Marking the 1st Birthday of an Angel

When they think of last February, they remember the chill. And the rain. And how small and empty the house suddenly felt.

They braced for the emotional hurt. What they didn’t foresee was how much physical pain they would feel. An ever-present heaviness.

That’s how it feels when your child is killed.

And that’s how it was for Deborah and Fred Borad, a Westminster couple in their 40s who took the phone call at 3:39 a.m. last Feb. 14 and learned their 19-year-old daughter, Amanda, had been killed in San Diego by a hit-and-run driver. The unthinkable had arrived at the Borad home with a cruel finality.

Deborah believed early on she couldn’t survive this. Not the loss of her only daughter, a radiating bundle of talent and charm who had just begun focusing on college. Or, at those fleeting times when Deborah thought she might survive it, so what? Who wanted to live with that much pain?

Fred, though devastated, was more accepting, plying a religious faith that at that point was stronger than Deborah’s. Numb and grief-stricken, he instinctively knew he would muddle through but couldn’t imagine how he could ever look again to the future with hope.

Now, another February has come around, and the Borads are sitting on their sofa and talking about Amanda and the year they’ve come through. The hurt is still there, but they have a message they want to convey to anyone who might face the same nightmare:

You think you can’t survive it, but you can.

“I had days when I didn’t think I could get up,” Deborah says. “It was like something was on my chest. I can’t really describe it, it was so excruciating. You always hear that God won’t give you something you can’t bear, and this was always something I had determined I couldn’t bear.”

The two would take turns comforting each other, but sometimes, neither could help the other. And from time to time, they’d fall into the vicious trap that awaits families at times like that:

“Debby would say, ‘Why aren’t you crying?’ ” Fred says. Deborah says: “I was having a hard time because they [Fred and 21-year-old son Matt] don’t grieve the way I grieve. They weren’t emoting. And then they’d be equally irritated with me.”

There were the inevitable questions.

Why was Amanda the only one of the four people in the two cars to die? Why couldn’t she have been spared? Why would God take someone who had set her sights on a career in biochemistry and medical research?

Fred’s faith, forged over a lifetime, got him through those tortured questions. He and others helped Deborah get through it too. She was angry at God and, at times, wondered if she even believed in anything. One day her sister asked her: “How can you be mad at something you don’t believe in?”

She begged God for strength, and she felt it come. She prayed for peace, and she felt it.

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” she says. “There’s no magic pill, nothing anybody can say to you to make it all go away. You get very humbled.”

She and Fred learned things about the other they hadn’t known before, such as why they handled things differently. Deborah felt a renewed sense of wanting to help people and to live her life not as much through her daughter, but more for herself. She learned to quit feeling guilty at those times when she laughed.

As we sat in their living room for two hours earlier this week, the Borads talked openly and without tears about Amanda. I’d seen videos of her, and “vivacious” doesn’t begin to describe her. Tall, athletic and blessed with an effortless smile, she epitomized youthful vitality.

“When she was on stage, she glowed,” Fred says. “She absolutely loved to perform, loved to dance.” She danced at Disneyland and loved to go into the crowd and pick youngsters to come on stage and dance with her.

Hers was a death that, even to me as an outsider, rips the heart. I wrote a column about her a year ago, after her uncle sent a touching tribute. I recalled talking to Deborah last year and hearing a voice that itself was almost lifeless.

Which is why it was heartening to see the Borads this week. “I appreciate people more now,” Fred says. “I don’t take them for granted. Make sure to tell people you love them, because you may never have the chance again.”

Their sadness lingers, but they are committed to looking ahead. “I see an overwhelming sadness for a while,” Fred says. “My picture was that I was entering my last 10 to 15 years of work, then retire, go out and have a great time and spoil my grandkids rotten. That picture has changed considerably.”

They’re proud that Amanda was an organ donor. The UC San Diego Tissue Bank notified them that Amanda’s corneas helped two blind people see and that her skin and other body parts helped immeasurably, in one case saving the life of a 4-year-old burn victim. Two scholarships in her name have been established, one locally and another at UC San Diego where she was a freshman.

All things from which the Borads took solace. But there was something else that needed to be done.

Last Sunday, the Borads and about 30 friends and relatives gathered at Amanda’s grave site in a Westminster cemetery. It was the anniversary of her death, a day that dawned with Fred not sure he could get through it.

At the service, people shed tears, but the mood was celebratory, not sad. Deborah mingled and greeted everyone with a smile, while Fred hung back, unsure of his emotions.

Deborah spoke bracingly of her daughter, without tears. People read poems, a friend sang a song. Another friend said she considered the day not the first anniversary of Amanda’s death but her first birthday as an angel.

The Borads asked God for strength. They asked Amanda for permission to say goodbye. They asked not to shed their memories but their sorrow.

And then, as the 45-minute service wound down, the Borads stood off to the side of the group, entwined two balloons and let them go. They took flight in the early afternoon sun and floated away. Fred would say two nights later he felt a weight taken off him that afternoon.

It was an afternoon without chill. Without rain. An afternoon that, after a long tortured year, spoke of hope.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com