Tragedy hits, but hope lives in this family

The Boston Herald

February 28, 2001

Tom Lehmann, 48, was buried last Friday after a three-year battle with cancer. It was a fierce battle. When he was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread from his colon to his liver. A succession of experimental therapies bought him time, but at a big price.

The treatments slowed the disease, but slowed him down, too. A mailman accustomed to walking miles every day, there were now too many days he couldn't make it to the next room. Yet when he could walk, in the brief remissions between chemotherapies, when he had a little of his old strength back, he'd be in his back yard throwing a ball around with his 11-year-old son, Keith. Or in the next room on the ham radio with his 16-year-old son, Jeff. Sick, exhausted, bald, seemingly defeated, "We never had even a little good news," his wife Meg said. "We always heard: 'This didn't work. You're not gonna get better.' " But right to the end, Lehmann continued to fight. And so did Meg. "I couldn't do much, though. It wasn't like a broken leg. I couldn't make it all better. I could keep his spirits up, but I couldn't get rid of the cancer."

Meg kept his spirits up, kept the house running, kept her job, kept her sons focused on school and their lives, refusing to let the disease destroy them, too. She kept track of doctor's appointments, tests, medications. She kept the ground from caving in. Friday, after the burial, she was thinking that she had gotten through it. "I did it and I didn't fall apart," she said. At home, surrounded by family, she started to relax. "We had a meal. We talked. We were together."

The house was still full of people when the telephone rang. Her brother, Bill, his wife and two children had been in an accident, the caller said. Bill and his younger son were OK but his wife and 8-year-old son had been airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital. They had left her house only an hour before. They had just stood at the grave beside her. "Here we were again, jumping into a tragedy. I thought, How can this be? We've been through so much."

Bill had been back and forth [from Carlisle to Hanson] to visit Tom so many times. He'd come and sit and watch TV with him. He'd come and take him out to a local restaurant or when Tom was too sick to go out, he'd bring the food to him. "For Christmas my son wanted to see a Syracuse-BC game. So my husband got tickets but then he was too sick to go. So Bill drove all the way down here and all the way to BC to take him to the game."

Late Friday afternoon, Bill fell asleep at the wheel just five miles from his house. Driving into Mass General Friday night, Meg didn't know if her sister-in-law and nephew were dead or alive. She saw her nephew first. "He was lying on a hospital bed with a collar on." He was cut and banged up but he was OK. His mother was being wheeled into surgery, but she was OK, too, her injuries, a broken leg and a fractured rib, not life-threatening. Seat belts saved the lives of everyone in the family. The mini-van slid into a row of trees and crumpled like a tin can.

"You think things are bad and that they can't get worse," Meg said a few days later. "But they can get so much worse. Everything you have, you have to be thankful for. I have my boys and sleeping in the house last night, thinking about what could have happened to Bill, I felt sure that despite everything that has happened, we're all gonna make it after all."