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Balloons travel 400 miles, connecting two families dealing with loss Date published: 6/17/2005
By KRISTIN DAVIS They were looking for sea glass, those translucent jewels of the water, worn smooth and round from years beneath the surface. Jill Reid stored them in jars at home. Someday, she was going to make something with them. It was mid-April, a cool, sunny day in northern Pennsylvania, the first nice weather in months. They came to the shore of Lake Erie to think, and relax, and see what treasures the water had surrendered. Reid's daughter and 3-year-old granddaughter came along for a walk on the beach, just a narrow swath of land between the water and a steep bank. Winter storms had left it strewn with logs and debris, and the lake was still. Up ahead, Reid spotted a tangle of ribbons wrapped around the limb of a jagged tree trunk. She strolled toward the cluster and discovered a heap of deflated balloons. Tags, mostly faded and illegible, were attached to the ribbon. But Reid could decipher a Web site: angelswhispers.org. She tore off the tag and stuck it in her coat pocket. A storm and a celebrationTwo days later and 400 miles away, Jan Broom sat at her computer in a Leesburg hotel room, feeling very alone. For months, Jan's work with a phone company had kept her away from her Spotsylvania County home five nights a week. It was April, always a hard month for 50-year-old Jan and her husband, Jules. They'd lost their only child, 23-year-old Shannon, on May 1, 1998, in a car accident. Shannon, a blooming artist and Mary Washington College graduate, would have turned 30 on April 5. Jan and Jules never stopped celebrating their daughter's birthday, or commemorating Heaven Day--the day she left them. "Love is forever," Jan tells people. "It doesn't stop just because it changes forms. People do not have to say goodbye." Jan sat at her computer, remembering. Remembering Shannon and this year's celebration. The Brooms marked Shannon's birthday and Heaven Day together, on April 2. The morning dawned stormy and windy, with heavy, slanting rains. Jules barbecued in the backyard beneath an umbrella. The guests stayed inside, flipped through photo albums and watched home movies of Shannon growing up.
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