Charity Vogel: A family is there when one is needed
Updated: 06/23/08 7:50 AM
Morgan knew the moment she opened her eyes that something had gone horribly wrong.
She had been sound asleep. It was 6 a. m. on April 4, the last day of school before break — a day she had been looking forward to.
Through her grogginess, Morgan could feel her little brother shaking her arm.
“Terrill came to my bed and he said, ‘Mom’s on the bathroom floor and she feels cold,’ ” said Morgan.
She went to see, and it was true.
“She was supposed to wake me up, but she didn’t,” Morgan said last week, her strong chin quivering at the memory. “I tried to move her but I couldn’t — her head was too heavy.”
That morning changed life forever for Morgan McLin, 14, and for her brothers, 10-year-old Terrill and Aaron, 3.
It changed the heart and soul of Pinnacle School, too.
Pinnacle is a bright, cheery charter school on Ash Street on the city’s East Side, near the downtown core. It’s a place of wide hallways, grinning students, teachers who have high standards and open hearts. In short, it’s a family.
When tragedy strikes one of the 458 students, it strikes everyone.
Which is why, that April morning, Heidi Rotella reacted the way she did when she heard that Jennifer Buchanan, the McLin kids’ mom, had died in the night.
Rotella, chief academic officer at the school since it opened five years ago, called Buchanan’s home on Altruria Street.
“I didn’t get past, ‘Hello, this is Mrs. Rotella —,’ ” she said, “and the sobbing started. It was Morgan. I said, ‘Hold on, I’m coming over there right now.’ ”
Medical tests later showed that Buchanan apparently died of a severe seizure. Her passing, at 34, left a gaping hole in her family and in the school her kids attend, where she had been an actively involved parent even though she was a single mom and had a full-time job.
But, in a loss, the school found strength. They learned a difficult lesson they couldn’t have absorbed any other way:
That true family isn’t only there for you in the good times, but in the worst.
Students turned out en masse at Buchanan’s wake in South Buffalo, riding buses and begging rides to get there. Faculty flooded the wake, too. Parents of Pinnacle students offered a shoulder to cry on.
“I lost my mother when I was 19, so I could relate,” said Alex Whittcop, mother of a girl in Terrill’s class, who sat with Terrill on a stoop outside the funeral home and let him practice, over and over, the new vocabulary he needed.
“He kept saying, ‘Don’t cry, I’m practicing,’ ” Whittcop said. Then, being a mom, she broke down in tears. “He was saying, ‘My mom died. My mom is dead. My mom isn’t coming back.’ ”
Those were the ways the school helped, in the days after the loss — which was compounded when, on the morning of Buchanan’s funeral, a 6th-grade boy lost his own mother to cancer.
In the long term, they’ve got bigger plans.
A Family Bereavement Fund has been established at a local bank by the staff at Pinnacle to help the four students who lost their mothers.
Their goal is $10,000, so families like the McLins can get help with buying clothes, supplies and furniture for the kids’ new quarters in their grandparents’ home. A chicken barbecue fundraiser at the school on Saturday, from 2 to 6 p. m., will get the fund started.
In losing their moms, the lives of these kids grew suddenly dark.
Those around them are trying to bring the light — even just a bit of it — back.
That’s what families do.
