A Life That Matters Read Online Free PDF Page A

We all ran back to the car. I remember we had calamine lotion, like dots, all over us, and that helped. But Terri was scared to death.
    “When we were older, and Mom and Dad took us to the Jersey Shore, she was deathly afraid of the biting green flies. She hated going to the beach because of them, though she loved staying at the motel and lying on a deck chair to get a tan.”
    Aside from horseback riding, which she loved, the only time we can remember Terri doing anything athletic was when she started high school. Two of her girlfriends, including her best friend, Sue Kolb, persuaded her to come with them on a school skiing trip. We sent her in the school bus—she looking a bit green—and went to pick her up at her school when the bus returned. The kids streamed out; no Terri. Finally our daughter emerged, looking like a stiff board walking. She couldn’t bend her knees, didn’t move her arms. All she did was clump down the stairs, wrapped in her snowsuit.
    “Mom, I can’t move,” she wailed.
    I hugged her. “What’s wrong, honey?”
    “I fell. All day long I kept falling.”
    The next day, I took her to the doctor. “She’s just sore,” he said. “She should get more exercise.”
    Terri’s solution was to never go skiing again. “We used to go outside and play with the neighborhood kids,” Suzanne remembers. “Freeze tag and stickball, ice-skating and baseball. She had absolutely no interest in exercising. She did
not
like to sweat.”
    What she loved were animals. Each of our children had their own room. Terri’s, painted her favorite color, purple, was filled with so many stuffed animals she joked she could start a zoo. Because of her, we endured hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, rabbits, fish. Terri had her own fish tank. One of the neighborhood kids, Bret Lader, poured all the fish food in it at once and the fish died. Terri, by this time in her early teens, wanted to scream.
    The death of our Labrador, Bucky, was probably the biggest trauma of Terri’s early years. The love of animals never left her. When she was a teenager, she came home hysterical once, thinking she had run over a stray cat and killed it. Bob and a friend of his went to look for it, found it dead, and buried it. They told Terri it had run off chasing another cat. Only then did her tears cease. Bob claims it was the best fib he and his friend ever told.
    She loved television, too, especially cartoons and, later,
Starsky and Hutch
. Bob remembers coming into her room one time to find her crying her eyes out because Lassie had been injured.
    “Terri, it’s not real,” he said. “The dog didn’t get hurt. There are people standing there with cameras. The dog’s
acting
.”
    His reassurance did little good. A few days later, he came in again to find her crying—this time over a cartoon.
    We worried that she watched too many shows, that she didn’t get enough fresh air. Corning was the solution. She was happy when she was with her grandparents and also when we vacationed at the Jersey Shore. She’d go to the beach, though only after we convinced her that there were no green flies, but she wouldn’t go swimming.
Jaws
was the reason. She went to see it with her brother, but made him leave halfway through.
    “Our routine at the shore was to pull up to our favorite motel,” Bob remembers. “The kids would run out of the car and go up to the room, and I got stuck with the luggage. One summer, when she was thirteen or fourteen, I went outside and saw Terri in her nearly transparent bathing suit, stretching like a beauty pageant queen on the diving board at the pool.
She’s grown,
I thought, with a mixture of awe and shock at her naïveté. I made her go inside and change her suit to something more decent.”
    Terri’s clothes were usually jeans and a T-shirt. Her music was Loverboy, Duran Duran, and George Michael of Wham! When she wasn’t at school, she stayed in her room, with the door closed, playing with her animals. Sue