“Are you sleeping at night?”
Crystal Whitely pondered the question posed to her for a second. Then, through a tight smile, she said, “No, not really. I don’t know if I will ever sleep like I used to.”
It was a statement that was sort of tough for me to get my head around. Imagine something so horrific, so life changing that you don’t think you will ever sleep like you did before that terrible thing happened.
Like a lot of people on the late afternoon of May 22, Crystal didn’t give the weather warnings she heard on TV much thought at first. Dire weather predictions are something you get used to when you live in the Midwest. Then Crystal’s father, Felix Whitely, called her on her cellphone.
“He said, ‘You better get the kids and get into your bathtub,’” Crystal said.
So the young mother of three collected her children — Shante, 10, Trenton, 6, and Keana 4 — and ran to the bathroom in her home at 1602 E. 18th St. Crystal had her children climb into the tub first and then laid on top of them.
The storm ripped through the small house and picked the bathtub off the ground with Crystal and her children inside. The bathtub was thrown out of the house and tipped on its side, tossing Crystal and her children out of it.
“The noise was so loud I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t even tell if my children were screaming,” she said.
As the storm tossed the bathtub, Crystal felt a small leg by her hand. She didn’t know who the leg belonged to but she grabbed onto it and refused to let go. When the tornado passed, Crystal was in her front yard. Keana was next to her. Shante and Trenton were missing.
Despite the pouring rain and her numerous injuries, including broken ribs and a collapsed lung, Crystal picked up Keana and frantically began looking for Shante and Trenton. The first person she saw was her neighbor, Crystal Cogdill. She was looking for her 9-year-old son, Zach.
The women spent a few frantic minutes searching the area for their children but as her adrenaline rush wore off, Crystal Whitely knew she needed to get herself and Keana to a hospital. Someone — she’s not sure who — drove them to a triage center set up at 20th and Main streets.
“I was in shock. I was shivering and kept going in and out,” she said.
Medical personnel at the triage center took Keana from Crystal and then she was taken to Freeman. She would find out much later that Keana had been taken to Cox Medical Center in Springfield.
Sometime Sunday night, Aleta Whitely, Crystal’s mother, had to tell her daughter that Shante had been killed. Much later, Moses Caton, Crystal’s ex-husband, called from a hospital in Kansas to say that Trenton also had been killed. Later, she found out that Zach, her neighbor’s son, had also been killed in the storm.
That’s why Crystal doesn’t sleep much right now.
It’s been almost two months since that horrible night, but Crystal no longer thinks in terms of months. She thinks in terms of minutes, then hours.
“Day by day. That’s how I get by,” she said.
When Crystal said that, Keana looked up from the coloring book she was working on in Felix and Aleta’s home in Baxter Springs, Kan.
“Why do you keep saying that, Mommy?” she asked.
Crystal just looked at her daughter and smiled.
Crystal and I talked about the future. She wants to return to school and get her nursing degree. Hopefully, in a few weeks, she’ll be cleared to return to work.
“But it’s hard to see the future without my children. Things will never be normal again. We are just going to have to make our own normal,” she said.
Crystal says she has good days and she has bad days. The good days are tolerable. The bad days are horrible. But, she keeps on. She has to.
She has to be there to hold onto Keana.
Tornado: Mike Pound
Mike Pound: Mother of storm victims getting by ‘day by day’
- Tornado: Mike Pound
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Mike Pound: Saying nice things about St. John’s folks is easy
Francis Williams called me Wednesday morning and told me she reads my column “most every day.” I then waited for her next sentence, which usually goes something like this: “And I think you are a moron.”
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Mike Pound: Joplin Habitat looking for eligible families
A quick drive on Missouri Highway 171 near the Joplin Regional Airport tells you all you need to know.
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Mike Pound: Woman’s effort snags scrubs for Joplin
It was an idea so simple and so obvious that it makes people slap their head and say “Why didn’t I think of that?”
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Mike Pound: Veterans bearing gifts coming to Joplin
Robert Marrone told me that a planned trip to Joplin by a group of veterans from California University of Pennsylvania is just another way for them to give back to the community.
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Mike Pound: Minot, N.D. needs Joplin’s support, too
I tend to go through life without thinking. Or without thinking too much. I always felt that deep thinking was for folks ... well for folks who were deep thinkers. I tend to be a shallow thinker.
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Mike Pound: Winning teams in place before the tornado struck
We don’t have many big meetings here in the newsroom. I think, in part, that’s because nobody wants to spend much time in a room full of newspaper people. That’s what I think.
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Mike Pound: Group comes together for mother, child
The women all knew each other but they didn’t know each other well. They grew up in the same town, and they graduated from the same high school, but because of their slight age differences none of them were ever close friends.
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Mike Pound: There is no stopping the St. Mary’s backers
For a woman who is raising some serious cash, Tracey Welch doesn’t like to talk much about money. In response to a question this week about how close she and the other folks raising money for St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary School were to Tracey’s $25,000 goal, she sort of dodged the question.
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Mike Pound: Mother of storm victims getting by ‘day by day’
“Are you sleeping at night?” Crystal Whitely pondered the question posed to her for a second. Then, through a tight smile, she said, “No, not really. I don’t know if I will ever sleep like I used to.”
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Mike Pound: How can we thank all those who have helped Joplin?
I sort of got a problem. It’s a nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. The problem is I can’t keep up with all of the nice things folks have been doing for Joplin. I’m not the only one having that problem.
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