she said quietly as she sat in her campus apartment, surrounded by broken glass. “I feel like I’m really dead, in heaven--I believe in heaven and hell--and I have some sort of special gift to come back to Earth after the quake, see what it’s like and then be snatched back. I don’t feel like I’m really here. I feel so guilty.”

There is plenty of precedent to Gosier’s tale: the lack of seat space that took guitarist Tommy Allsup and future country music star Waylon Jennings off a small chartered plane that crashed in Iowa, killing rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. (The Big Bopper) Richardson in 1959; the illness that caused In-N-Out Burger co-founder Esther Snyder to disembark last month from a chartered plane that later crashed at a Santa Ana auto mall, killing her son and several others.

And there is a name for what Gosier is living through now, as the battered San Fernando Valley digs out from the massive earthquake: survivor’s guilt, that most bittersweet of ailments. To suffer from it is to be alive and have a heart. Not to suffer from it is a very scary thought indeed.

“The important part of it is the humbling part of it, to realize how fragile life is,” said psychologist Lilli Friedland, a member of the Los Angeles County Psychological Assn.’s disaster response team. “Just like in life, a little bit of guilt is good. It reminds us of how thankful we need to be.”

Gosier needs little reminder.

Sleeping in her cinder-block campus apartment Monday morning, Gosier was awakened by a flying mirror that hit her on the back of the head. Stepping out of bed in the dark, pitching room, she put her foot through a small television set, gashing her shin.

She and her neighbors were herded across Zelzah Avenue to spend a chilly hour on a CSUN soccer field. When dawn broke and she heard of the damage at the Northridge Meadows, where Apt. 238 remained vacant, she raced across campus. The force of the quake had shoved the top floors downward, reducing the first floor to a heap of rubble a foot high.

“It was down,” she said. “And I couldn’t believe it. I almost fainted. Some of the ambulances were taking bodies away. They were still pulling people out. We were still having tremors. You could see the building settle. It was terrible, terrible.

“There were a lot of elderly people in the building. I’m a nurse. If I still lived there I could have helped them.” And her voice trails off.

Her Rollerblades and the abundant, twisting walkways at Northridge Meadows apartments allowed her to meet most of her neighbors, know them at least by sight, many of them much better than that.

And now, as she fingered a list of the people who died in the quake, she murmured their names and remembered: Manuel D. Sandoval, 24. Cecilia Pressman, 72. Myrna Velasquez, 18, “the most beautiful girl. She’s one of those Chanel girls, every hair in place, pearls and pearl earrings even when she wore sweats and did laundry.”

Her finger goes down the list and stops at Adam Slotnik, 27, recently transferred from the East Coast to manage a restaurant in Northridge. They’d bowl together on occasion, he was going to buy her sofa when she moved out, his life was falling perfectly into place.

“He bragged that he was going to retire before age 30,” she recalled. “He had all these stocks and bonds. He’d say, ‘I won’t have to worry about anything when I’m 30.’ He sure won’t.”

They are gone. She is not. And everywhere she goes, everyone who knows her tale looks at her just a little differently these days. They ask her questions as if she foresaw what happened. She insists, over and over, that she did not. She just wanted to save some money, pay her tuition at CSUN, get the prerequisite courses done and head for a Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley.

She does, however, trust her judgment more these days. She has learned to be prepared, keeping a packed bag near her apartment door, showering with her keys in her teeth. The other changes are more of a mixed bag.

Nearly a week after the quake she was still sleeping in her Jeep, couldn’t stand the thought of being in a building for more than an hour. By Friday, her flu had blossomed into pneumonia.

She is plagued by a nagging feeling of doom, that her luck has run out, that the next time “it’ll be me,” that she’s “used up all my tickets on luck.” But even that pain comes and goes, threaded through, as it is, with sweet relief and a feeling that something good must come of all this.

“I’ve lost so much in my life: my parents, my brother, two marriages that failed. It’s just hard,” she said. “Before the quake that’s why I stayed by myself. I didn’t think anyone had lost as much as I did. . . . But now everybody talks to everybody. I’m going to be a much nicer person.”