Mother at the cemetery

For Laurie Whitham, whose son died in Iraq, the past is always present

SHE ARRIVES in a minivan after the hour-long drive from Corvallis, parking beneath the oak that guards her son’s headstone like a sentry. One hand clutches a bouquet of flowers, the other a hand weeder. Curiously, she has also brought a tomato.

“I like to make sure it all looks presentable,” Laurie Whitham tells me later. “I don’t want it to look as if he’s been forgotten.”

She pulls weeds, positions the bouquet at the base of the headstone, places the small tomato atop it.

“After high school he went to Alaska to work filleting fish for a sportfishing company,” says Laurie, who, along with husband Mark, had run a blueberry farm in Harrisburg. “He was always telling us how much he missed our fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Chase Whitham would have been 42 today.

FOR THOSE OF US who haven’t lost children, our grief for others is the Monopoly equivalent of landing on “Jail” without having to draw the ominous “Go directly to …” card. We’re just visiting, as I was Monday morning. But the Laurie Whithams of the world can’t so easily lose the past in the present.

Twenty years have passed since the chaplain and “casualty assistant” pulled up in front of Laurie and Mark’s house. On the day Chase was to arrive home from Iraq for R&R, his memorial service was held instead.

Chase, who grew up in Harrisburg and later attended Eugene’s Marist High (Class of 2000), was part of the Stryker Brigade in Mosul. On May 8, 2004, at the end of a long day, a handful of hot, tired soldiers slipped into a murky swimming pool when a shorted-out pump sent an electrical shock through the water. One soldier died, Chase. He was 21.

Here is a young man, I keep reminding myself, who was willing to put his life on the line for the freedom of me and millions of other Americans. How easy it is to take that commitment from our military personnel for granted.

So here we are, mother and columnist sitting in the cemetery together nearly 20 years after I wrote a piece on Chase for The Register-Guard. Laurie and I have stayed in touch over the years; I’ve joined her and Mark for dinner in Sisters, where they used to live. She’s attended a couple of my writers’ workshops.

AT HARRISBURG’s Wyatt School, their son had been the self-appointed class clown. The kid who, on a dare, ate a peanut-butter-and-worm sandwich. Who embraced the school’s Tree of Joy project with gusto; he loved buying toys for kids in need at Christmastime. Who, at Marist, although new to the school himself, endeared himself to another newbie, Jamie Carmichael.

“While there are many Marist classmates whose names I could hear today and not recognize, Chase is one I will forever remember,” Jamie wrote in a letter to Laurie soon after Chase’s death. “Chase would come into class every day with a smile on his face and could always make me laugh.”