Gratitude Triumphs Over Grief

Linda Durden can’t make candied yams. She’s never tried, really, never needed to. Year in, year out, with a dash of vanilla or a smidgen of nutmeg, her mom would make them--and most of the rest of the Thanksgiving spread too. Today her mother isn’t around to cook. Yams were her father’s favorite, but he’s not around to eat them. Silly things like that, it seems, bring loss to life: Durden’s parents were killed last month in the EgyptAir crash.

She is not alone. Across Orange County today, families will sit down to Thanksgiving dinner missing familiar faces. The plane crash stole Durden’s parents and Max Bowman’s wife. Rachel Newhouse was found murdered in a remote canyon. Scotty Lang, all 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds of him, couldn’t have seemed more healthy, until he collapsed and died on a football field 10 days ago.

Today their families have awkward choices to make: whether to leave the empty chairs at the table or hide them in the garage, whether to confront loss with a toast or avoid the issue altogether.

Their stories, however, are not about sorrow. They’re about resilience, and they may have something to teach those of us who need a day off and a drumstick before we remember what we’re thankful for.

The four families see a turning point in grief, a point when they will no longer feel cheated by the time they didn’t have but thankful for the time they did. They haven’t trivialized what’s happened to them in the past year; but they are managing, through tears, through anger, through prayers, to turn their loss from a dismal requiem to a celebration of life.

“It just kind of happened naturally,” said Durden, of Laguna Niguel.

Durden picked up her 21-year-old son, Justin Bannister, at Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday and returned to Dana Point to celebrate Thanksgiving where her family always had, at the home her parents retired to 12 years ago.

“The kind of life my parents led is something to be celebrated,” she said. “You can’t talk about it without smiling. There is no loss. Our parents gave us too much.”

Not Dwelling on It

It’s hard to say whether it’s worse to fear your daughter is dead or to know she is dead. On Nov. 12, 1998, Rachel Newhouse, a 20-year-old Orange County native and Irvine High School graduate studying nutrition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, vanished after a fraternity party at a Mexican restaurant.

As the FBI and police posted notices across six counties, launched an Internet campaign and offered a $10,000 reward for information about Newhouse’s disappearance, her family ate Thanksgiving dinner last year under a cloud of uncertainty.

This will be the first Thanksgiving they know the truth. In April, police discovered the remains of Newhouse and a second victim on the property of a convicted sex offender.

“If we made it through last year, we can make it through this year,” said Stephanie Morreale, Newhouse’s aunt, who is having the family over for Thanksgiving dinner at her home outside Riverside.

“We’re not a family that’s going to dwell on this and make it worse than it needs to be,” she said. “Rachel is not going to be forgotten. A lot of tears go out every time we think of her, even now. But you can’t let that take over your life, because then you’re defeating the purpose of life itself. You have to put it in the proper chapter in the book and put the book in the proper place on the shelf. And you have to know when to pull the book out and look at it.”

Already, Morreale said, her brother--Newhouse’s father--feels fortunate for the time he had with his daughter.

“He looks at it like this: ‘At least I knew her for 20 years,’ ” Morreale said. “Some people never got to meet her. He was her best friend.”

The family recently added a final posting to the Internet site devoted to Newhouse’s disappearance, thanking the strangers who donated money to the reward fund, distributed posters about her case and sent letters about her “around the world and back.”

“There are dark spots in each of our lives, but the world is filled with good people,” the Internet site says today. “We must all remember that and not dwell on the sadness. Rachel is not sad now.”

Relying on Memories

Steve Lang looked as surprised as everyone else.

“I’m having a good time,” he said with a grin.

He was at his son’s funeral.

It was last Saturday, less than a week after Scotty Lang, just 16, collapsed while running wind sprints with his Fountain Valley High School football team. According to his family, Scotty had no history of medical problems.

Unable to sleep the morning of the funeral, Steve Lang went surfing. At 8:30 a.m. he was rushing back home to change and happened to drive by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Huntington Beach, where the memorial service would be held two hours later. The parking lot was already half full. By 10 a.m. almost 2,000 people--including most members of the football team, clad in their blue-and-gold jerseys--were inside.

