HOUSTON — Lainey Landry’s parents hung the stocking embroidered with her name on the mantel beside her older brothers’ even though the 9-year-old is gone. She’s still in the family Christmas card photo, but they added a message: “There’s a brighter star in the Texas sky.” And they placed two new ornaments on the tree, etched with lines from letters Lainey wrote home from Camp Mystic.
“There’s a lot of those firsts that are happening,” Natalie Landry, 42, said as she sat in the sunroom of her Houston ranch house. Behind her, Lainey’s name, scrawled in marker, was on the family chore chart, her tasks forever blank.
For the Landrys, life since Lainey and 26 other girls died in the rising waters of the Guadalupe River nearly six months ago has been a succession of choices: What to preserve, what to change? What to remember? What to do with her bedroom, her siblings’ grief and should they go to camp next summer?
The Landrys, in this respect, are no different from the other grieving parents of the campers and two counselors known as “Heaven’s 27.” Many already led intertwined lives in Dallas and Houston, attending Mystic, the same churches and colleges, sending their children to the same schools. They lobbied at the state Capitol for camp safety legislation, wearing matching buttons. Many of the families filed lawsuits, alleging that Mystic’s owners (including Dick Eastland, who died in the flood) knew the risk, failed to plan for emergencies and ordered campers to stay in cabins as floodwaters rose.
On text message threads, they share daily challenges, victories and questions large and small: Do we move? Have another child? What to do with old soccer cleats and dance shoes? Hand them down? Give them away?
But as united as they are in their grief, there are differences, too. One family is still searching for their 8-year-old daughter’s body. Another family lost twins. Others lost their only child, or only daughter. Some know more than others about the circumstances of their child’s death.
Carrie Hanna’s 8-year-old daughter, Hadley, was in the Twins cabins, where about half of the girls survived. So she learned that Hadley managed to climb a tree before she was swept away.
“Knowing is hard,” Carrie said. “How are we so unlucky? How is she so unlucky?”
The Landrys and the Hannas share a common goal: raising their surviving children. In interviews, both sets of parents discussed mourning their daughters while trying to preserve a sense of normalcy for their other, grieving children. Family holidays have proved especially fraught: a gauntlet of Halloween, Thanksgiving, now Christmas and eventually the flood’s anniversary — Fourth of July — without their girls.
“Daniel told me the other night, ‘You know what I miss most about Lainey?’” Natalie said of her 13-year-old son. “‘How she smelled in the morning.’ … She’d sit on the couch with Daniel and they would just snuggle up and watch a show and be silly. That’s when Luke brought up Christmas.”
Christmas morning always started with the boys waking Lainey.
“She would love to sleep in and they would have to be like, ‘Lainey, come on, let’s go get Mom and Dad!’” Natalie recalled. “Luke said Christmas is going to be so weird without Lainey.”
‘Not about the stuff’
The day after they identified Lainey’s body, the Landrys went to Mass. And they kept going.
“My brain was thinking of her being there screaming, being terrified, the thought of her drowning and struggling,” Natalie said. But she has come to believe her daughter “didn’t know that because she’s in heaven. Like, she’s not going to remember that.”
Sitting across from her, her husband nodded.
“Our faith is you just have to know that we get to see her again,” Ben Landry said, “and we have to be strong for our boys. And channel her joy. Because we can’t bring her back.”
Some of their decisions are accidental, like painting over the children’s height chart on a wall.
Other decisions are intentional.
At Lainey’s funeral, Natalie, an animated extrovert, decided to wear a pink “mother of the bride” dress, “since I’ll never get to be one.”
Natalie printed out photos Mystic sent her while Lainey was at camp: swimming with cabinmates, posing in silly outfits of tutus and pajamas.
Lainey sent eight letters home. “Dear Mom and Dad,” she wrote on Mystic stationery, drawing a heart for the “o” in “Mom,” “I miss you two sooooo much.”
“This was a gift we got,” Natalie said.
“We got one of them the week before she was buried,” Ben said. A friend turned the letters into Christmas ornaments, another gift. Natalie keeps one framed on her desk in the kitchen.
