Gilbert, Arizona. After our magical Christmas of 2007 and a toast to our future, Shannon decided to drive to California for a few days while I studied to renew my emergency medical technician certification. I remember squeezing her tight, tears in my eyes, and saying, “Please don’t go.”
This holiday season had been the best ever; I didn’t want to let go of it, or her.
On the night of January 6, Shannon calls to say she is on her way home. I tell her that eight o’clock is too late to be on the road.
“No,” she says. “You know I love to drive, and I want to be with you—I’m already in Palm Springs.”
We talk for about thirty minutes—seems like we never run out of conversation. At 11:15 p.m. she calls again from Quartzsite, Arizona, where she has stopped for gas. She is running late because it is raining.
“Please,” I beg. “Just stay there and come in the morning.”
Quartzsite, a few miles past the California border, is the last leg of the route along Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to Phoenix. Here the land begins to rise into sandy hills dotted with saguaro cactus—a sure sign that you are in Arizona. During the winter months Quartzsite becomes the temporary home for thousands of “snowbirds” who camp in their RVs. Shannon was not interested in stopping there.
“I love you with everything I have,” she says. “I want to get to you tonight.”
“Okay, I’m going to shower,” I reply. “Soon as I get out I’ll call to make sure you stay awake.”
“Okay, I love you.”
A few minutes later I call back. No answer. Shannon always answers her cell phone. I call again, over and over. No response. Worried, I phone some hospitals in the area, but there are no reports of a major wreck. Thinking she might have been in a minor accident, I get into my car and head west on the I-10. I keep calling. No answer. Sometime after midnight I call Mom and ask her to pray. I bargain with God.
Mile Marker 27.2, the I-10 Freeway. As I approach Quartzsite, the freeway is shut down. The smell of fire and burned rubber is in the air. I park on the side of the road and sprint across the median, avoiding the highway patrol officers who are securing an accident site. Then I see Shannon’s white Lexus SUV, the entire top half gone. I fall to my knees and vomit.
Right then a highway patrol officer gets to me. “Who are you?” he says.
“I’m Shannon’s fiancée.”
He says, “Well, technically we can’t tell you anything until we reach her next of kin. Would that be her parents?”
I look at the officer. “I’m the only one that knows where her parents are, so you better tell me what the heck happened, so I can explain it to them, not you.”
He looks away, then back at me. “Ma’am, Shannon has been in an accident. She was killed on impact.”
I go numb before slipping on the stony face I had built up during childhood. Show No Emotion. I look toward her car. No matter how bad it is, I need to say good-bye. But the officers won’t let me see her. Then I spot her shoe—I had just bought her a pair of Sketchers—lying on the highway and pick it up. This is my fault, because Shannon was hurrying home to me. My cries sound primal in the cold, rainy night—where the hell was God’s hand in this!—I was too angry to ask how could he let this happen.
It happened at I-10’s mile marker 27.2, just past Gold Nugget Road. Four miles east, the highway 60 overpass has a sharp curve that enters the I-10 going east. If you are, say, driving drunk and speeding, it would be easy to miss the sign pointing you toward Phoenix and simply careen straight ahead onto the exit from the I-10. In such a condition on a rainy night, it would be easy to miss the two unlighted red signs that read: “WRONG WAY.” That is what a man named Lewis Young, with a blood alcohol level of .244 percent, had done in his lifted F250 truck. Shannon was passing a big rig when she would have seen his headlights. Both cars had been going eighty miles per hour when they collided. Ten minutes after Shannon said, “I love you,” she was gone.
My cell phone has gone dead, so on the way back to Phoenix I stop at a pay phone to call Mom. She promises to come stay with me as soon as she can afford to travel. Then I call Shannon’s parents. After they arrive we identify the wreck that had been her Lexus. Back at our apartment, they take nearly everything of hers, but I keep her bike, her clothes, and two pieces of furniture. It breaks my heart to see how little they know of their daughter’s life. They know that she was in the process of transferring to Arizona but not that we were living together. They do not know that the reason Shannon wanted golf clubs for Christmas was because I had been teaching her to play. They want to choose an urn for her ashes and ask me what her favorite color was (lime green). For the funeral they want to play her favorite song; do I know what it was? (Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”)
Shannon’s funeral took place in Cerritos, California, on Saturday, January 12. I got up and said a few words, though most people there didn’t know of our relationship. But as I looked out at the faces in the seats, I saw old friends from the Santa Ana College Fire Academy, and the Long Beach and Fullerton Fire Departments, including my former girlfriend, Karen. My family was there, too, except for Dad, who said he could not handle it. Somehow I found the words I wanted to say and was able to speak them with a smile. Shannon would have liked that.
