Time has done nothing to ease the pain of a father whose teenage son died nearly four decades ago.
By KATHRYN WEXLER
Published September 7, 2003
[Times photos: Stefanie Boyar]
Tears still well up in Felix Gomez’s eyes during his daily visits to his son’s grave.
Statues that Gomez placed over the years to adorn the headstone, below, have been stolen.
The bedroom of Felix “Boy” Gomez Jr. is largely as he left it in 1966, except for his parents’ addition of a shrine to their son.
TAMPA - Among the boom-era concrete houses of West Tampa, a place of flower beds and chain-link fences, grief came on Feb. 2, 1966, and stayed.
That morning, a 17-year-old awoke on the slender mattress in his indigo bedroom. On one side of his bed was a stack of Archie comic books, on the other, a bottle of Jade East, "a man's cologne," the box said.
The shirts that hung in his closet, like the red-checked button down and the blue one with the fat zipper, were crisply ironed, thanks to a doting older sister. On the wall, a ripped-out magazine page on how to select a car engine was stuffed into a small frame.
Felix "Boy" Gomez Jr. was a gawky senior at Leto High, a bad boy in the way kids were bad in those days. He dyed his hair blond, swaggered like James Dean, tore apart engines and put them back together with more kick.
But really, he was a good boy who came home to his fragile mother at night and obeyed his adoring father, who forbade him to quit school to work for J.M. Fields grocery store.
On that terrible morning nearly 40 years ago, Boy went to school and never came home.
Between classes, he complained of a bad headache. He went to his sister's nearby house, then the hospital. He had a brain aneurysm. He lay unconscious for five days on the starched white sheets at Tampa's Good Samaritan Hospital and finally slipped gently into death.
One late night a few weeks later, his father, Felix Gomez, drove his 1964 Ford Galaxy into Colon Cemetery, a few miles from home. He balanced a goodbye note on the steering wheel and staggered to Boy's fresh grave.
There he knelt, aching and willing, pistol cocked.
A car pulled up then, its headlights glinting off the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. From the driver's seat emerged his son's friend, a boy, really. Gomez shoved the gun into his front pocket.
"Mr. Gomez," the youth called out, "that's not the thing to do. That's not the right thing to do!"
Gomez returns to Colon Cemetery off busy Columbus Drive daily. He sat recently on a bench facing the headstone, his big shoulders drooping. He is 79. His two daughters have married and borne children of their own.
Yet no one has filled the black hole his son's death created in his life.
Gomez's face still crumples easily. He drags a white handkerchief roughly across his watering eyes.
"To me, he's never been gone," he says.
Gomez blanketed Boy's grave with a slab of concrete and shielded it from the sky by an aluminum canopy.
He has perfectly preserved Boy's room for nearly 40 years. The shirts are still hanging in the closet, the cologne souring. The LP that Boy left on the turntable the morning he collapsed is still there, a Dean Martin record he bought on his dad's recommendation.
Gomez rigged an automatic spotlight to shine directly on Boy's portrait every night, all night, keeping away the darkness until the bedroom is once again awash with the morning light.
Boy is protected now.
***
It wasn't until Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying in 1969 that America stopped treating death like a stigma, something unfit for conversation.
"In 1966, we were still at a point where we inhibited grief," says Gordon Thornton, president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling in West Hartford, Conn., and professor of psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
"We were clamping it down, hiding it," Thornton says.
In the decade that followed, the public began to mourn collectively and more openly. Universities offered courses in aspects of dying, lending an academic stamp of approval to public discourse about the subject.
"There's been a revolution where death and dying have really come out of the closet," says Thomas Frantz, director of the counselor education program at the Department of Counseling and Psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "Support groups sprang up all over the country - parents groups, children's groups."
The latest trend to emerge among grief counselors is to view loss as an opportunity for personal growth.
Pamela Blair, co-author of the book I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One, says mourners transcend despair when they imbue significance into the life of a loved one.
"My philosophy is . . . why not make some meaning out of that life?" Blair says.
Experts say the death of a child is the hardest to bear.
"A child symbolizes to us some very critical aspects of our lives," Frantz says. "They are part of how we transcend death ourselves because they live on."
Guilt over a child's death, even if the parents could have done nothing to prevent it, also can set in deeply, Frantz says. Some hold tight to their grief, believing that when sadness lifts, love is lost.
Alan Wolfelt, director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colo., who has written books on grieving, says unending grief is unhealthy.
"The more alive you try to keep someone who is dead, the more dead you become to those around you," Wolfelt says.
Pat Loder, executive director of Compassionate Friends in Oak Brook, Ill., still wells up over the death of her two children 12 years ago in a car accident.
"You have to feel it, walk through the shadows, walk through the valley," Loder says. "But the important thing is you don't camp there."
Boy's birthday and the anniversary of his death are the hardest times for his family. They don't mention him around Mrs. Gomez, who is schizophrenic and would become distraught.
Professional help was never part of their lives.
"I don't think they had grief counseling back then," Gomez says. "You just had to grit your teeth and move on."
Counseling sounds somewhat pointless to them anyway.
"You never forget," Boy's sister Orchid Ward says. "There's nothing really that anybody can say."
