January 30, 1949 — May 2, 1982
Exactly 42 years ago today, my cousin, Sheila Mullen, died as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile crash. While I’ve known about this tragic death all these years, it is only today that I feel compelled to write about it. Here’s why.
A
few days ago, another cousin, Pete, emailed to ask if I had any pictures of Sheila.
This was somewhat of an odd, out of the blue request, so I asked Pete what had
motivated it. He responded saying he had recently been talking with
a friend and a memory involving Sheila had popped into his
head. Here's the gist of it:
In the mid-60's, Sheila's entire family (Uncle Jack, Aunt Kathy and their four girls) traveled to the Philadelphia area to visit the relatives. By all accounts, visits like this were rare. As such, the girls were never very close with any of their cousins. Sheila, the oldest, was remembered as being somewhat shy and quiet. But since Pete and Sheila were about the same age, Pete was "encouraged" by his parents to take Sheila to a dance at the local Catholic Church. When Pete arrived at the dance accompanied by this beautiful young woman, his friends were shocked. They asked Pete why he had been hiding his girlfriend from them. Pete replied, "She's not my girlfriend, she's my cousin from Connecticut, so she's available!".
I didn't press Pete for further details, but that little story was more than I had ever heard about Sheila in my life. Although she was only six years older than me, I don't remember ever meeting her. She was born in Jersey City in 1949 and moved to Connecticut in the mid-50's (about the same time I was born). In 1972, she married Ken Langlois and moved to Michigan in 1978. The fatal car crash occurred four years later. Here is a copy of her obituary from the May 5, 1982 edition of the Hartford Courant:
As expected, the obituary provides only minor insights into Sheila, so I asked Pete if he had any other memories of her. He provided one more small anecdote.
Our grandmother, Bridget Agnes McHugh Mullen, died in July of 1975. I was 20 years old at the time and attended her funeral. Everyone did, including the Connecticut Mullens. After the final gathering at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, Pete and his wife Marie went back to their car – an AMC Matador – and discovered it wouldn’t start. Sheila and her husband, Ken gave them a jump-start and followed them back to Pete’s parents’ house in Rockledge to troubleshoot the problem. Somehow, I managed to be at the event where this happened without meeting or talking with Sheila or her three sisters.
At this point, I knew I wanted to write something about Sheila, but I was stuck. The post would be woefully incomplete without a photo of her. I was now in the same boat as Pete, only worse, since I had no idea what Sheila looked like. I began by searching through Ancestry's genealogical databases. Their yearbook collection is my go-to place for photos of people in their teenage years, but I faced two difficulties: I didn’t know where or when Sheila went to high school. My best guess was that she attended East Catholic High School in Manchester, Connecticut, graduating in either 1967 or 1968. Sadly, Ancestry’s database only had East Catholic yearbooks for 1975, 1980 and 1982.
Discouraged and ready to give up, I decided to search the entire web to see if any site other than Ancestry had East Catholic yearbooks on file. In football terms, this is known as a Hail Mary pass. Unbelievably, this Hail Mary was caught for a touchdown! I found a site dedicated to the East Catholic High School Class of 1970 that contained East Catholic yearbook photos from 1965 through 1969 as well. And that's where I found Sheila Mullen's 1967 senior year photo, displayed at the top of this post.
That’s
about all I’ve got, except for one personal observation. Starting at around the time my parents
died in the late 1980’s, I became very disdainful and dismissive of organized religion. For the most part, I'm still that way. I continue to believe in a Supreme Being and an afterlife of some sort, but the ability to communicate with God and those who have gone before us is, to me, a childish fantasy. There are no ghosts. God and our ancestors do not intervene in our lives.
These last few days, though, have put a few tiny chinks in that armor. Why did that story about Sheila suddenly pop into Pete’s head? Why did I feel compelled to spend hours researching a cousin I never knew in order to commemorate her death in a blog post? Why, after hours of fruitless search, did a photo of Sheila fall into my lap, dare I say, miraculously? And why did I carefully re-read Sheila’s obituary, looking for any tidbit of information I might have missed, and discover that today is the 42nd anniversary of her death? I can't explain any of it, but it all seems a tad eerie and way too coincidental.
If anyone else has any other memories of Sheila, feel free to add them by clicking on the comment button. If you feel like it, add your name; otherwise your comments will be attributed to Anonymous, which is also fine.
Rest in peace, cousin Sheila.
