Third-hand Trauma of a Ward’s Worst Day

This story is not mine. I first encountered it reading a newspaper in 1987. A family traveling to the temple had perished in an automobile collision. Father, mother, a recently returned missionary son, and three more younger sons. They were survived by a daughter and sister who was at Ricks College when her family all died. It was an astonishing thing to think about, and if that had been the end of it for me, I think reading of that tragedy would still haunt some corner of my mind.

Three years later I found myself living in the small town that had been that family’s home. I didn’t know this at first, but now and then I would hear some remark that led me to realize that I had arrived at an intersection with the dead family I read about. Their deaths were somewhere in the back of everyone’s minds and sometimes those thoughts came to the fore. There were two wards and two buildings in that community of 18,000. Prior to 1978, they were one ward, the Los Alamos Ward. Kent Budge’s father had been a bishop of that ward. The Virchows, the family that died, had lived in the other ward, the White Rock Ward.

In 1994 I married into a family that had lived in White Rock since 1975, moving there approximately when the Virchow family did also. My wife told me of being in the Denver temple with the other youth when their bishop came in and told them that the Virchows had died. They had made a family outing out of the ward youth temple trip and drove up from New Mexico separately. On that long, straight, level, two-lane highway going straight north-south through the San Luis Valley, an old man driving south crossed over for some unknown reason into the north-bound lane and collided with the Virchows’ car. A memorable detail in my wife’s telling was the front row of pews in their chapel that was removed to make room for six caskets. Six people in those caskets—a middle-aged husband and wife, a 22-year-old young adult, two high school students, and an eight-year-old boy—meant that many different people knew the dead; a Little League baseball team were among the estimated 1,500 who filled the building.

It’s not my story. I never met the dead. I wasn’t in their town until a few years later. One non-death thing I learned about the Virchow family that I liked was that every Sunday they would have a different family from their ward over for lunch. The lunch was always tomato soup and popcorn. The last two times I was in the White Rock Ward meetinghouse were 2012 and 2018. In 2012 I noticed the family portrait in the foyer that had been hanging in that spot on the wall for 25 years. That won’t be there forever, I thought.

When I returned six years later, the portrait was gone. The interior of the building had been overhauled. I saw one of my wife’s childhood friends in the hall, one of the shrinking minority who knew the Virchow family before they died thirty-one years earlier. I asked about the Virchow portrait, and she said they were not allowed to keep it up. But, she added, we fought for the Primary photos and got to keep those. In the hall outside their Primary room the wall was covered with hundreds of wallet-sized photos of each child who had been served as a member of that ward over the decades. It had grown considerably since I first encountered it.

My wife who grew up in the White Rock Ward of the Santa Fe Stake is now dead, and I have re-married. Sunday I told my second wife everything that I wrote above. It was on my mind because my late wife’s oldest brother is now a member of the Grand Blanc Ward. His wife sent messages to the family telling us of a murderous rampage that had struck their ward. You have all heard of this too. Among the sadnesses that pass through my mind as a third-hand observer is that their ward will not be able to hold a funeral in their own building. The physical space that the ward shared with their four dead is also gone.

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“Auto tragedy strikes family of well known Ricks co-ed Julie Virchow”