Hope

May 8th, 2013 by Regina Brett

By now, everyone has heard the 9-1-1 call:

 

"Help me. I'm Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years and I'm, I'm here, I'm free now."

 

Free at last. We didn’t even know she was locked up. Most of us believed she was dead.

 

The shock and celebration is starting to wear off and the anger will soon kick in.

Before it does, let’s pause to let the hope sink in.

 

Michele Knight was missing for 11 years.

Amanda Berry was missing for 10 years.

Gina DeJesus was missing for 9 years.

 

The lost have been found. They didn’t give up.

 

On Monday night, I was sitting at a restaurant listening to the students from Baldwin Wallace University dazzle us with song and dance when my husband checked his cell phone and whispered to me. “They found Amanda Berry. Alive.”

 

What?!

 

“Gina DeJesus, too,” he said.

 

I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. The story is being called a miracle. It’s more than that. It’s three miracles. Four, if you count the safety of the girl born to Amanda while she was held prisoner in the house.

 

I have never stopped thinking about Amanda since the day I sat on the couch in her living room and listened as her mother cried and begged for her safe return. Her mom kept hoping for a miracle.

 

I imagine that Amanda did, too, all those years she was locked away from the world. She never gave up. And now she is free.

 

Free to look at the stars for the first time in years. Free to see the sky. Free to sleep. Free to hope even bigger than ever.

 

Some people believe it’s dangerous to hope. They haven’t seen my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. In it, Andy writes to his friend Red: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

 

And once Red is finally free, he says: “I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

 

Hope. That’s what I wish for Amanda, Gina and Michelle.

 

 

Comments (0)

Missing girl

May 6th, 2013 by Regina Brett

They found Amanda Berry today.

Alive.

 

I'm stunned beyond words. 

 

She's been missing for over a decade. If only her mom, Louwana Miller, could be here to see her "Mandy" alive again.

 

Here's the last column I wrote about Louwana, the week she died.

 

 

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Every few months she called.

 

She always wanted the impossible: Find Mandy.

 

She wanted me to do more. Write another story. Call the FBI. Get the TV cameras rolling.

 

"Please, honey," she begged.

 

She always called me honey, though she was younger than I.

 

I never met anyone like Louwana Miller, whose daughter Amanda Berry vanished after her shift at Burger King on April 21, 2003. She had told her sister on a cell phone, "I've got a ride. I'll call you back." Then she vanished between Burger King and her home a few blocks away on West 111th.

 

Louwana lived in the upstairs of an old house. When I knocked from the porch, she hollered for me to come up.

 

"Shut the damn door," she barked.

 

She wasn't crying. She didn't act the way moms of missing children do on TV, delicately wiping tears with folded tissues while whispering pleas for help

 

Louwana was angry. She chain-smoked Marlboros. She didn't trust the police, so she put her own phone number on the fliers.

 

She would cuss out the very people who tried to help her, then she would apologize and sob like a baby, tears rolling down her big, puffy cheeks.

 

When I was there, she was watching a psychic on Montel. "We need her," Louwana hollered at the TV as a friend wrote down the number.

 

Before that psychic did her in, Louwana tried everything else.

 

She pestered the police and FBI for clues. She got people to knock on doors, staple fliers on telephone poles, hold candlelight vigils and prayer rallies.

 

She begged the media for more coverage, and we let her down.

 

She called me, angry, the day she saw the TV news offer a reward for a missing dog.

 

"What about my Mandy?" she bellowed. She called when CNN covered the woman missing in Aruba.

 

"How come she gets so much publicity?" she cried.

 

She told me she named Amanda from a Conway Twitty song, "Amanda, the light of my life." She still bought Christmas presents for Amanda and sat on her bed listening to her music.

 

Louwana started every conversation angry, cried in the middle, and ended saying, "Thank you for doing whatever you can, honey."

 

The last time we spoke, she demanded, "I want her on the news. She's faded away from the whole world. It just kills me. This is killing me." It finally did.

 

She got her wish to see psychic Sylvia Browne, who told her about a short, stocky Burger King customer in his 20s wearing a red fleece coat. The psychic said Mandy died on her birthday, that she didn't suffer, that her black hooded jacket was in a Dumpster with DNA on it.

 

The psychic promised, "You'll see her in heaven." That was Louwana's final hope.

 

Around Christmas I heard Louwana was in the hospital. It still shocked me when she died Thursday. I couldn't help thinking of how she took the faded yellow ribbons off the front yard fence, washed them and put them on Mandy's bed. How she cried, "No one cares."

 

The truth is no one cared as much as she did. No one could. She was a mother facing a fate worse than death: not knowing.

 

Every time I called the FBI, special agent Bob Hawk, who has since retired, would tell me, "We are working on it every day. We haven't given up."

 

Louwana did.

 

She died of heart failure.

 

Comments (2)

Failing forward

May 5th, 2013 by Regina Brett

Fail forward.

 

That’s what my husband taught me.

 

He’s an entrepreneur. Me, I want to get paid every Friday by someone else. I don’t mind signing the back of my paycheck. He loves signing the front of the paychecks.

 

I’ve learned a lot being married to the owner of a small business.

 

He’s a risk taker. Some risks pay off, some don’t. Actually they all pay off if you learn from them. He doesn’t let the fear of anything stop him. It simply becomes the fuel to drive him to work harder and smarter.

 

Along the way, he’s lost a few jobs but he used everything he learned to propel him forward and to give someone else a boost on the way. You can’t let the fear of failure keep you from starting a business or growing one or changing one.

 

A few years into our marriage, my husband lost his business. It was a scary time for us when he closed the door and was unemployed. But he taught me to believe big. So I believed big in him when he wanted to borrow money and start up another business, this one with a tighter, clearer, singular focus: Crisis communications.

 

He’s now the expert to call. Last year, he moved the company out of our house and onto the 32^nd floor of Terminal Tower in Downtown Cleveland. Hennes Paynter Communications is doing better than the business he lost.

 

I keep a paperweight on my desk that reads: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

 

What would you do?

 

Go do it.

 

And if you fail, let it propel you forward on that river of life that always carries you to something even better.

 

 

 

 

Comments (0)