As a parent, I want my children to fear. A little bit.
Though I want them to play with abandon and love without bounds, I also want them to be safe. I want them to wash their hands to prevent illness. I want them to scurry up the driveway when they hear squealing car tires.
I want them to know that nobody may touch certain parts of their bodies. And I want them to kick and punch and scream their heads off if, God forbid, a stranger grabs them.
Instilling this fear is necessary; terrible things sometimes happen.
I know that these instances are rare, the freak exception. And I realize that the news media fills our brains with hysterical stories about these shocking stories: kidnappings, rapes, rabies bites, high-speed car crashes.
But this has been a season of exceptions for our community. Milwaukee’s streets have been termed “killing fields,” this summer, with the city murder rate at 78 as of Wednesday morning.
Those deaths affect us all. Even if we don’t know the victims, this wave of violence defines our city and begs us to action.
The local Jewish community has suffered its own particular season of horrific disbelief, through a series of odd and awful accidents. Each of these stories is important to recall; each victim must be remembered.
On Wed., December 22, 80-year-old Benjamin Fagan was killed in a car crash at the intersection of Hampton and Port Washington Roads.
There was no split-second moment for questions. A 24-year old woman, who was fleeing from police after allegedly trying to cash a forged check, led the police on a high-speed chase and ended up crashing her SUV into Fagan’s Buick.
In spite of Lara Strack’s July 22 sentence of 15 years in prison followed by five years of supervision, there is no justice for the toy salesman and World War II hero, for a life unfinished.
To his last day, Fagan saved a piece of his parachute that he cut and used to cover a fellow soldier after an emergency jump from an airplane in the Himalayan Mountains. He showed it to his grandson’s third-grade class in a presentation about the war.
He is survived by his wife Bernice, children, grandchildren. (Read Chronicle obituary, Jan. 7.)
Just one month later, on Monday, Jan. 24, 12-year old Baki Muchin did not wake up for school. In the time it takes for a parent to try to nudge her child’s shoulder to wake him, the world shifted for his parents, Marge Eiseman and Andy Muchin, and his three surviving brothers, Zachary, 9, and now 16-year-old twins, Jonathan and Jacob.
The cause of death was first explained as brain inflammation but has now been determined to be long QT syndrome, an abnormality of the heart’s electrical system that can cause very fast heart rhythms and sometimes lead to sudden cardiac death, according to the Web site, www.qtsyndrome.ch.
Baki’s death is impossible to understand and certainly a parent’s biggest fear. For my eight-year-old, it revealed a possibility she had never imagined: How could a seemingly healthy sixth-grader, a child she knew, just die? The natural extension is, of course, “Why not me? Am I next?” (Read more about Baki in the Feb. 4 Chronicle.)
Early morning Friday, July 1, the community again suffered a blow, as Devorah (Debbie) Rennert, 45, was killed in a car crash in suburban Chicago. She and her husband, Rabbi Shmuel Rennert, were traveling with seven children when their van struck the rear of a semi-trailer.
Two off-duty Lake County sheriff’s deputies controlled the resulting fire and extricated Rabbi Rennert. Highland Park officers broke other windows to remove the trapped children, according to a July 1 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Rennert left behind 10 children, ranging in age from four months to 22 years. (See Chronicle, July 15.)
Like her, Judee Ross, also 45 years old, was killed in Chicago in an auto-related accident. On Saturday, July 16, Ross, an English and literature teacher at Milwaukee Jewish Day School, was walking in Chinatown with her family when she stepped backward to take a photograph.
And that’s when a reckless driver, racing with another car, struck Ross and continued driving. As in the other tragic accidents, there was always a stranger ready with a mitzvah; this time it was another driver who witnessed the accident and followed the driver for 45 minutes until the police arrived.
Ross left behind hundreds of past students, husband Richard Ross and three teenage children. (See Chronicle, July 22.)
On Wednesday, July 20, Steven Stone, 44, was killed in a plane crash. A student pilot with clearance to fly, Stone took off from Lawrence J. Timmerman Airport and was apparently headed for Green Bay. According to a July 21 Journal Sentinel story, his rented airplane nose-dived into Jackson Marsh, about five miles south of West Bend.
His father told me in a telephone interview, “He loved flying…. He was an adventurous guy, a very hard worker and a hard player.”
Stone didn’t tell his family about his flying lessons, as he hadn’t told them several years ago about his skydiving experience, in an effort perhaps to protect them from worry.
As I finished my short conversation with Robert Stone, my throat caught as I tried to express a few, probably useless words of comfort. What I meant was that Steve’s death breaks our assumed rules about the nature of life and death:
Parents should not bury their children; babies should know their mothers; children should breeze through life’s cycle with the assumption that they will care for their aging parents. And finally, we should be warned when something terrible is about to happen.
I’m not one of those mothers to put a leash on my child during a walk through the mall. I don’t even like anti-bacterial soap. But these recent accidents make me hold my children a bit closer.
Perhaps also they nudge us to live life well, love passionately and be exactly who we want to be today.
The community joins in grief with the friends and family of Benjamin Fagan, Baki Muchin, Devorah Rennert, Judee Ross and Steven Stone. May their memories be for a blessing.
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