LIMA — There is nothing that is going to make this Christmas easier for Shoshanna. What she wants from The Lima News’ Empty Stocking Fund is help making it a little easier for her two surviving children.
Shoshanna, 37, lost her 21-year-old daughter, her first-born, in a car accident in June. The young woman and her grandmother, Shoshanna’s mom, were driving from their home in Arizona to Lima for a visit. Shoshanna’s mother was at the wheel when the car went off the road in Indiana and landed on its roof in a culvert.
“[They were] only two hours and 5 minutes away!” she cried, sitting on the edge of the sofa. The living room was dim on this recent morning, the curtains drawn.
A photo of the accident shows a red car, wheels up, on its roof in a shallow stream of muddy brown water underneath a highway overpass. Shoshanna keeps the photo on her cell phone. Its screen is the only bright spot in the gloom.
“I have to,” she said, her voice tightening, tears coming. “You don’t see accidents like this, except in a movie, where it goes off an embankment and flips over in a ditch.”
Her daughter died of hypothermia. Her mother suffered hypothermia, too, and critical injuries, but survived.
Shoshanna described a family crushed by grief and loss.
“My son, he’s 4, he doesn’t really understand My 11-year-old daughter, she’s heartbroken. That was her best friend. She’s always wearing her necklaces and jewelry, on a daily basis.”
Shoshanna said she had been working at a local manufacturing plant for the last three and a half years, but quit after her daughter’s death.
“The stress, the emotions…I couldn’t take it no more. I did something stupid and I left.”
She now works 12-hour night shifts at a food manufacturing plant, but the position is temporary and bills are mounting, made worse by $3,500 in funeral expenses and the weeks without a paycheck when she was between jobs. Shoshanna wants to make a normal Christmas for her children, but needs help to do so.
“Just ‘cuz I’m not feeling it, I can’t do that to them,” she said, visibly weary from crying. “I just try to be strong for the other two.”
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