Speaker after speaker, including the boy’s parents, told story after story about Scotty’s impish grin, about his practical jokes, about the times, as a toddler, he would tell his mother: “Don’t worry, Mommy. I will ‘be-tect’ you.”

The Langs have relied heavily on their Mormon faith--and memories of the warm relationship they shared with the boy--to overcome their only son’s death.

“I had a friend. His dad died, and I’ve never seen anybody more distraught or upset,” Steve Lang said recently. “I thought about it for years afterward. The reason was that they didn’t like each other. He had so much regret; it ate him like a cancer. I told my son daily that I loved him. I don’t have any regrets, and I think that helps.”

On Monday night, the Langs took a family vote and decided to have Thanksgiving dinner at their vacation home on the California side of the Colorado River. It was a tough decision, and it will be a tough day: Scotty loved the house on the river and used to gaze at the stars, unsullied by city lights, through his telescope.

Some traditions will change. If nothing else, the family may need a smaller turkey.

“He was the king of food,” Steve Lang said. “It was incredible.”

But other traditions will endure.

“Every year on Thanksgiving, everybody sits around after dinner, and we talk about what we’re grateful for,” he said. “I’m sure we won’t break the tradition this year. Because we have so much to be thankful for.”

A Comforting Image

Rick and Dotti Foth’s three children have an image of their parents’ final moments, hands clasped, together, just like they would have wanted it after 45 years of marriage, on EgyptAir Flight 990 before it plummeted into the Atlantic.

The kids like the image because it means their parents were comforted--and the kids are comforted by it too.

The Foths seemed to challenge their three children and four grandchildren to keep up. Even as they neared 70, the couple led excursions in their motor home. They had planned a ski trip for February with their friends of 40 years, Barbara and Art Peever, who also died in the crash. The foursome was headed to Egypt for another adventure--Rick was looking forward to exploring the architecture behind the pyramids--when they died.

“The loss will never change,” said Linda Durden, one of the Foths’ children. “But the fact that they went together, that they went enjoying life, and that they went without regrets, that’s what’s comforting. We have a sense of peace in their passing.”

On Wednesday, Durden reunited with her son, Justin. The young man had been on a Mormon mission in Billings, Mont., and other than at her parents’ funeral, she hadn’t seen him in two years.

He’ll finally get to meet his baby cousin--the youngest son of Durden’s brother.

“It’s a special time,” Durden said. “We will miss our parents dearly, but it’s wonderful to have [Justin] back in our midst and to celebrate his homecoming. Life kind of goes on. The generations continue.”

The Bowman brood, replete with seven grandchildren, is getting a little big for Thanksgiving. Most years, the family splits into factions for the big dinner, heading to at least two different houses.

Not this year--not three and a half weeks after Judith Bowman died in the EgyptAir plane crash. This year, the family will be packed together, packed into son Steven’s Huntington Beach home.

Judith Bowman’s husband of 40 years, Max, is bringing a honey-baked ham--”in case no one knows how to cook a turkey,” he said. The family has few Thanksgiving traditions, said Max, except “hanging out and eating too much and then rolling on the floor and falling asleep.”

The couple lived in the same Huntington Beach home for three decades. Max Bowman, a former city lifeguard, eventually led the couple to travel the world. Judith Bowman and three friends were embarking on an ambitious three-week tour of Egypt and Israel, including tours of the Nile and the Great Pyramids.

The holidays will be trying times.

“I still go to bed at night, and I say ‘God, this can’t be happening.’ But it is,” said Max Bowman, who met his wife in the mid-1950s, when she was a student--and a beauty pageant finalist--at Huntington Beach High School. “I get in bed, and I just pray to the Lord to let me sleep and then wake me up in the morning and we’ll start all over again. My children are worried about me.”

Still, Bowman cherishes the time he had with his wife.

“Life has been good to me, and it was good to Judith,” he said. “This has changed my life and my children’s as well. But the message is that time is so precious. You should not waste it. Don’t go to bed with sorrow or madness. Tell your spouses that you love them. Love and cherish your friends. Because that’s all you have on this earth. And don’t think about tomorrow.”