John Putnam's Journal
June 8-19, 2003
Day 14 - Sunday, June 8th, 2003 - Two weeks had gone by now. Still no Laura. I was getting more and more worried she may be lost or stuck on something. We had not approached the amount of time I speculated it would take, but I always doubted myself and feared we would not find her. The previous night, mom and dad asked us to come pick them up from the lake house around noon. I got a call from them around 10am that morning. Mom said they were ready and could we come over. Audrey and I jumped out of bed, dressed and hit the road. Before we left the hotel, we spoke to the manager one more time. Told him we were leaving and tried to somehow thank him for what all he had done for us. There was no way. Phil's wife had come back down to the area a couple of days prior so we now had two vehicles. We hooked up by phone with Phil and agreed to meet down the road somewhere for lunch. We picked up mom and dad, filled up with gas and headed home. We met Phil and Robin for lunch and they followed us the rest of the way back to Fort Worth. Audrey and I dropped mom and dad off at their house. They had not been there in 2 weeks and this was going to be tough. We pulled down the driveway to the back of the house. Mom got out of the car and immediately lost it. She just wandered around in a daze crying. She had so many memories of Laura there it was clearly too much to handle. Dad tried to console her but this was something that had to happen. She had to do this and we had to let her. I unloaded them quickly as I could not handle seeing her this way. All I wanted to do was get out of there and get home as soon as possible. We dropped them off at almost exactly 4:30pm and probably left about 4:40pm with the sounds of mom crying ringing in our ears. I was ready for another small break from the family for a while. Audrey and I got home about 5:15pm. I had some yard work to do and Audrey worked on the inside of the house. We tried to relax. We had a couple of drinks and dinner. We had planned on going back to work the next day. No later than Tuesday for sure. I was still of the opinion she would not come up for another week at least, maybe two. Finally about 9pm we decided to clean up and go to bed. While in the shower, I received two phone calls from mom and dad. Before I called them back I had a feeling. Dad answered the phone and said they had found her. My verbal response was that it was great. I was so relieved. The fear of never finding her was gone. We were not going to have to go through life without having found her. That was an enormous weight off our shoulders. That phone call was as profound a moment as the one we got about her missing. Now we were able to move on to planning the funeral and moving toward some piece of closure. We told them we loved them and discussed working or not that week. I decided not to. Beside, what was I going to do. We had a lot of planning. About 15 minutes later, Phil called me. He asked if I had spoken to mom and dad. I said that I had and the line became silent. We both instantly fell apart crying. All we could say was we would talk to each other the following day. That was the worst I had felt up to that point throughout the whole ordeal. We were her brothers and this hurt like hell. It was almost like it was official now, she was gone. I felt lost and empty. I had said several times before during the previous weeks that I was preparing to find a place in my heart and life big enough to hold this gigantic hole. This was the worst, the first time Phil and I spoke after we found out we had her body. It was so bizarre again, that certain events unfolded this way. We had been down there for 2 solid weeks. According to the wardens, they found her around 6:30pm. Exactly 2 hours after we dropped mom and dad off at their house. Mom contended that Laura was just waiting for us to leave before she surfaced because she did not want us there. I am not saying it did, and I am not saying it didn't. It was just another amazing thing. But those amazing things were becoming harder and harder to explain. It was like she died and left this world but not without helping us from beyond. She gathered us all up and on the way to Marble Falls she showed me that she was an angel in a bumper sticker. And she also said, "Oh, by the way, could you play 'this' song at my funeral." And, "Oh, by the way, spend 2 weeks down here in this beautiful place with privacy and deal with the shock of my loss." And, "Oh, by the way, when you are ready to leave here, I am going to wait until you are home and then, I am going to come to you so you can get on with it." And that was not all, there would be more to come. The decision had been made that the funeral would take place the following Saturday, June 14th. Somehow the events lined up such that we would have Laura's funeral the day after Phil's birthday and the day before Father's Day. We had planned on doing a slide show with some pictures of her throughout her life. It was going to be shown before the service with 8 or 10 songs we picked out. Something for the early comers to watch while they waited. We ended up finding some 250 pictures for that. Phil put together a video using the song "Think of Laura" that we going to present as our eulogy. Our cousin Laura Putnam Jenkins was going to sing "How Great Thou Art". We had planned on getting a bag piper to do "Amazing Grace". Between all that and the flowers, and a visitation, there was a lot to do. We spent the week getting everything taken care of. Audrey and I had a bunch of family coming in. So did the rest of our family. People were dropping off tons of food and flowers to mom and dad's house. Every time I went over there, there were guests there in some capacity. Mom was so busy putting things together. Dad went to work a couple of times. Plans had been made for mom to have a visitation that coming Thursday the 12th. I can't say Phil and I were completely on board with that scenario, however we realized it was very important to mom. Our only main objection to the idea was asking our friends to drive out to Grapevine on Thursday night and grieve with us and then come back on Saturday and do it again. However, most of mom's world was in Grapevine. So we did it. I am glad we did. I didn't really know what to expect but I ended up seeing people I hadn't seen in many, many years. It really made us feel good. Two hours we stood there and received people. Some I knew, some I didn't. Some smiled and offered condolences and others were speechless. A couple of times I had people who were violently obsessed with finding the person who killed her. I was surprised at those people. But nevertheless, it was a trip down memory lane for sure. It is quite possible I saw over 90 percent of all the people I have ever known. A friend of mom's had made a memorial for Laura for the visitation. The urn was there, but Laura was not in it yet. Some of her sentimental things were there, cheerleading stuff, Zeta stuff, pictures, a dress she wore when she was about 2 years old. I had never seen a memorial like that for someone I cared about and loved. It was sad. I imagined if she could see that or not and if she could, was she sad too. After it was over, some of Phil's and my friends were going down the street to a restaurant and bar I go to often. I had told the staff there we would be bringing in about 20 to 30 people. When we showed up, the manager had compensated some appetizers for us and paid up to $100 towards our tab. It was nice. I remember thinking, the visitation is over, which I was dreading and we are now within less that 36 hours of having the funeral. Almost three weeks had passed now and I was ready to get the funeral behind us. The funeral was about how you would expect it to be. Some 1,200-1,400 people attended. That figure came from the church. Capacity was 1,200 and a lot of people had to stand. The service was video taped. I have a copy but have not watched it. No special reason, I just don't watch a bunch of video tapes. The following week, after the funeral, we went back to work. I remember finding Phil sitting in his truck about mid-morning on that Monday. He was in tears. He couldn't figure out why he was at work. We all still had folks in town. Throughout the week people went back home. Finally on Thursday morning I believe Audrey and I said so-long to the last of our guests. That should have been around the 19th of June. That afternoon I got a call from dad. He said they had found the boat. Here we go, begin the second chapter in this ordeal…
|