After the funeral, I stopped at the Home Depot and bought an orange bucket, a bag of concrete, two gallons of water, white paint, and a couple of two-by-fours. I painted the pieces of wood and nailed them together in the shape of a cross. On the cross I wrote “Shannon, 1/4/74–1/6/08. . . . We love you.” I mixed the concrete in the bucket and plunged the cross into it. On the drive back to Phoenix, I stopped at mile marker 27.2 and set the cross in the sand. As cars and trucks raced by, I wept. The area was my personal vision of hell. On the median’s embankment were the burn marks of the F250; in the dirt by the road’s shoulder were not only the picture of Jesus that Shannon kept on her dash but also her other shoe, with glass in it. Then I found my leather ring, which she wore whenever we were apart. We had talked about trading it in for a “real” ring. Now all I wanted was that leather one.
The next morning I got up and played “Dancing Queen” before reporting to the Gilbert Fire Department Academy. I went to the training captains and explained that I had just lost my fiancée in a head-on collision. I dared not mention her gender. Arizona is not an antidiscrimination state, and I could be let go for no cause.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it, but I’m going to try,” I said. “I want the job.”
The men were kind. “Anything we can do to help.”
The guilt I felt for taking Shannon out to Arizona crashed over me in waves. I would have welcomed death if it had come my way. I began to see that I was breakable and that I needed people. It turned out to be mostly women, who I had always had trouble drawing near, who were there for me. Connie Rudolph came. My defenses down, I told her that Shannon was much more than the dear friend I had introduced her as in St. Paul. It took a while to spit out the words that I was gay. The news did not seem to bother Connie at all. She stayed with me for several days, and just as she had years earlier, during my days with the Saints, got me out of myself in the best way possible—into nature, namely the Phoenix Mountains. Hiking the rocky trails past sagebrush, saguaro, pincushion, and jumping cholla cactuses while turkey vultures and hawks soared overhead was the spiritual tonic that Connie knew I needed.
Debbie Martin, one of my instructors at Santa Ana College, was another woman who stood by me. Years ago she had lost her daughter on a slippery mountain road in Big Bear, California, when their car went over a cliff. Debbie’s listening ear and understanding of loss helped get me through.
Growing up, I had seen Mom as weak for not protecting us from Dad. Now I saw her strength. When she arrived in town, she took one look at my face and my messed-up apartment, and asked, “What can I do to help?”
She cleaned the house. She did the laundry. She never told me to stop crying. One afternoon Mom said, “Sit down on the couch, Ila, and tell me about Shannon. Tell me some stories I don’t know.”
As we reminisced about the silly things we had gone through, I started laughing. Then it went to tears, and then I was asleep. I slept for several hours, and when I awoke, I saw Mom, weeping.
“We all loved her, Ila,” she said. “I loved her, too. You know, I think she telephoned me more than you.”
“I want to die,” I told her, “but I’m not going to do it. I just need some help to stay alive.”
Mom is the reason I survived. Most of all she listened. Buried under the guilt I felt at Shannon’s death was the guilt I carried about my grandmother’s drowning. Now Mom and I talked about guilt and forgiveness and those early memories. Mom knew things that I either did not know or had forgotten. Mom’s parents had been unhappy about her marrying out of the Roman Catholic faith. They didn’t attend the wedding and didn’t even see me until I was three months old. That visit, though, began to heal the rift. Mom always thought that Grandma was good for my Dad. He had been raised in an abusive home, and Grandma was able to bring him out of himself. Grandma had grown up scared of the water—her older brother and sister used to tease her about it. So when Mom and Dad bought their house with a pool, she was determined to learn to swim. She did not want me, her first grandchild, to know she was afraid of the water. She had spent the entire summer of 1979 just learning to get her face in the water. By the end of that year, she was doing laps, though Mom said she couldn’t really swim very well.
It helped to have meaningful work, where my anger at losing Shannon fueled the energy I needed to make the grade. Each day I put myself on the line like it would be my last day on the job—nothing held in reserve. At graduation, my peers voted me the Recruit of the Academy, and the department gave me the Academic Scholar award. The occasion on May 14 was a blur as Debbie Martin pinned the badge on me at graduation. I was now a probationary member of the Gilbert Fire Department. There was so much to like about this department. For one, it had ex–professional athletes: former major leaguers like Clay Bellinger and Andy Larkin, former minor leaguer Eric Christopherson, and former professional football player Andy Bowers. I got to work alongside them and other great guys, great in the sense of being loyal to their wives, doing the right thing, spending time with their kids, giving back.
