There’s a story to be told about two brothers, one 67, the other 55, placing flowers to mark the spot where their sister was killed so many decades ago.
On Wednesday Kevin Willman of Winfield and Cliff Haines of Aurora met by the bridge in North Aurora over the Fox River to acknowledge the death of this beautiful, outgoing little girl more than 50 years ago.
Her name was Cathy Haines. She was just 10. And among her many passions was a love of reading. That’s why she was at the North Aurora library the morning of Nov. 13, 1971.
It was a different time back then – fewer people, less traffic, more freedom for kids who rode their bikes everywhere. Carefully placing the library books in the white basket attached to her pink and blue bike, the little blond who also loved music and was excited about her guitar lesson that afternoon set off for home about a quarter-mile away.
It was around 11 a.m. when Cathy crossed to the north side of the bridge that had no street-side guard rail at the time. No one will ever know why she lost control of the bike and fell about a foot down onto State Street, the brothers said. A car driven by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy happened to be driving by at just that tragic moment in time.
Because the accident occurred so close to the fire station and had been witnessed by a volunteer looking out the window, an ambulance was on the scene immediately, Cliff said. But the impact had been horrendous. Cliff never saw his sister even in death, as the casket was closed.
“I felt like I was walking in a dark cloud,” he recalled.
What made the Haines brothers’ grief even more heartbreaking was that their mother Nancy had been killed the previous year when her car went over the Interstate 88 bridge near Route 31 on her way to her North Aurora home.
No doubt lots of questions were shouted to God through angry tears during that horrible time. Two fatalities so close together seemed particularly cruel, especially for this family already struggling with rips in their tight fabric.
Nancy and husband Clifford Haines Jr. were not only separated at the time of her death in March of 1970, she had a 6-month-old son by another married man with children, who wanted nothing to do with the new baby he’d fathered, according to the brothers.
Life can get messy. And it often becomes more so when tragedy hits not once but twice.
Fate had left Cliff Haines without a mother at 13, and before he had turned 15, he also lost the little sister he adored. As he recalls, his dad, who had still been in love with his mother and was hoping for a reconciliation, was eager to raise baby Kevin after her death, despite not being the father.
But in the end, maternal grandmother Edith Jacobson stepped in. The child was adopted by Nancy’s brother Brian Willman and wife Sally, whose 3-year-old daughter Karen became his sister. And it wasn’t until Kevin was in eighth grade, after Cliff’s father had died of lung cancer, that the family gathered to let him know about these closely-held family secrets.
Hearing this news, Kevin said, was “mind-blowing.” His birth mother was dead, his birth dad was alive but equally absent, his now married-with-children cousin was actually his sibling and the beautiful little girl in the picture frame at his “Grandma Jake’s” house was a sister he never knew existed, he said.
That’s a lot to deal with for both of Nancy’s boys. But instead of more drama, the revelations formed a tight bond between the two brothers, drawn together by their mutual love of sports and music. Yet over the years they spoke very little about their loss. After all, Kevin had no memories of either. So how could he begin to understand the impact those deaths had on his sibling?
The day after Cathy was buried, work and school resumed for father and son, Cliff told me. There were no conversations, much less any grief counseling, But despite all the trauma and drama in their lives, he was determined not to add to it.
“I never went crazy for fear of hurting my father even more,” Cliff said. Nor did he want to upset Grandma Jake, who had experienced her own hurdles in life.
The brothers agree it was this determined and loving matriarch, who died in 1991, who gets credit for holding the family together.
Despite so many personal challenges, their story does indeed show how tenacious, how enduring blood ties can be. And perhaps that is really the core of this story about two brothers, torn apart by tragedy and brought together by love, who want so desperately to acknowledge a little girl lost.
On Wednesday Cliff, the software specialist, and Kevin, in marketing at College of DuPage, walked that fateful route their Cathy took 53 years ago. As dusk settled over the river, they placed a bouquet of flowers and picture of their sister taken two weeks before her death next to the regal fox statue overlooking the water.
“Fifty-three years ago sometimes feels like 53 seconds ago,” said Cliff, who admitted that throughout his life he couldn’t help but wonder “what might have been” for this outgoing little girl who loved to sing and play guitar but never got a chance to rock this world.
For Kevin, Wednesday was also “a hard day.” And yes, there were a few tears. But as he and Cliff listened to the waterfall calmly flowing over the dam, it was the rain falling from the darkening sky that brought two brothers closer to their sister.
“I’d like to think she was looking down at us,” said Kevin. “That we were feeling her tears of joy.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
