In early October, I drove to Savannah’s beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery to find Robert, Tina and Wahl Stoddard’s graves. Stopping at the administrative building, I entered their names in the automated search kiosk, which then printed a map showing the graves’ location.
I’d been to Bonaventure several times before, but mainly visited the more tourist centric graves. Johnny Mercer is buried next to his wife and mother. Each marker is inscribed with one of his song lyrics.
Pulitzer winning poet, Conrad Aiken’s grave is a bench. During his many trips to his parents’ grave at Bonaventure, he would drink martinis while looking at their markers, each with the same day of death—the day at age nine when he responded to two gunshots in the family living room. His father had shot his mother and then himself. Aiken went to live in Massachusetts with family members. From there he went to Harvard where he and classmate T.S. Eliot compared and clashed over each other’s couplets.
The moss-draped trees filter the sunlight falling on the sand and pebble lanes. Low granite blocks border the six-grave family plots. Following the map, I follow the path toward the Wilmington River. Reading each family name until I find the Wahl plot that belonged to Tina’s family. Bob and Tina’s joint gravestone with Wahl’s marker just in front of it were all decorated. My trip was shortly after both death anniversaries—Bob and Tina in late September and Wahl’s just a few days before in October.
Decorative pebbles anchored the flowers on both stones, but Wahl’s grave also had a rusted piece of curved metal artistically arranged as a border for the flower display. As I speculated on its significance (a symbol of the car he died in or even a piece of it? Did he like metal music?), I began to think that more people than just the Stoddards and their friends may have perspectives on their tragic story.
What about the two friends Wahl picked up that tragic day, Carolyn Alexander and David Womack? Once in the car with Wahl, they were doomed by the love of speed he inherited from his father. As sad as Wahl’s death and the subsequent disintegration of Bob and Tina’s lives were, surely the pain in those families would have been bitter as well.
As I said, I’ve been to Bonaventure before. It is an incredibly beautiful place. The sounds of singing birds, the light, and the salt breeze have always left me with a sense of peace before—not this time. Ultimately, what makes a story is conflict. Conflicts leave winners and losers in their wake. This story had no winners, save the reader who heeds the cautionary tale’s lessons and the writer who learns to look for different perspectives.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. -Flannery O'Connor
Wahl was not driving at the time of the car crash.
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