Today, suburban mothers of slain children still mourn
Naperville mother Pat Shanower doesn’t need today’s holiday to remind her what Osama bin Laden took from her when a hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon and killed her 40-year-old son, Navy Commander Dan Shanower.
“Mother’s Day isn’t the worst. His birthday, Memorial Day and September 11th are the hardest,” says Pat Shanower, who gets quick agreement from her husband, Don. “On his birthday, his dad and I always look at videos and photographs of him.”
Her memories of Mother’s Days when Daniel was little are foggy because she was busy being a mom to all five of their kids.
“There’s 10 years from top to bottom,” she says of the span between her oldest and youngest. “The refrigerator was always covered with art projects. It was pretty lively.”
She doesn’t remember if the kids brought her breakfast in bed.
“If I got breakfast before I got the kids to church, I was doing well,” she says with a chuckle.
Shanower says she’ll spend part of her holiday with her son and daughter who live in the suburbs and will hear from her two remaining children.
“Dan was never home on Mother’s Day after he went into the military,” she says, explaining how Christmas was the holiday when he’d try to get time off and show up with presents from the exotic locales where he had been stationed. “But he was a good letter writer. For being so far away, he was always close to his family.”
Thinking of other moms with similar losses, Shanower says she wonders how they get through Mother’s Day “if they don’t have family, friends and faith.”
Churches and restaurants honor mothers on their special day. Athletes remember to give a “Hi, Mom!” shout-out during their games on TV. Each of those public celebrations can be like ripping the scab off a wound for a mother in mourning.
“To go through a day and see people celebrate, the unfairness of it is difficult to swallow,” says Patricia Loder, who with her husband, Wayne, founded The Compassionate Friends support group headquartered in Oak Brook after their daughter, Stephanie, 8, and 5-year-old son, Stephen, were killed on the first day of spring in 1991 when a motorcycle traveling at 115 mph hit their car. “A lot churches give mothers flowers on that day, and you stand there wondering, ‘Am I a mom?’”
With the death of her 45-year-old brother just a few months earlier, Loder had seen the devastating effect that death had on their mother and father.
“As the living child, you just want them to be normal again,” Loder remembers thinking of her parents, “but there really is no normal again.”
Time doesn’t heal the wounds for June Conrad of Schaumburg, but every Mother’s Day with her two surviving kids seems to be better than that first “horrible” holiday after her 31-year-old son was murdered.
“We cope with it, but we sure do miss him. He was my baby,” Conrad, 76, says of Jack, who was beaten to death and dumped in a forest preserve in October 2000 in what DuPage County prosecutors called a “thrill killing.” She remembers the Mother’s Days with all her children, their handmade cards, the art projects from school.
“He was such a sweet boy. In fact, I’m looking at his picture right now,” the mom says. “It’s a beautiful day out today and I’m thinking of him.”
Mourning mothers think of the children they lost every day, Loder says. They read stories of children abused and murdered by their parents, and wonder.
“Hey, I was doing everything right. Why did my children have to die?” Loder says. “You keep asking yourself these questions, but there really aren’t any answers. We tend to feel robbed. They should be here and get to celebrate Mother’s Day.”
Loder and her husband went on to have another son, Christopher, 18, and daughter Kathryn, 17. But their children who were killed are always part of every holiday, as are the dead for other families.
“We usually don’t talk about Dan being gone,” Shanower says. “He was a very positive and forward-looking person and we talk about all the happy times. We were fortunate to have many.”
In the hours after the announcement that bin Laden had been killed, Shanower says TV stations phoned their house at midnight, 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., waking them with requests for interviews. They will get the same requests as the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 draws closer.
“The upside is people remember our son. He will never be forgotten,” Shanower says. “The downside is the public side of it. He really belongs to the nation.”
All these parents must deal with grief, and in their own ways, Loder says.
“You lose a son, you lose a son, no matter how it was done,” says Conrad, a widow since her husband died last December on his 80th birthday.
Groups in the suburbs such as The Compassionate Friends or Parents of Murdered Children provide help, but they don’t put an end to pain or deliver the gift of closure, Loder says.
“I hate the word closure. It’s not closure,” Loder says, adding that the mother of one dead child once said the only closure she saw was obtained by the lid of the coffin. “You think in the back of your mind that you’re going to get closure. Maybe there’s justice, but there’s no closure.”
Before her 19-year-old daughter Ryanne was murdered in the 2008 Valentine’s Day shooting that killed five students in a classroom at Northern Illinois University, Mary Kay Mace often would celebrate Mother’s Day, her mother’s birthday and Ryanne’s May 13 birthday in one big bash. On what would have been her 20th birthday, Eric and Mary Kay Mace spread their daughter’s ashes. Ryanne, a 2006 graduate of Dundee-Crown High School in Carpentersville, was a bright student, talented violinist and fun-loving young woman.
“I miss her every day, but it’s more poignant when you want to stay away from restaurants or churches. I just stay at home and lock myself away,” Mary Kay Mace says. “I haven’t had a happy holiday in a little over three years. I haven’t had a Christmas tree up. To me, there’s nothing to celebrate.”
Some parents find comfort on holidays from built-in support systems.
“We’ve been buoyed up by Dan’s siblings, who have been closer since we lost him,” Shanower says. The Maces don’t have that option.
“Ryanne was our only child so I don’t have any hope of hearing ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ from any other child,” Mary Kay Mace says. “It’s difficult.”
People who know her story don’t wish her a happy Mother’s Day, but maybe they should acknowledge the holiday and her loss.
“Gosh, I don’t know,” Mace says. “It’s not going to be a happy Mother’s Day either way, but it’s nice to be thought of.”