Grieving
mom: ‘They lied to me’ about the danger
By
Peter Gelzinis
Boston Herald Columnist
Sunday, July 23, 2006 - Updated: Jul 24, 2006
Elisa
Santry was due to come home tomorrow.
Home to a second-floor apartment in Southie and the family who
expected to be dazzled by stories of an inquisitive 16-year-old
girl’s first great adventure, some 3,000 miles away in the Utah
desert.
“She was going to come home with a whole
new view of life,” Elisa Woods softly recalled yesterday, in a voice
every bit as heavy as it was hollow.
“I called her my miracle,” this
mother said of her youngest child and only daughter. “I had
hemorrhaged (during the pregnancy) and the doctors at St. Margaret’s
thought both of us were going to die. Her father and I couldn’t
agree on a first name, so I gave her mine.”
In place of sleep, Woods spent all of
Friday night and yesterday morning tenderly laying out the moments
of her daughter’s life on a white poster board. Today, that collage
of pictures will stand inside O’Brien’s Funeral Home, where a
shattered universe of young and old will see Elisa’s radiant smile,
hear her voice and be reminded of the kind and generous spirit who’s
been so inexplicably taken from them.
Tomorrow, on the day Elisa should
have come home, she will be buried.
“All that matters to me right now,” her
mother said, “is laying my baby to rest. I want to make sure she’s
at peace. That’s the most important thing. As for everything else,
well, that can wait . . . ”
Woods’ voice trailed off, but not the
simmering pain in it. The “everything else” she alluded to happened
to be the worst nightmare of every parent.
A child who was a joy, who earned good
grades in school and the respect of everyone she met, wrote an essay
for the Summer Search scholarship program that won her a spot on a
22-day Outward Bound Wilderness expedition in Utah.
Woods, who freely admitted, “I’ve
always been overprotective of my ‘miracle baby,’ ” was fearful and
uneasy about the cross-country journey her daughter yearned to make.
“I was worried that there wasn’t enough
supervision,” Woods said, “and that’s exactly what I said to Meg,
the person who was Alisa’s mentor at Summer Search.
“But Meg assured me that there was
going to be plenty of supervision and that nobody has ever died on
one of these (Outward Bound) trips. And that was a lie.
“They lied to me,” Woods said, her voice
breaking under the weight of anger and regret. “If they had given me
the answers they were supposed to, if they told me my little girl
would be walking around in 110-degree heat . . . in a desert . . .
by herself . . . I would’ve taken her right out.
She never would’ve gone in the first
place,” Woods said. “And sure, she would’ve been mad at me. But
she’d still be alive.”
A couple of days ago, Woods listened to
a woman’s sobs on the other end of her phone line. A month earlier,
the same woman had convinced Woods to suspend her fear and entrust
her only daughter into the hands of strangers -strangers who were
supposed to provide her with a life-affirming experience.
Now, all the woman could say amid her
sobs was, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Over and over again.
“ ‘You’re sorry!’ I told her. ‘What
about me?’ I said. ‘What do you think I’m feeling? You lied to me!’
”
Snoozing on a chair in that living
room yesterday was a cat named Trouble, waiting for a 16-year-girl
to come home, so he could curl up in her bed once more.
“My daughter, my baby, dreamed about
being either a veterinarian or a pediatric orthodontist,” Woods
said. “She would’ve done it, too. She has a brother who graduated
from MIT on a full scholarship. She knew what the future held for
her. And now . . . my heart’s breaking over how she suffered.”
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