Friday, August 20, 1999

Family reflects on blessings after crash

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Boswell family: Annie, Lee Anne, Bob, Deren, Barrett and Robby. (Yoni Pozner photo) | ZOOM |

        The Boswells often go in different directions. It's a fact of life for this Florence family of two working parents and four busy kids.

        Bob Boswell Jr., 48, has spent many an evening selling insurance for State Farm or coaching youth sports; his wife, Lee Anne, 46, is a customer support manager for Cincinnati Bell.

        Their children — Deren, 17; Annie, 15; Robby, 14, and Barrett, 12 — juggle schedules crammed with sports, summer honors classes, sports, church activities, music and sports. The three oldest are students at Boone County High School; Barrett attends Ockerman Middle School.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        They're lucky to have dinner together once a week, if that. They even split up on Sunday mornings, because Bob and Lee Anne have allowed their maturing children to decide what church they will attend.

        When they're home, the place often looks like Grand Central Station.

        “Our friends are here almost every day,” notes Deren, “and Mom and Dad are very close to a lot of them.”

        “It's a pretty fast lifestyle,” says Annie, and the rest of the family acknowledges that with laughter.

        It's not surprising, then, that they were going in different directions on July 9, 1998, the day their lives changed in one terrifying instant.

        That night, Bob and Robby were on the way home from a basketball game. Deren was at Northwestern University, attending a program on government and politics. Annie was going to spend the night with a friend.

        And Lee Anne and Barrett were heading to Erlanger to see the movie Armageddon. They never made it.

        Lee Anne doesn't remember the collision. But in the instant before her car was hit head-on, she saw headlights in front of her. Her brain told her something was horribly wrong.

        A drunk driver, traveling in the opposite direction, had struck a car from behind, sending it into Lee Anne's lane. She says she was traveling about 45 mph, and the impact “stopped us dead in the road.”

        Later, passing each other on gurneys in the hospital, mother and son had a brief exchange.

        Lee Anne: “Are you OK?”

        Barrett: “Yes.”

        Lee Anne: “Are you OK?”

        Barrett: “YES, Mom.”

        Barrett was treated for a spleen injury, and quickly recovered. Lee Anne's problems were more severe. Both leg bones were broken at her right ankle.

        More than a year after the accident, she is still on crutches. One bone never healed properly, and so last month she had surgery to fuse the ankle joint.

        In another six months to a year, she hopes “to walk close to normal.” By then, the pain should be significantly less.

        The accident, Bob says, has changed them.

        In some ways, the change is apparent. The children have been asked to do more.

        Deren, for instance, helps transport her siblings. She doesn't mind, she says, because for years her parents have rearranged their schedules to take the kids places.

        “They have to wait on me hand and foot,” Lee Anne says. “I can't even carry a glass of water to my (home) office.”

        Other changes have been more subtle.

        The accident, Annie says, “put everything in a totally different light.”

        “It made us realize what we have,” Robby says.

        “I think we've all realized how much God's blessed us,” Deren adds.

        Says Bob: “It makes you realize that life is not about "me.' It's about us.”

        These days the Boswells are as busy as ever with soccer or saxophone or volleyball or evening appointments. Often going in different directions, it seems.

        But aware, more than ever, how much they mean to each other.

       

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