Mother’s Pain Serves as Warning

As I drove to Lake Forest to meet Astrid Harvey, I tried to think of questions I needed to ask her. But all that came to me--as I put myself in her place--were the questions I didn’t dare ask for fear of appearing insensitive.

How do you make it through each day? How do you stay out of deep depression? How do you keep from just screaming about the senselessness of the tragedy that has bounced your life from wall to wall?

Harvey, 41, who now lives in Foothill Ranch, was a single parent who gave up a successful job as a hairdresser to spend more time at home with her 4-year-old son Christian. She worked just two days each week--Saturday and Sunday.

It was on a Saturday 14 months ago that she learned at work that her son--her only child--had been killed. He was struck by a train near their home in Lake Forest. Her baby sitter’s husband had taken the boy, and his own two children, for a walk. They were apparently taking a shortcut along a railroad bridge crossing when Christian, who was always fascinated by trains, got away from the baby sitter’s husband. He was also struck, apparently trying to get to Christian, and lost a leg as a result. The other two children were uninjured.

Remarkably, Astrid Harvey anticipated all the questions I didn’t know how to ask with any delicacy, and got me off the hook. The pain has been worse than one can likely imagine.

“It’s like I’m not really being of this world anymore,” she explained. “So you try to find some kind of meaning in the new world you’re in, to somehow try to make sense out of all this.”

After 14 months of painful struggle, Harvey is beginning to find direction.

On Monday, she will be center stage at a Metrolink news conference at Union Station in Los Angeles. She will help the commuter rail service promote three dramatic new TV rail safety public service spots. They are dramatic reenactments of what can go wrong when you don’t respect the danger that trains can represent.

Harvey is nervous about her Monday appearance before the media, but also very pleased to be asked to participate. She hopes to expand on that press conference with appearances in one of a couple of current rail safety programs at various Southern California schools.

“I’ve discovered that the best way for me to exist is to try to help others,” she said. “I’m actually starting to find days where I’ve even experienced some joy, which I didn’t think would ever happen.”

The first months after her son’s death, she says, “my circle of friends diminished. Some people didn’t know what to say to me. Others said the wrong thing; they didn’t mean to, but it would hurt anyway.”

Her “lifeline,” as she calls it, has been an Orange County group called Compassionate Friends. A local chapter of a national group, it’s made up solely of parents who have had children die.

“They’re just tremendous in how they give you strength,” Harvey says of those parents. “Now we have new people coming into the group, and I’m discovering that I can be the one to help others who have just lost a child.”

It’s also brutally painful for Harvey that no one has yet told her the details of how her son died. She says the man in charge of her son at that time, a longtime family friend, hasn’t talked to her since, has never explained to her what happened.

Harvey has gone back to the location of her son’s death and sat there waiting for a train to come by, just to see if she could learn something.

“What people don’t realize is you don’t hear a train,” she said, “not until it’s too late. If you’re talking and not paying attention, or the wind is blowing, a train is upon you before you know it.”

Which is why she considers the Metrolink public service spots so important. If people pay attention to the message, she says, they may very well save lives.

Pioneer Spirit: One sad footnote to the eventual closing of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station: Some of the finest community events I’ve attended over the years have been held at its Officers Club.

This week I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the members of the Orange County Pioneer Council, which held its annual dinner there. The guest of honor was its oldest member, Ethel Coffman of Santa Ana, who is 101. Her father, William Coffman, brought his family to California from Elkhart, Ind. in 1905 and settled in Orange County in 1908.

The Pioneer Council is quite an exclusive club. To join, someone in your family had to come to Orange County no later than 1914. Right now, it has 440 members.

A major project of the council’s is to produce oral histories to benefit the rest of us who want to learn more about this county’s early days. It has produced 58 so far, with help from the Cal State Fullerton oral history program, and has a half dozen more planned for this year.

Moon Talking: Since his days as a White House speech writer for Richard Nixon, James C. Humes has spent much of his time writing books and spinning humorous political stories on the lecture circuit.

He’s speaking at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda at 1:30 p.m. today, a talk he calls “Please Don’t Go to Gettysburg, Abe,” about Lincoln’s famous address. He’ll also sign copies of his latest book, “Confessions of a White House Ghostwriter.”

His affection for Nixon is obvious throughout that book. In reading it, I also discovered that it was Humes--as part of his White House duties--who wrote those historic words you can find on a plaque on the surface of the moon, if you ever happen to get there:

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon in July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Wrap-Up: Last year, 96 people were killed in collisions with trains in California, the largest number in the country. The TV spots, which are part of Metrolink’s weeklong safety promotion, are called “California Highways or Dieways.”

One reenactment depicts children playing on the tracks with a train coming; one of the youngsters gets his foot caught in the tracks. Another shows a female driver ignoring the warning signal that a train is approaching, and her car dies on the tracks. In her panic, she can’t get her child’s door unlocked to let the girl out. In the third, a group of fun-loving young people in a convertible try to beat a train to the next crossing. In all three, people die.

Metrolink spokeswoman Cheryl Downey says that all three public service messages are based on real life events.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by call-ing The Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail tojerry.hicks@latimes.com