***
Four decades back, when Gomez was working as a warehouse manager for a plumbing supply store, he stuck his key into the ignition of his red Ford Galaxy one morning and BANG!
Out he jumped, yanking open the hood. The engine was spewing white smoke. Something smelled like it was burning.
Gomez saw his teenage son and his best friend, Tony, before he heard their guffaws.
"There on the corner was him and Tony, laughing their butts off," Gomez says, laughing himself, just like he did that day.
"He put a damn bomb in the car!"
That was just like Boy. If the skinny prankster wasn't startling his dad, he was hiding in the trunk of a car. Or unscrewing light bulbs. Or offering his sister a pancake the size of a pea.
"He would have been a comedian," says his sister Gilda Cash.
The jokes never angered Gomez. Not when his namesake reminded him so much of his rambunctious youth.
Boy was the baby, after sisters Orchid and Gilda. Home was Ybor City, in what the family still calls "the projects." Felix Sr. was of Italian and Spanish descent, his wife, Selvia, Spanish.
For as long as anyone can remember, the baby was affectionately called Boy, common among Spanish-speaking families.
Mrs. Gomez was long troubled by mental illness. The Gomez kids stuck together, taking care of one another and the household when their mother couldn't.
They moved to a stucco home on N Thatcher Avenue in 1965, part of a wave of second-generation Spaniards, Italians and Cubans seeking the middle-class comforts of carports and lawns.
Boy loved motorcycles. So Gomez bought him a Spanish-manufactured Bultaco, and a Yamaha, both with nickel-plated fenders and rims. A Chevy II followed.
He bought him a .22-caliber rifle and gun rack. Gomez hadn't mounted it before Boy died. It is still leaning against the bedroom wall.
Gomez was a warehouse manager by the time Boy died, but he'd been an officer for the Tampa Police Department for much of the 1950s, assigned to the homicide division. The bodies of dead strangers did nothing to prepare him for the death of his kin.
"It's altogether different," says Gomez, sitting at a table at La Teresita Restaurant, a few blocks from Colon Cemetery.
"You can watch other (dead) people all day and all night long, but when it comes to you . . ." he says and reaches for a handkerchief.
***
The day Boy collapsed, his family members mobilized fast.
But the way they remember it, nothing worked right, no one was fast enough.
"Man, I got a headache. I got a bad headache, Tony," Boy told his friend. He was standing by the stairwell, between classes.
"Oh, quit your damn whining," Tony Furnaro remembers saying.
But the pounding got worse. Boy made it a few blocks to Orchid's house, where she lived with her husband. He was soaking from perspiration.
Orchid put a cold cloth on his head, but nothing would stop the pain. She called an ambulance and her father, who immediately left work at the warehouse and sped to Tampa General Hospital.
But the minutes ticked by. No ambulance.
Gomez reached Tampa General first. He called Orchid, telling her that when the ambulance arrived, she should direct it to Good Samaritan Hospital, smaller than Tampa General but closer.
Boy was losing consciousness. Twisting around from the front passenger seat of the ambulance, Orchid watched her little brother lying on the stretcher, wretching.
He had the classic symptoms of a hemorrhaging blood vessel.
When the ambulance reached Good Samaritan, someone handed Orchid papers for her father to sign, she says. Gomez was still speeding across town.
"They wouldn't touch him until he signed," she says, tears in her eyes.
After an eternity, her father's Ford pulled up to the curb. Orchid ran outside, yelling.
"Daddy, hurry!"
It's almost 40 years later, but Orchid is crying as she stands by Boy's grave. Beside her, Gilda Cash starts to cry, too. They glance at their father's crestfallen face.
"By the time he got inside," Orchid says, "he'd stopped breathing."
The family has met at the cemetery they regularly visit together to show a reporter where their beloved Boy lies. Gomez's car is parked nearby, a red Mercury Grand Marquis. He has attached little American flags to the tops of the rear windows, which he has to keep rolled up or the flags will blow away. It's a small concession, though, given the way they flutter so beautifully as he drives.
With today's technology, 75 percent of those who suffer a burst aneurysm will die. Twelve percent will recover.
Had surgery been performed on Boy after the aneurysm ruptured, he would have stood a chance, however slim, says Dr. Avery Evans, assistant professor of radiology and neurosurgery at the University of South Florida and director of Interventional Radiology at Tampa General Hospital.
"There would have a been a shot, if they'd been at a place where they did those things," Evans says. ***
Gomez bolted a marble statue of Jesus with outspread arms to his son's headstone. That was stolen first.
Five kneeling angels, 12 inches high and cemented down, went next, two at a time.
Two concrete statues of the Virgin Mary. "I had them painted so they would look nice," Gomez says. Gone, both of them.
Another statue of Jesus, this one in a dome. Gone.
A marble guardian angel. Gone.
Many a night, Gomez sat, armed and ready. The thieves never showed up. Today, he is relieved they didn't.
"I don't think I could resist," he says.
Thankfully, no one disturbs the eternal candle Gomez keeps burning at the grave site. He was happy recently to see that the silk flowers he'd left a few days earlier hadn't disappeared, either.
All the aggravation does nothing to diminish Boy's light.
"Never was there a father and son closer," Gomez says often, his voice cracking.
The darkness comes, too.
"It's constantly on your mind," Gomez says. "What could I have done to maybe save him?"