Ben, 44, runs the family industrial equipment company and coaches Luke’s sixth-grade football team, while Natalie spends her days ferrying the boys to nearby Catholic school and practice. Outside their home in Houston’s Tanglewood neighborhood, tree trunks are still tied with green ribbons mourning those lost in the flood.
Initially, the Landrys left Lainey’s bedroom untouched. The boys shared a room and would visit. But by September, Daniel was asking to move into his sister’s room “to be closer to Lainey.”
“That forced us to think about why he wants to be there: Well, okay, that’s special,” Natalie said.
Natalie called the person she trusted most with helping her process the grief that came with packing up Lainey’s room: her sister. Together they sorted clothes, drawings and other keepsakes, including Lainey’s first Communion rosary, “crying, laughing, angry — all the different emotions.”
By the time they finished, Natalie had let go. She didn’t need Lainey’s bedroom to remain a shrine. She tries to honor her daughter’s memory by adopting her habits, like giving random compliments.
“It’s not about the stuff,” she said. “It’s about the memories.”
‘Frozen in time’
In Dallas, Hadley’s bedroom remained as she had left it — except for clothes sent home from Mystic, laundered and folded atop her shoes.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” said Carrie, 43. “Right now it’s just a place that we can go and feel her and cry.”
“That was the first thing I did when we got home was try to go see if I can smell her on the pillow,” said her Carrie’s husband, Doug Hanna, 46, a commercial real estate agent.
But the bedding had been laundered while his daughter was at Mystic.
Hadley’s sisters sometimes visit the room to play. Hunter, 7, leaves notes for Hadley tucked in her bed. She told her mother that Hadley replies.
After the flood, Hunter started carrying her sister’s old purple backpack. She gets lonely at school, which she used to attend with Hadley. Often she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t like her mother to leave her side and struggles to fall asleep at night.
“We’ll look at pictures. You know, just scroll through old pictures, and that kind of calms her down,” Carrie said.
Carrie’s sad to see both girls avoid the playroom and backyard. They spent so much time there with Hadley on the trampoline and swings, Carrie constantly shouting for them to shut the door to keep the mosquitoes out. “Our house is a lot quieter,” she said.
Harper, 10, has survivor’s guilt. She and other campers evacuated on foot past younger siblings’ cabins, Carrie said. “So they all are like: ‘What if I had gone to go get them?’”
“I should have done more,” Harper says to her parents. “It’s my fault.”
The Hannas tell Harper that while they’re still mourning her sister, they don’t blame her. “We are absolutely devastated to have lost Hadley, but we are also so thankful we didn’t lose you,” Carrie said. “Both of those things can be true.”
Doug has found solace at church and playing pickleball with friends in the mornings, “something to put some regularity in this life that has had all the wheels blown off.”
But Carrie wrestles with guilt. She grew up on the same street where they live in the upscale Highland Park community, where Mystic has been popular for generations. Carrie loved Mystic so much, she registered her first daughter to attend soon after she was born. When Hadley feared going to camp for the first time last summer, Carrie reassured her.
“Trust me: You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be safe. You’re going to be happy, and you will love it,” Carrie told her. “And that’s what’s been really hard for me, is that she wasn’t safe.”
Carrie still flashes back to identifying her daughter’s body.
“I told you not to do it,” Doug said.
“I needed to,” Carrie said.
She didn’t recognized Hadley at first, she said. Then she saw the green-and-yellow nail polish.
After the funeral, Carrie kept Hadley’s ashes at home in an urn adorned with a pink-and-purple butterfly.
“I talk to her a lot,” Carrie said of the urn. “I tell her I miss her and I love her. I usually tell her I’m sorry most of the time: Sorry I didn’t take you to Taylor Swift. Sorry I sent you to camp.”
Before the flood, Carrie was vice president of a self-storage company, a working mom with an MBA still very involved in her daughters’ schools and activities. Now, grief makes that all difficult: cafeteria duty, volunteering with the PTA, attending their Methodist church, even chatting with other moms or compiling a grocery list. Was it Hadley who liked orange chicken, or her sisters?
Sometimes Carrie avoids social engagements that involve her daughters, then questions: Is she caving to anxiety at their expense? She braved fall parent gatherings for school and dance class only to suffer panic attacks.
