Woman, 94, Rejoins Loved One She Lost Decades Ago

Her new Buick purring and her hair freshly done, Carrie Miller set out for an afternoon drive on a rainy day. She honked the horn and waved at a friend as she left her neighborhood and headed east out of town.

It had been some time since the 94-year-old grandmother had come this way, so she stopped to ask a highway worker how to get to St. Francis Bay. The spot she was looking for didn’t look the same anymore. Over the years, the waterway had been widened, and the old wooden bridge of her nightmares was gone now, replaced by a concrete span a bit to the north.

The worker pointed to a gravel road that forked off in front of a bridge: Take it, turn immediately left and you will see the boat ramp.

Miller turned onto the rocky road, drove down a cement ramp and plunged straight into the murky water. She shifted the car into park and switched off the ignition with the windshield wipers in mid-stroke.

The water was 11 feet high that day, but the new car had a good seal and the windows were shut tight. As the numbing 40-degree water slowly seeped into the car, Miller waited quietly, seat belt buckled, driver’s license and wallet in her lap--a convenience for authorities who would identify her body.

This was the ending Miller chose for a long life filled with family, friends and meaningful work. It was also the ending she wrote to her own remarkable love story.

*

Carrie Robinson was 28 when she married Raymond Miller on May 28, 1934, in a ceremony in the English garden of her sister’s Wynne home. By the standards of the day and place, she had waited a long time for the right man to come along.

Although she had lived in the flatlands of eastern Arkansas her whole life, she followed her new groom to hilly Norris, Tenn., where he was an engineer for the new Tennessee Valley Authority, designing dams to provide electricity in a depressed economy.

There was no question that Raymond Miller had the mind of an engineer. The birth of their first and only son in 1938 was announced this way: “The Miller Construction Company of Norris, Tennessee, announces the completion of another TVA project. Robert Lee Miller. . . . Design, Ray Miller. Construction, Carrie Miller.”

Carrie Miller kept several copies of the birth announcement among her most precious possessions--a black leather Bible she and her husband received on their fourth anniversary, and a black-and-white photo of a dapper, dark-haired gentleman in a three-piece suit sitting on a steel park bench.

Raymond Miller posed for that photo not long after his son’s birth. There was a log cabin and a dark sedan in the background when he crossed one leg over another and looked at the camera. It was November 1938. It says so on the back of the photograph, right next to another date:

“Died, December 26, 1938.”

Raymond Miller’s life had ended, but his widow had a lot of living left to do. She moved back to Wynne to be close to her siblings. They all lived on the same street; and her sister and brother, both married without children, helped rear Robert Lee Miller.

The Robinson siblings were the core of the neighborhood, and their friendly, relaxed attitude caught on with everyone.

“It was such a graceful neighborhood. There were lots of little casual suppers, everyone was constantly dropping in,” said Lolly Shaver, who lived behind Carrie Miller. “And she was always very generous with us, with her time and love.”

Miller was also very respected at work. Within two years of beginning in a clerical position in 1945, she had been elected secretary-treasurer of Wynne Federal Savings & Loan, taking care of all the money matters and managing the office.

So talented and trusted was she that she was appointed to a committee for the National Savings & Loan League in 1951 and, the following year, became the first woman elected to the board of directors of the Arkansas State Savings & Loan League.

By the time Pat Baker joined the bank in 1961, Miller looked the part of a professional woman, with pearls and a fur cape draping her 6-foot frame and glasses that gave her an intellectual air. More than 20 years had passed since the death of her husband, a man she had lived with for just 4 1/2 years, but she was still wearing a wedding ring.

“Being young and stupid, I had blurted out one day and just asked her what happened,” Baker said. “She didn’t say a lot . . . just that she would never remarry again, just that she was in love with him, that he was the only love she ever wanted.”

Kathryn Aitken, who was married to Miller’s son, Robert, for 12 years, said the woman “didn’t reminisce a lot about Raymond, but when she did, you could sense that great loss in her.”

Sometimes, Aitken said, Miller would talk about “making do in Tennessee--the dirt roads, when Raymond got his first car. She would reminisce about how happy they always were. They didn’t have much, but they were just happy, happy, happy.”

Aitken wanted to know more but didn’t want to pry. It was her husband who told her his mother would date occasionally but always said she could never remarry.

In a life as long as Miller’s, there are bound to be other losses, and she had her share. Her mother, Lela Robinson, died nine years after her husband. Her father, Vincent Lee Robinson, died of a heart attack shortly before her son graduated from high school.

Sometime after her father’s death, Miller began renting a two-bedroom apartment on the north end of her home to a friend, Tippie Wilkins. They would gather with a few neighbor women to go fishing, play canasta or have an afternoon “tea.” Miller liked wine; others preferred vodka or beer.

But one by one, most of those neighbors moved away. Miller’s younger sister, Leta Barwick, already a widow, died of cancer in August 1991. Jewell Robinson, the wife of her older brother, Elmer, died of cancer two months later.

As Miller grew older, her son, Robert, moved back to Wynne to be near her, and for a time, life was joyful again. But on Oct. 29, 1997, Miller and a neighbor found him lifeless on the family sofa. Wynne Police Chief Mike Bachand, also the county’s assistant coroner, pronounced Robert dead of a heart attack. He was 59 years old.

“She kind of wasn’t the same since,” Bachand said. “It just got to her; it just really got to her.”

Then Miller’s brother, Elmer, grew seriously ill. Elmer, who had been there when her husband died.

When Miller checked into the hospital for a week because of heart problems, Elmer moved to Missouri to stay with a nephew of his late wife. Miller came home to an empty house.

“Carrie had always looked after people all of her life,” Aitken said, “and suddenly she had no one to take care of.”

On Wednesday, March 15, Miller got her white hair freshly curled and then returned home for lunch. Her housekeeper, a longtime friend, left about 1 p.m., promising to return in four hours to spend the night with Miller.

But Miller was gone by then. She had taken a drive.

About the time she drove into the bay, her housekeeper returned to discover a brief, handwritten note: “Find me and my car in St. Francis Bay where Ray Miller was killed.”

It happened the day after Christmas in 1938. Raymond Miller and Elmer Robinson were going duck hunting. As Miller drove across a low wooden bridge, the car slipped into the icy water of St. Francis Bay. Robinson popped to the surface and, realizing his brother-in-law was still below, swam down again and again to try to save him.

No one was there to try to save Carrie Miller. The highway worker who had pointed the way realized, much too late, that she had never returned from the gravel road that led to the water.

The Buick, with just 2,000 miles on the odometer, likely floated partially submerged with the current, passing between railroad trestles before coming to rest underwater about 250 yards from the boat ramp, Bachand said. It took a week for authorities to find the car.

When they did, they realized Carrie Miller had drowned at almost the exact spot where her husband had died at that old wooden bridge, 61 years ago.

Her former daughter-in-law, Kathryn Aitken, still ponders an unusually long letter she received the day before Carrie Miller’s death. “I miss so many loved ones--my one and only love, Ray, my beloved son, Robert,” she had written. “Perhaps I’ll throw a flower and a kiss in the St. Francis for Ray someday.”

“She was the flower,” Aitken said.