Go Home, Willie James

I like to tidy things up at the end of a year. It bothers me to have projects hanging over from one century to another like so many strands of linguine dangling from a pot.

I want lost glasses found, missing pets located, couples reunited and wandering sons wandering no more. For instance, I want Willie James Wilson to forgive himself and go home.

He’s in L.A. somewhere, bearing the kind of burden that no one ought to shoulder alone. He’s thinking how much he loved his mother and how he should’ve been able to save her. And when he couldn’t . . . well, it was just too much for Willie James.

His life began to unravel.

It began in 1985. He was a member of the Tallahassee, Fla., Fire Department and was dedicated to the job of saving lives.

No one was better able to do that. At 26, Willie James was a champion weightlifter and in incredibly good physical condition. All agreed that he was one of the best firefighters the city ever had.

His family life seemed equally solid. Married and with a young son, Willie was a caring husband and father. He was a good brother too, one of five in the Wilson family. There were also four sisters. He’d visit them all every day of the week, making sure they were OK.

As his sister Lois said the other day, thinking back, maybe one of Willie’s problems was that he just cared too much.

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The date was July 18. Willie was off duty and on the way to see his mother. As he arrived, he saw fire engines in front of her home. Inside, paramedics, recognizing him, signaled that she was dead, the victim of a heart attack.

They’d been giving her CPR but when Willie entered, he insisted on taking over. “He wouldn’t stop,” Lois said the other day in a telephone conversation. “Even on the ambulance he kept it up. There was something in him . . . .”

Adline Wilson was pronounced dead at the hospital. Lois remembers that Willie held himself together for the sake of the family, but she could see how much he was hurting inside.

“Willie changed at that moment,” she said. “He stopped coming by and we hardly saw him anymore. Then people began telling us he was on drugs.”

They all tried to convince him that what had happened wasn’t his fault. Willie said he felt as though he’d failed his family by not being able to revive their mama.

“He was always the strong one among us,” Lois says. “We looked up to him. He was so protective of his mother and sisters. He cared so much.”

Six months earlier, the fragile nature of his empathy became clear. Unable to save a woman in a burning car, Willie had to be held back from rushing in to the flames to bring her out. She died and he broke down and cried.

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It wasn’t long before Willie resigned from the Fire Department. Urged by the family, he entered a drug rehab program, but it didn’t work. He joined the Army as a kind of last resort toward well-being.

“Just after he enlisted he was supposed to come home on leave,” Lois says. “We waited at the airport with signs that said ‘Welcome Home’ and ‘We Love You,’ but he never showed up.”

He went AWOL for a while but then returned to camp and was shipped to Hawaii. After a year in the islands, he was discharged, flew to Los Angeles on a one-way ticket and hasn’t been heard from since.

“He told me once that he loved us and was sorry he’d embarrassed the family,” Lois remembers. “Then he said, ‘If it doesn’t work out in the Army, you won’t have any problem with me embarrassing the family anymore.’ ”

Then he vanished like a leaf in the wind.

A woman who wouldn’t identify herself telephoned a brother a few years ago and said Willie was OK and was going to drug rehab in L.A. She said he talked about his family a lot.

He’s been missing for about six years now. His wife waited and then divorced him three years ago. His son, now 16, still wants his dad. The family was hoping to contact Willie when his father died earlier this month. They were hoping he’d be at the funeral to say goodbye.

What this is all about, I guess, is what Lois says it is: the case of a good son who cared too much. It just wasn’t in Willie to forgive himself. But there are a lot of people in Tallahassee who are hoping he will.

They’re saying come home, Willie James. Come home at last.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.