This essay was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on July 29, 2006.
A stranger's kindness eases a loss:
A beloved mother died in a tragic crash, but not without a hand to hold.
By PAMELA MILLER
pmiller@startribune.com
On the afternoon of April 24, 2006, Michelle Meyer was driving north on Hwy. 61 from her home in Wabasha, Minn., to Lake City when she saw something awful.
Near Reads Landing, a blue van in front of her shot off the right side of the road, slammed into the guardrail, veered back across the highway, hit the sandstone embankment and rolled over.
Meyer, 29 and nine months pregnant, pulled over and grabbed her cell phone. A registered nurse for the Mayo Clinic and a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT) for the city of Wabasha, she knew that the response would be faster if she called the Wabasha County Sheriff's Department rather than 911.
Send an ambulance, she said,
and have Mayo One send a 'copter.
As she spoke, she ran to the van. A slightly built woman with silver hair was trapped in the crushed vehicle, bleeding heavily at the chest and head.
"Being so pregnant, I couldn't crawl in to get her out, but a couple guys who'd stopped helped," Meyer said. "We laid her down and tried to comfort her. She told us her name, and tried to say other stuff, but she couldn't speak very clearly. We stayed with her, talked to her, held her hand."
Minnesota State Patrol officer Malachy McCarthy arrived, then an ambulance, then fire trucks. Another EMT driving by on his day off stopped.
Despite their efforts, the woman was dead by the time the helicopter landed. Meyer stayed until the scene was clear.
Identification was found among the woman's bloodied belongings. It bore the name she had gasped out to Meyer: Alverna Miller.
My mom.
*****
The varieties of bad news are infinite, but some are more devastating than others, news of a child's death being the undisputed worst.
Still, the shock of a call saying that one's lively, beloved 81-year-old mother has been killed in a car crash is like being hit from behind with a big stick: You stagger, your mindlocks up, the pain spreads slowly.
Shortly after the crash, McCarthy and my mother's pastor knocked on my uncle's door in Lake City. Choked with sorrow, my uncle called me at my Twin Cities home.
As I sat at the dining room table, speechless, my 16-year-old son, Noah, told me about an e-mail he'd just read from his grandmother. The day before, she'd taken him to Kellogg, Minn., to play miniature golf, had removed her watch and forgotten it there. The next day,she had driven to Kellogg to retrieve it, and was heading home to Lake City when the crash occurred.
I called my brother, Chris Miller, a Star Tribune sports editor, and my sister, Cathy Miller Northrup, a Presbyterian minister in Kansas. Ten years earlier, I had called them with the news of our beloved dad's death from metastatic melanoma (William Alton Miller, 4/13/25-3/1/06). We'd loved him, too. But this news was harder to convey.
Each of us in the chain had the same reaction. We were speechless. Then we said,
What? She what? Tell me again. Are you sure? Could there be some mistake?
In the days that followe
d, Mom was mourned, honored and buried. It all went as well as could be expected. Her children went back to work -- my sister to her ministry, my brother to his intense sports journalism job, I to my job as the Star Tribune's Faith & Values beat reporter.
But I wanted to know more about the accident. I called Officer McCarthy, who gave me a few details and kindly assured me that Mom hadn't suffered.
I called the Wabasha County medical examiner, who said initial autopsy results showed no sign of stroke or heart attack, no clue as to why it happened. The cause of death: massive chest trauma.
The accident is a mystery, and will remain so, I realized.
And then I called Michelle Meyer.
*****
On the night after the accident, Meyer couldn't sleep. As an EMT, she's seen a lot of gore, but something about this accident stayed with her, perhaps because she'd responded as a passerby, not as an EMT.
At work the next day, she went into labor. That night, Henry, 7 pound
s 6 ounces, was born via Caesarean section, just as her first child, Madeline, had been five years before.
"All through this, I thought so much about how when one person dies, another is born," Meyer said.
When I called her the first time and she told me about giving birth the day after Mom died, it made me feel better.
I told my brother, my sister, my uncle. They all smiled when they heard it. "That's so cool," they said.
The first time I talked to Meyer, she stressed that Mom hadn't suffered.
The second time, she told me that Mom had indeed lived awhile, had said her name, had been aware of the comforting hands nearby. It was hard, but good, to hear that.
*****
The day of the crash, there were plenty of cars along that stretch of Hwy. 61, one of the most beautiful roads in America and one Mom loved to drive, looking for bald eagles. (I've since buried that darn watch, still ticking, in a small memorial at the spot where Mom died.)
Why did Meyer, so pregnant, stop when others were pulling over, too?
"There was never any question," she said. "Here was a terrible accident. Someone needed help. I wanted to be there."
And not just as an EMT, it became clear as I talked to her. She wanted to be there as a fellow human being doing the right thing, as someone who realized that a mortally injured person would need a hand to hold.
It means so much to my family, what this woman did. We are so grateful that Mom's car did not hit hers. We're so glad she stopped, and that Mom's last interaction was with a person with kind eyes and a gentle voice, a woman great with life.
We had an exceptional mom. Henry and Madeline Meyer, so do you.
Pamela Miller - 612-673-4290
Alverna Miller (7/23/24-4/24/06) teaching grandson Noah Miller Johnson, then 5, how to "fly" during a trip to Glacier National Park in the early 1990s. Another photo above is also of Mom and Noah.
The living room is bright green, modeled after "the great green room" in the classic children's book "Goodnight, Moon." It's nice to have bright colors to cozy up to during Minnesota's long, cold, sometimes drab winters. Moriah and Hannah helped me pick out the bright red chairs a few years ago.
The living room from another angle. That's Alverna's old china cabinet in the corner, recently moved from the now-sold Lake City place. Though it's March 24, Alverna's Christmas cactus is blooming away. And the bead curtain? Love bead curtains, have several in my house.
The little girls on the beach ...
... and playing a hot game of putt-putt.
Auntie Pam catches up with the little Miller girls.
