COMMENTA RY
Small stones help to carry great grief
She carried them with her to Washington, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, tucked into a corner of her suitcase. You would have thought they were rubies. Two small stones, each about the size of a half dollar, gray and grainy to the touch.
When she puts her nose to them, she imagines she smells jet fuel.
“The way the airplane came down, it left everything around it undisturbed,” said Robin Tolsma, a widow of Flight 3407.
“If they were looking out the windows,”— she means her husband, Darren, and the co-workers he was traveling with—“that’s the last thing they would have seen.”
Ever since that terrible night on which her husband never came home, Tolsma has been collecting stones from the site of the Clarence crash.
She stuffs a few into her pockets each time she visits the patch of scarred earth. Sacred relics; reminders. Sometimes, she holds one of the stones tightly, for the comfort it gives her. She’s put another in a dish on her coffee table where she can see it every day.
They’re only pebbles, really, but they are easing her grief.
That’s why she’s saved two of the stones for two families she wants to reach out to, more than ever, in the wake of the federal hearings last month: the families of Marvin Renslow and Rebecca Shaw, pilot and co-pilot of the flight that crashed to the ground Feb. 12, killing 50 people.
Tolsma, who attended the National Transportation Safety Board hearings, thinks the plane’s crew is being vilified in the eyes of the public.
She can’t do much about that; she’s only one person. But she can offer this: two stones, from those she has gathered.
Think of it as a tiny spark of connection, from one side of a chasm of grief to the other. Sometimes, connection can be a powerful thing. Almost enough.
“My heart goes out to those families,” Tolsma said. “They’re grieving, too. I think it’s actually worse for them—after those hearings, it seems like the blame is being personally laid on them. I don’t hold them responsible. I harbor no hate for them at all.”
Part of grief is releasing anger, especially when a loss comes suddenly. Tolsma, like many relatives and friends of Flight 3407 victims, learns that lesson afresh every day.
As a mom, she’s also trying to help her two children learn it.
Her son, Darren, begins work this summer as an intern at Northrop Grumman, the same firm where her husband worked for many years.
And her daughter, Nikki, who turned 17 during the hearings in Washington, is working out her sadness in other ways. She got boxing gloves and a punching bag for her birthday, by request, and scattered some of Darren’s ashes over the finish line at Lancaster’s track.
“Running is the way she takes it out. She’s just feels, ‘If I can get to the finish line, I can get to Dad,’ ” Tolsma said.
The search for peace in a place of pain is a subject Tolsma and her family know well.
That’s why she wanted so badly to speak to the Shaw and Renslow families when she traveled to Washington last month. It’s why she took the two stones with her, guarding them like gems, hoping that she could pass them on, with her blessings.
That didn’t happen; NTSB officials kept the families separate.
But Tolsma is keeping the offer open. She wants the families to know that she will save the two crash artifacts for them, as long as necessary. Even if it takes forever.
“It’s the last piece,” she said. “It’s part of them all, now.”
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