Shared Sorrow : Parents of Teen Who Died Suddenly Take Solace in Outpouring of Letters

Every day, Peggy Barrett-Lunde waits for her 14-year-old son to nudge his bike through the side gate after school. She imagines him trotting downstairs for breakfast. In the living room, a framed picture so precisely captures her son’s winning grin that she thinks he is close enough for her to hug.

It’s been a month since freshman Gray Lunde collapsed during water polo practice and died of a heart attack. His mother still has nightmares of panic and dreams of lifting him out of the pool at Newport Harbor High School.

On a day of thanks, you’d think the Lunde family would be hard-pressed to find any. But today, Gray’s parents and two older brothers will leave for a week’s vacation in Montana, their hearts full of thanksgiving.

Since Gray’s death, an outpouring of support has buoyed the family--and astounded them. Every day, they get letters from friends and strangers. So far, they have received more than 600 letters from across the country and $10,000 in contributions for a memorial scholarship in Gray’s name.

“It truly gives us hope that the world is still the wonderful place we all want it to be,” said Barrett-Lunde, 44.

Said Gray’s father, Robert Lunde, 46: “In this community, people run around so much. You get busy. And I think [Gray’s death] made people think. . . . For some reason, this just punched through the center of all the families.”

Gray was captain of the freshman water polo team, a junior lifeguard and just two badges shy of Eagle Scout. He was a strong, fast athlete, 5 foot 9, 140 pounds; he played soccer, baseball and basketball. The night before he died, he had played four quarters of water polo against Corona del Mar High School.

There was only one warning. Two weeks before he died, Gray suffered a seizure during practice. Doctors cleared him for play after a battery of tests. Otherwise, he had always been healthy, and he brushed aside his parents’ concern. He felt just fine.

On the morning of Oct. 19, Gray was downstairs eating breakfast. His mother was upstairs, listening to him chat about his team’s victory the night before. He yelled goodby. And then he rushed off to school before she could kiss him goodby.

Later that day, at water polo practice, Gray said he felt dizzy. He climbed out of the pool and collapsed. He died in a heartbeat, his father said, in a teammate’s arms.

Paramedics rushed him to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, where doctors tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead, two hours after his collapse.

The probable cause of death: a congenital heart defect (the coroner’s report is not complete yet).

Five days later, on a sparkling day, Gray’s family scattered his ashes in the ocean, a ring of giant sunflowers, lilies and other cut flowers floating in the waters where he had once bodysurfed.

The next day, more than 1,500 people packed St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach for a memorial service on what would have been Gray’s 15th birthday.

” . . . For his death to be so sudden, with nothing leading up to it, and no one to blame . . . it shocked people,” said Barry Martinez, Gray’s youth minister at St. Andrew’s.

And then the letters began coming. One mother wrote about how fresh her grief was for her 16-year-old son, a football player who had also died of a heart attack--44 years ago.

Another woman wrote: “Peggy, when I heard you say on TV [news], ‘Every moment you have with your child is a gift,’ I felt it was the most precious thought, and I repeat it to myself often. This changed me. I have hugged my kids more, and I’m more patient, and try to cherish each moment.”

Every letter helped. Even the one from the teen-age boy who wrote to say that he was sorry, that he had known Gray--but not as well as his sister, who had kissed him twice at a party during “Spin the Bottle.”

The Lundes laughed at that.

They haven’t had time to respond to all the letters. Instead, Barrett-Lunde wrote an open letter to the community, saying how much the support helps, even as she still holds Gray’s hand every day in her mind to try to work through the grief.

“I want to extend the same hand that holds Gray’s to our dear friends, neighbors, church family and community,” she wrote in a letter titled “Thanksgiving Mourning.”

“It is a reach of hope and thanksgiving.”