“I have to get up in the morning for the girls,” she said. “I think that I would not if I had the option.”
During the day, she can pretend Hadley’s at school. But at pickup, she remembers: Hadley’s not coming home.
“We’re going to see the pictures of the other two get older and older and she’s not going to,” Carrie said. “I think about that a lot. That’s really hard. And when is it okay to change my watch background from the three of them? Or will I ever want that? I don’t know. … She’s frozen in time and I hate it.”
‘A God wink’
Natalie, counseled by relatives, decided not to identify her daughter’s body. She was determined to remember Lainey as she last saw her. “It’s closure to have her and to bury her.”
Instead, her husband viewed Lainey’s body. He removed the silver James Avery cross from her neck; rubbed her hands and feet.
Other families have started foundations in memory of their daughters. Sitting in their sun room one afternoon, the Landrys said they want to focus on their sons, to make the most of their childhood.
After the flood, Lainey’s gray tabby, Yeow yeow, turned up pregnant. She gave birth in August to what Natalie calls “Lainey’s kittens.” When one of the five creeps into the living room, Natalie summons Luke, who’s just returned from school, to gingerly carry it away.
Natalie and her husband didn’t attend Texas Hill Country camps. They have no plans for the boys to return to Camp La Junta, where Daniel and Luke had been for only a day and a half before the flood forced them to evacuate. Instead, the family will spend next summer as far as they can from Hill Country: with friends in Maine.
Daniel hasn’t completely moved into Lainey’s old room yet. Ben’s sister, an interior designer, is redecorating. They’ve kept a pile of her stuffed pigs on Daniel’s bed, her “pig army.” Natalie wears a pig necklace engraved with Lainey’s signature. A friend recovered several treasures of Lainey’s from the muck after the flood: a stuffed capybara, the first stuffed pig she got as a toddler and a clay cross.
“This is all I wanted,” Natalie said.
Ben had bought the clay cross for Lainey to take to camp, to keep at her bedside “to remember God’s with her if she gets sad.” It was recovered from her cabin. Now he keeps it at his bedside.
Lainey’s with them in other, more subtle ways, too. Like what happened at Thanksgiving.
Natalie had returned to the family’s farmhouse in rural Kansas with the boys for the first time since Lainey’s death. “It was sad but also joyful, thinking of all the memories we shared there with her,” Natalie said, how they would wander the fields, picking wildflowers.
In the house, Luke brought Natalie a picture that Lainey had drawn in colored marker, signed with a smiley face. It showed a yellow sun shining down on a tree surrounded by pink hearts.
“I counted the hearts in the sky and couldn’t believe it,” Natalie said.
There were 27. Natalie checked over and over, awestruck.
“Definitely a God wink in my book,” she said.
‘We’re going to say yes more’
After the flood, the Hannas sat their girls down and told them they would do all they could to ensure they enjoy their childhood. Yes to cookies after school. Yes to Hunter getting her ears pierced early.
“We’re going to say yes a lot more,” they said.
Harper’s response: “Can I get a phone?”
They did not say yes to a phone (yet), or to a second dog (another of the girls’ ongoing campaigns that involved an appeal to Santa). But when Harper expressed interest in attending sleepaway camp in Arkansas next summer with friends, including some former Mystic cabinmates, the Hannas considered it.
They checked the camp out. It was about as far away from them as Mystic. And like Mystic, it was on a river. Unlike Mystic, they noticed the camp was accredited, with more adult staff, equipped with radios. They phoned the owners, who said they train counselors and campers to respond in emergencies. They would hold a spot for Harper.
The Hannas said yes — for now.
The two-week session starts July 5, around the first anniversary of the flood.
“I don’t know how I’m going to let her out of my sight,” Carrie said, but “Harper has been through so much, I want to do what I can.”
“I don’t see me myself putting her on a bus this year,” Doug said. “I can see myself camping out in Arkansas for two weeks. I was kind of thinking maybe we use it as a vacation.”
Carrie wasn’t sure her daughter would want to go, come summer.
“We want her to be able to do it,” Carrie said. “Will she be able to do it? Will we? I don’t know.”
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