My first rotation at the Gilbert Fire Department was at Station 1, Engine 251. I could not have found a better place. I liked our department’s service ethic. If that meant changing a tire for someone in 113-degree heat, we did it. If someone fell and got hurt while trimming a tree or cleaning a pool, we would finish the job for them. It was all about serving others—and I was proud to be part of the department. In a devotional I found these lines, by the blind Scottish preacher George Matheson, which sum up the philosophy I wanted to live by: “When all our hopes are gone / It is best our hands keep toiling on / For others’ sake: / For strength to bear is found in duty done; / And he is best indeed who learns to make / The joy of others cure his own heartache.”
My captain, Joe Sperke, a smart-ass with a keen wit, caught me one day grabbing my food out of the fridge and taking it to the bay to eat alone.
“What are you doing out here?” he demanded.
I told him I was hungry but still cleaning stuff and looking things over.
He said, “I don’t know what you are used to coming from California, but get inside here, sit down, eat, chill, and hang out with us.”
Most of the department at Gilbert was equally friendly and pulled their share. On our days off the guys invited me to go bicycling or hiking with them. Twenty of us hiked the Grand Canyon—my first time there. I began to feel part of the family. As in baseball, pranks are played all the time in the fire service. This one guy could not stand to have food thrown at him, so what did we do? Took handfuls of powdered doughnuts, snuck up to his room where he was sleeping, and hurled dozens of donuts at him. Another guy’s helmet and car keys were put in a Jell-O mold. You always had people dunking water on your head or squirting you. I participated—I threw a stink bomb into the restroom and held the door shut for as long as I could. Someone put live chickens in the chief’s office, really funny until the birds lost control of their bowels. Soot smeared around the helmets and headsets that leaves a mark on your head; oranges stuffed in your shoes so they squished when you put them on. It was a great release to just laugh.
Looking back, one of my great regrets is that I didn’t have more of this sort of camaraderie in the baseball teams I played on. I had it early on in junior high girls’ basketball but not so much in baseball. Oh, I had a close connection with guys like Dave Glick but never the whole team. I think if I’d had that in baseball, it would’ve helped me tolerate a lot of what I went through. Too bad I wasn’t in the place I was now. I’ve learned to kid around. Example: when one of my crewmates teased me about my celebrity. “Oh, look,” he said, “We have a famous person right here who has her own entry in Wikipedia. . . . When the book comes out, we have to tell people how she made this mistake and that mistake.”
I just laughed and said, “Yeah, and don’t forget to tell how I slipped on a crate and shot up in the air five feet and landed on my back.”
Was there hidden animosity in those remarks? Maybe, but I’ve learned that laughing at yourself helps diffuse the attitudes of people who may feel threatened by you. Living out of the closet taught me that. Just wish I’d learned it sooner.
My first day on Engine 251 we got a code (no pulse, no breath). A driver in a black SUV had run a red light and smashed into a small car. At the scene, I saw that the front of this little car was gone. I checked the man inside for a pulse: nothing. I put on the monitor and printed out an electrocardiogram strip, which showed a flat line, or asystole. I noticed his wedding band and sent up a silent prayer for his family. Something told me right then, Ila you are where you are supposed to be. I could see the captain watching me, likely wondering how I was going to handle this. Wow, I thought, Shannon had been even more messed up. I had been upset that she pretty much disintegrated upon impact, but now I found peace in knowing she had died immediately. As I left the accident scene, I continued to pray for the man’s family, knowing what they were about to go through. After the call, our engineer asked, “Everyone cool?”
All of us said, “Yep.”
Yes, I was cool with whatever came my way. As firefighters we see a lot of bad stuff, and some people may think us cold because we don’t usually react emotionally. Through baseball I had developed a high threshold for pain. That had prepared me to cope with losing Shannon. Now I had more empathy. I wanted to make Shannon proud. During my years in baseball it had been all about me. When Shannon showed me what unconditional love was, it changed my heart. Because of her, I began to move from being critical—as athletes we are judged every second—to seeing the good in others, and in myself.
Despite the ache that wouldn’t leave, I kept trying to dedicate whatever resources I had to serve my family, my friends, and society. I decided to become a paramedic. I wanted to be the one on call when people experienced the worst day of their lives. For eighteen months, I worked my regular firefighting shifts while attending school for my paramedic certification. I had plenty of support from my co-workers, who gave me time to study or take a quick nap during the day. Why I was not taken, and Shannon was, I will never know, but I am so damn thankful for the three years God gave us. I used to wonder why I went through so much in baseball. Now it clicked. The game had prepared me to go through the toughest loss of my life.