Anita Creamer: After a tragedy, a reason to go on

Marlene Norton learned to knit in high school in the early 1950s. She loved it so much that she knitted her graduation dress, if you can imagine that. As the decades passed, she taught her daughter, Lynn, to knit. Then her granddaughters, Shelby and Andrea.

Sitting in front of the TV, watching from the sidelines at her granddaughters' soccer games, she was always knitting, counting the stitches, her hands moving with the needles.

Her family meant everything to her, she liked to tell people. She and her husband, Bert, lived in Elk Grove only five doors down from their daughter, Lynn Bowler, and her family – husband Mike and their two girls.

Then came tragedy.

On May 11, 2007, Andrea Bowler drowned in her family's swimming pool. The Coroner's Office later said she had viral meningitis and encephalitis, which had likely caused a seizure whle she was in the pool. But Andrea, a bright, athletic 12-year-old, hadn't complained of feeling ill that afternoon.

One moment, she was alive.

The next, she was gone.

And Marlene Norton stopped knitting.

"I couldn't concentrate," she says now. "Absolutely could not concentrate enough to knit. I cried all the time."

On a warm spring afternoon, we're sitting at the Nortons' kitchen table. Family photos are everywhere. Here are Shelby, now 15, and Andrea as little girls, smiling goofily for the camera. Here are memories of sunnier times.

"I've lost my mother, which was hard," says Marlene, 72. "But she was 78 years old at the time. It was the way it should be, not the way this was."

When she gets choked up, she knocks on the table with her fist – rap, rap, rap, rap – and then she talks through her tears.

Burying a grandchild seems to violate the natural order of life.

"And we thought, 'That will never happen to us,' " she says. "Well, it does. And I think, 'Why her? Why not me or my husband? We're old.' But we are not to question. God has a plan for all of us."

The loss would be difficult under any circumstances, but maybe especially under these. Beginning when Andrea was 10 months old, Bert Norton commuted from Fresno to Elk Grove two days a week to take care of the girls. Marlene retired not long after that.

"That's when they moved to Elk Grove," says Lynn Bowler, who works for the Elk Grove Police Department. "And from that point, they both did all the child care for our children. It's a huge understatement to say we relied on them."

Without Andrea, there's a hole in all their lives, a vacuum that can't be filled. It's that simple.

The Nortons are members of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Elk Grove. In the fall, several months after Andrea's death, a fellow churchgoer named Diana Wogen came to Marlene with a request.

St. Peter's donates scarves and hats to the homeless every winter, and Diana wanted to learn to knit.

"Instead, Marlene decided to teach everybody," she says.

The result: Marlene's knitting group, a dozen or so women who meet each Monday evening at the church. Over the winter, they knitted dozens of scarves and hats, and a few pairs of mittens.

"Oh, my," says Marlene. "What a blessing to have some place to go, to have some ladies to help."

She's rapping on the table again, fighting back tears.

"It's been a lifesaver," she says. "I don't know how else to say it. It makes me get out and keep going. That's it right there. And it makes me think of other things besides my grief.

"They've given me so much more than I've given them. What they've given to me is being there for me to help them."

As they knit, they chat, and they laugh. And the time passes. And it helps.

"That's what it's all about," says Marlene Norton. "If we don't help one another, we're lost."

About the writer:

• Anita Creamer's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in Scene. Reach her at (916) 321-1136 or acreamer@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/creamer.