She Died and Now I Live….

He was 26 years old, a football coach with a medium build, blue eyes, and red hair, living in Carroll, Iowa. His name was Boyd also known as Tommy. He worked on his parent’s farm after graduation and didn’t like it, so decided to go to college in nearby Mount Vernon. His college education launched him into a career as a teacher and a coach.

It must not have been long after he started teaching that he met Elsie Kolberg in 1924. She was from Reinbeck, Iowa, and was planning to teach in Carroll the following year. Maybe it was love at first sight, maybe they had common interests and passions and it brought them together. Maybe they stayed out late into the night walking the streets chatting or sitting at a park under the stars, learning about each other until they married on June 24, 1925.

I don’t know anything about the wedding or the courtship or really anything about Elsie. But I imagine the setting, the time period, and the climate had to be similar to the musical the “Music Man” that takes place in Iowa, right?

Tight-knit communities, fresh-baked apple pies on windowsills, walking with your love to the barn dance or attending the high school band concert hand in hand and then walking her home to the big front porch with a wooden swing and kissing her goodnight. I am sure they shared in all the newlywed bliss and the excitement of courting, dating, and finding love.

Fourteen days, two weeks was all they got. August 8, 1925, on a honeymoon road trip near Boise, Idaho, the car the newlyweds were driving skidded on gravel and overturned, killing Elsie Kolberg and sending Boyd to the hospital.

I can imagine he was driving; I can imagine him hearing the news that his precious bride had died. I can imagine, the gut-wrenching pain and anguish that a man might put himself through, feeling as if it was all his fault. Boyd returned to his home in Carroll by train. The train carried him and the casket of his bride. When the train arrived his football team met him at the train station. I imagine it was such a humbling, honoring, beautiful sight to see.

Why in the world would you find your love and the one you want to wed only to have it stripped away in a matter of days? Why does life do such horribly cruel things to us? This was someone’s daughter that they loved dearly, maybe a sister and a friend. Why did these parents have to bury a daughter, this is so backward and twisted.

Why the loss of her life? Why the gravel on the road? A honeymoon tragedy no one wants to endure or live through.

This story is one I am wrestling with; it is exposing a part of reality and life that the mind cannot comprehend.

You see, Boyd a few years later began dating another teacher who taught kindergarten and music in Carroll, Iowa. By July 23, 1928, they married at the home of some of their friends.

These two, Boyd and Katherine, are all I had ever known. To me, they were Great Grandma and Grandpa Thompson.

Every piano song I have ever written has been on Great Grandma Thompson piano which now lives in my home. I also have all my precious treasures from teapots and glass birds displayed on the hutch built by my Great Grandpa Thompson. The Thompsons had three children, Virginia (Ginny), Constance, and Robert. Grandma Ginny birthed my mother.

I recently sat in a room with 26 beautiful people, we were all related. Cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, mimi, papa, grandma and more cousins! Our existence all hinges on a significant tragedy, on the death of Elsie Kolberg.

I am tussling with this story and the magnitude of what has come in the wake of what may have been the most horrible moment in my grandfather’s life.

His tragedy is the most powerful moment of ALL time for our some 70ish descendants that live, that have created families and birthed children, and carry on the legacy of the union of Boyd Thompson and his second wife, my great grandmother.

My youngest sister Anne, wrote a song (I think when she was in 10th grade), called “Gravity.” This song is one that has become a life lesson for me. The picture the lyrics create has spoken to me over and over through so many different situations in my life.

The lyrics of the chorus say:

“Just hold on, don’t lose your strong, just hold on…. for maybe it’s gravity, maybe it’s heartbreak, maybe it’s tragedy, but darling don’t fall too deep, cause maybe it’s gravity.”

I am in a season right now where it seems tragedy is hitting very close to home in the lives of my friends, loved ones, coworkers and I experienced my own tragedies over the last few years. Elsie’s death is a powerful message of the cyclical nature of life and to hold our tragedies ever so gently, lightly, loosely, as the story may have only just begun.

Maybe it’s tragedy, maybe it’s heartbreak?

One thing that we can count on in this life is the waves. One after another they come crashing down on the shore, some days more fierce than others, but they are always there.

We cannot stop them. If we tried with all our might, or used all the technology on earth, if we used all the educational and psychological advancements, or if we prayed really hard, we still cannot control or stop the waves.

They are connected to a force, a pull that is so great, it could kill us and it also sustains us, it grounds us and lifts us, it secures us and ALL things; gravity.

If you were to sit and chat with a random group of people I can guarantee, you would hear our stories of pain, our tragedies, and how our sorrows are an ever so familiar companion of this life.

Very few escape it, and if they have thus far, it is probably close behind. You cannot escape the waves.

I am learning that the rain or you could say the waves, truly do fall on the just and unjust. There will never be answers to the whys, which is so frustrating. But there can be a calm mighty surrender to the waves.

A surrender and an acceptance of the ride we have been given. It can be a mysterious, riveting, suspenseful, incredible journey or it can be a hopeless tragedy. We decide.

There is no promise of ease, comfort, or the absence of calamity, tragedy, and pain in this life. We are here, vulnerable, little specks of dust, doing our best to live the best life we can. Yet the forces of nature, on this rock we call home, the ebbs and flows of life, are completely out of our control.

And if we cannot stop it, if we cannot change it, if we cannot overpower it, we must surrender to it.

The waves will never stop coming. We can fight against them and watch them push us down and tumbled us under their power, or we can expect them, watch for them and learn the unmatchable power of surrender to them. Their power, their heights, their depths will propel us and take us on the ride of our life.

So darling, “Don’t let the waves swallow your brave, don’t let your heartbreak…. for maybe it’s gravity.”

From My Heart to Yours,