Adam Uster, my beloved son, remains held in my mind and heart as existing in the present tense.
He lives in Brooklyn with his young family, his wife, and two little girls who are four and six years old. He is the youngest son of a blended family of five children. I am Adam’s 77-year-old retired mom living a peaceful single life in Bend Oregon.
Adam is my youngest child, my sweet son, who is kind, funny, creative, and always eager to connect with family and friends. He is our hero, our rock, the pin in the hinge that held us all to each other. Adam is a family treasure.
Adam’s reputation is someone everyone wants to know. He often hosted neighborhood dinners at his Brooklyn townhouse, inviting a diverse group. He took obvious pleasure in encouraging new connections between friends and neighbors.
Adam travels to all our family events and celebrations to share joy with us. No event in our family will ever happen without the addition of his energy and love. Adam will always be part of these family gatherings and connections, always and forever.
On May 1, 2023, I was ending a week’s visit with Adam’s young family in Brooklyn. I was to leave at noon that day for LaGuardia to return home to Oregon.
Adam and I spent that pleasant, sunny, spring morning walking the girls to school, walking back home all the while chatting easily with each other as was our special connection.
When we returned to the house, Adam unexpectedly turned to me and said: “I need to run to the store, Mom. I promise to be back in time to order your ride and say goodbye before you leave for the airport.”
“No need to rush, Adam,” I told him. “I can easily order my ride to the airport.”
He wanted to give me that last gift as proof that he was my loving son. He said: “No, no, Mom, I’ll be back in time to do that.”
“Be safe, Adam,” I said.
He mounted his bike, pulling the cargo carriage attached to hold the groceries, and peddled up the street.
Ninety minutes later, I received a text from Adam. “On my way,” it read.
Fifteen minutes later, as I continued to wait with my suitcase in his living room, my daughter-in-law ran down from her upstairs office with panic in her voice yelling: “Adam has been in an accident.”
She ran out the door to bike one mile to the scene where Adam’s crushed body lay on the Brooklyn residential street.
He had been pulled under a flatbed truck hauling concrete barriers and driven by an 18-year-old. The truck had suddenly turned right, crossing the road’s bike path and forcing Adam’s entrapment under its chassis.
The tragedy was videoed by nearby store cameras. Because of that witness, I can count to three in the time the truck had hit Adam, pulled him under, and the rear wheel and ran over Adam’s hips.
The truck makes a hiccup up-and-down motion as it rides over Adam as if he were a bag of trash, an inconvenient obstacle in the street.
He was barely conscious when his wife arrived at the scene, quickly going into shock and then taken by ambulance to the hospital two miles away.
The medical staff tried whatever was necessary to restore his blood circulation with two surgeries, two resuscitations, and sixty pints of blood.
After I fetched the little girls from school, and with Adam’s closest friend offering to stay at home for the children, I was free to join his wife at the hospital.
At 5 p.m., Adam’s wife and I sat in the general public hospital lobby with only the hospital chaplain to speak with us. No medical staff ever came to us with an update on Adam’s condition. At 7 pm, we phoned the ICU, and the medical staff said we could visit the unit.
I saw my son for the first time since saying goodbye that morning.
He was on a respirator, intravenous tubes about his body, bed sheets and blankets piled atop his abdomen to cause pressure on his crushed hips, and his eyes rolled back in his head so that all that was seen was the whites of his eyes.
He was dead. Adam, my beautiful son, the devoted husband and best father ever, and the very healthy and strong man, had changed, was gone, was not in that bed but now forever in our thoughts and hearts.
Two hours passed, and his wife then told the staff to stop the ventilator. A few moments later, he was pronounced dead at 9:27 pm.
In 75 years of life, I have never wept with the force and depth that I did that evening with his wife by his bedside.
Adam will be with me forever. It is a haunting of a forever spirit. My most incredible pain is knowing the daughters that he adored will be without him for their entire long lives.
The following day, the little girls woke and rushed down from their bedroom, bouncing and happy with anticipation of seeing their dad and shouting: “When can we go to see Papi?”
Mom sat them on her lap and told them: “Papi is dead.”
The eldest child’s face exploded in grief. I’ll never get the picture and the sound of her moaning scream out of my mind.
I had phoned my daughter in Denver, who quickly found a flight to NYC to help us. She posted on Facebook about her brother’s tragic death, and people began reaching out to our family with kindness and empathetic words of comfort as word spread of our loss.
Like a large boulder dropped into a pond, there was the loud splash of Adam’s sudden ugly death, and then the progressing rings of grief ripples as the news spread to more family members and friends.
My 48-year-old stepson, who lived in Miami with his wife and two teens and was suffering from ALS but still functioning at a reasonable level, was told of Adam’s death; he soon suffered a heart attack and was pronounced dead a few days later.
We discovered that people with ALS are prone to heart failure from “broken heart syndrome”. Adam and his funeral were one week apart.
Adam continues to live in the present and future because our longing for him and the pain of losing him lives permanently in us.
We are told we should be grateful for having him for the past 39 years. We are grateful. Of course we hold those joyful memories. He will be 39 years old forever.
The enormous potential for Adam’s future will remain potential unfulfilled, never benefitting the world he was born into.
We believe that the pain in our hearts is because we loved him to the max. We believe there is no answer to the forever question: “Why?”
Anne Goldner is a retired mother and grandmother living Bend, Oregon.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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