Nobody will braid Torriana Cox’s hair as well as her mother, who died last week trying to escape the E2 nightclub.
But there is no shortage of aunts and cousins willing to try.
Likewise, family members have been driving the 3-year-old to day school, years before the girl fully understands the loss of her mother, Eazay Rogers.
As families mourn, they are also rushing to care for at least 36 children who lost a parent when 21 people died Monday in a crush of panicked people and a fog of pepper spray at the South Side nightclub.
Grandmothers are preparing to raise children for a second time. Surviving parents are struggling to describe death to toddlers who have not yet asked and won’t understand that their father or mother is gone.
Those mourning find sanctuary in the children, reminders of deceased parents.
And two mothers who had children by the same man–now deceased–have met in person for the first time to form an alliance against the sorrow.
The day before Eazay Rogers’ funeral, her tight-knit family crowded into the home of the family matriarch, Mary Rogers.
Torriana and 3-week-old Torrence Cox Jr. have moved back indefinitely, and while the infant is comfortable in the arms of his many relatives, his sister is aware of why the family is gathered. Nobody had to tell Torriana how her mother died.
“She knows,” Mary Rogers said, brushing at a tear. “[Torriana] pointed to the television and said, `That’s the place my mommy is dead at.'”
Gale Garrett-Butler, 49, touched her daughter’s face at the morgue.
“I told her, `Thirty-one years ago when you came into the world I loved you, 31 years later as you leave I still love you,'” Garrett-Butler said.
When she got home that day, she sat her 9-year-old grandson, Monte Johnson, on the couch next to her. Garrett-Butler explained to Monte that his mother, Teresa Johnson-Gordon, had gone to heaven.
“We are going to do the best we can down here,” she said. “She will be proud of you every day of your life.”
She said Monte responded: “Now you are going to be my mom.”
Monte, being a good student, told his grandmother that he wanted to go to school the next day. He said that otherwise he would have too much work to make up.
Monday ended at 8 p.m. for Monte. His grandmother tucked him in, and they said the Our Father. They asked God to bless everybody. Then Monte added, “Really, really God, you have to bless Teresa.”
“I said, well, you know, it’s me and you now,” Garrett-Butler told him. “We have to do what we need to do.”
He told his grandmother to wake him up early for school. He didn’t want to be late.
When Tience Moore, 22, first saw Michael Wilson hold their baby “little Mike,” she felt the presence of God.
Wilson was her first love, her high school prom date, but she had never felt so close to Wilson as that moment in the delivery room when she named her son after his father.
Though Wilson did not live with Moore, he would visit Mike, 3, weekly, playing Spider-Man video games and building things with Legos. Moore worries for a future of empty holidays. Wilson used to take Mike trick or treating. They were supposed to go to the auto show last week.
“He reminds me of his father, the hairline. He just looks like his father spit him out,” Moore said. “Every time I look in his eyes, I just want to cry. I’m hurt because [Wilson’s] gone but most of all I’m hurting because I’m wondering what my son is thinking. I don’t know if he’s really going to understand it.”
More Top Picks Best Clip On Magnifiers For Glasses
Mike doesn’t know his father is dead, but Moore believes he senses it. He’s seen his mother crying. He asked her if she missed somebody.
Moore has decided to let her son view his father’s body at the wake.
“We are going to take him down there and show him that Daddy is asleep now. He was sick; he went to sleep. He went to visit the angels, and he’s not going to come back. But he’s watching you everyday. He sees you, but you aren’t going to be able to see him,” she said.
Mary Carwell, mother of victim Demetricta Carwell, 23, has had trouble sleeping and eating, but has found in her granddaughter a reason to overcome the sorrow.
The refrigerator in Mary Carwell’s South Side apartment is covered in magnets that her granddaughter Laneisha Crawford happily moves across the door.
“This is a picture of my birthday,” the 4-year-old said Friday, holding up a snapshot of herself smiling warmly.
Minutes later, Laneisha dropped a giant red stuffed dog and crawled into the lap of her uncle, Cortez Carwell. As she bent her uncle’s braids into “teddy bear ears,” he said he sometimes thinks the girl is trying to cheer everyone up. Still, there is sadness.
“It feels like the end of the world or something,” he said, “like a dream that ain’t real.”
Laneisha knows her mother has died, that she “has gone to heaven with God and the angels,” as Mary Carwell explained it. Laneisha knows her mother died “because those people stepped on her.”
“She walked up to me Thursday and asked me if I was going to keep her. She asks questions. She’s a bright little girl,” Carwell said. “I said `Do you want to stay with me?’ She said `I love you,’ then jumped down and ran to play.
“I’m going to take care of her. I’m going to keep her. I’m not going to let her go with anybody else, not as long as I’ve got breath in my body.”
Maurice Robinson Jr. explained from behind two, crooked, growing-in front teeth that his father is now an angel.
“Because when they go up to heaven, they be angels. They fly around the sky,” the 6-year-old said.
Angels, Maurice said, can see people on Earth, but people on Earth can’t see angels. “If you don’t see them, you miss them,” he said.
Maurice, a miniature version of his father with thick eyebrows and short, braided hair, watches the news reports on television. As one newscast ends, he switches to another. Then he watches cartoons.
He sucks his thumb, while rubbing his mother’s skin and hair. His mother, Tamita Duncan, 22, sits on a black and beige couch and recalls the similarities between Maurice and his father, 22.
Both talked fast, writing their words just as close together. They hummed while eating.
They wrestled in the living room.
For the first five years of Maurice’s life, his father would come see him every two weeks, but in September that changed.
Robinson was shot last summer as he was leaving E2, the club where he died last week. Duncan had given him a choice to either be an integral part of his son’s life or leave it altogether.
She told him: “We never know when God is going to call us, when it’s going to be your turn.”
Robinson responded: “You’re right. I could have died out there. I couldn’t imagine leaving here and my baby not knowing me.”
And so the father-son relationship truly began, one visit at a time, from after school, helping with homework, until Maurice went to sleep.
Duncan and Robinson’s new girlfriend, mother of a newborn girl by Robinson, met last week.
Duncan said she and Robinson’s girlfriend recognize that they are family now, and they plan to begin spending time together as the children grow up. Duncan hopes Maurice will share stories with his half-sister about their father.
“We were talking like we had known each other all of our lives,” Duncan said of Robinson’s girlfriend.
The children met last week at a funeral.
“Our kids’ father is gone. We have to be there for each other and for each other’s kids,” Duncan said. “We are connected in a new way.”