LOVES LOST
Author(s): Scott W. Helman,
Globe Staff Correspondent Date: July 30, 2002 Page: B1 Section: Metro/Region
MILFORD - Maybe decades later - after noble
careers, children of their own, and a lifetime of memories - Iris and Violet
Carey could have been laid to rest in a funeral ceremony everyone could
understand.
Instead, the two young sisters were buried
yesterday far too soon for the hundreds of family and friends gathered at St.
Mary's Church here to make peace with the occasion, far too soon to fully
celebrate life after death, to accept the ritual hallelujahs. Iris, 4, and
Violet, 5, were killed last week when an apparent natural-gas explosion leveled
their Hopkinton apartment building as they slept side by side. The state fire
marshal's office is still investigating the accident, a spokeswoman said, and a
definitive cause is still weeks away.
The girls were buried side by side in a single
white casket in Milford's Vernon Grove Cemetery. Their parents, Heath and Tara
Carey, who survived Wednesday's explosion, only to hear their daughters' last
breaths under the rubble, said goodbye to them yesterday at the kind of somber
service a parent hopes never to attend.
"I loved you both with all my heart,"
Heath Carey wrote in a letter to the girls read at the church by a family
friend. "We still live and breathe for you. A group of four inseparables
has been split down the middle, just like my heart."
The Rev. Michael Foley, pastor of St. Mary's,
acknowledged to the mourners yesterday that he had no explanation for the
tragedy. Instead he focused on what he could explain: that the family's love for
the girls - "these two works of art, these two treasures who have
died" - is as important now as ever.
"In the quietness of your hearts, you're
going to know how much they're still in love with you," Foley told Tara and
Heath Carey. "As hard and as cruel and as overwhelming as all of this has
been, this is not the end."
Even at their young age, Iris and Violet were
remembered yesterday as emotive and curious, ready to help in the kitchen, and
always hungry for knowledge.
"They were like sponges. They just wanted
to learn so much," said Tiffany Germain, the girls' aunt.
"They lived more in those few years than
many of us will live in a whole lifetime," Foley added.
And the congregation sang, "All I ask of
you is forever to remember me as loving you."
The night Iris and Violet were killed, they had
been flipping through a back-to-school catalog. Violet was to start at
Hopkinton's Center School in the fall.
Iris went to bed that night in her favorite
bathing suit, and Tara lulled both girls quickly to sleep. The sisters, whom the
family called their "little flower garden," were crushed by their
crumbling house hours after their mother said "I love you" one final
time.
None of the 10 others who lived in the Main
Street apartment building were seriously injured in the explosion, which blew
off the top portion of the house and sent it to street level.
Because the tragedy struck so suddenly, Foley
urged those at the funeral service to not take one day with their loved ones for
granted.
"Every mom and dad, every grandparent,
every brother and sister. . . . We are looking at our own loss, our own
potential loss, our own fragility," he said. "It's so easy to look to
the future, to expect to love someone tomorrow."
The noisy hydraulic truck brakes outside the
church yesterday served as a subtle reminder that the work of life continues.
Still, as family friend Nancy Hause said at yesterday's service, "No
heartbreak compares to the death of a young child."
The only thing that eases the heartbreak, Tara
Carey wrote in her letter to the girls, was knowing that heaven now has its
favorite little angels back.
She wasn't ready to let "mama's little
babies" go, but she takes comfort in knowing Iris and Violet will always be
around.
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