Angels Among Us | Ordinary People with Extraordinary Hearts

The Weight of a Stone Dave Cote

A bank of steel-gray clouds had just moved overhead as a dozen of us scrambled the final few hundred yards to the top of Owl Mountain in Maine’s Baxter State Park. It was pushing 10:00 in the morning, and over the course of three hours we’d hiked through thick forests, over small streams, and up a few rocky faces.

Most of us were strangers to one another when we began, but as we moved closer to the summit, the unfamiliarity faded away and conversations flowed easily. But then, at the top, a quiet came. Amid the clear views of Moosehead Lake and the southern side of Mount Katahdin, the casual lightness of trekking through the Maine woods on a late-spring day receded. The true mission of our trip was about to begin.

Silently, we shrugged off our backpacks and unearthed the stones we all had been carrying. They were of different sizes, shapes, and colors, but they shared this: Each one was marked with the initials, rank, birth year, and death year of a Maine service member killed since 9/11. Mine read “J.L.B., SPC USA, 1985–2008” for Justin Buxbaum, an Army specialist from South Portland who was on his third deployment when he was killed by non-enemy fire in Afghanistan. Dave Cote, the man responsible for bringing us on this nearly three-mile hike, waited patiently for us to place our stones together; each stone held a story of a person, a place, and those left behind. Then, atop the summit, we told the stories. And remembered.

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Dave Cote wasn’t looking for a life-defining mission. Instead it found him, on Labor Day weekend in 2012. A native of Bangor, Maine, Cote was a 34-year-old Marine stationed in California when he joined a crew of Navy Seals buddies on a hike up Mount Whitney. As Cote caught his breath at the top of the 14,500-foot peak, he watched his friends pull softball-size stones from their packs. On the rocks they’d written the names of fellow Seals who had died over the past year. They told stories about the men and women they were honoring, then left their memorials in mountaintop crevices.

“I thought it was so powerful and meaningful,” Cote says. “I thought that I could do the same thing in Maine.” A proud Mainer and a Marine major who’d served a tour in Iraq’s embattled Anbar Province in 2006, he saw an opportunity to create something dedicated exclusively to his home state’s fallen. “We make a promise to the parents—We’re not going to forget your son—but are we really doing that?” Cote says. “It’s easy to put a name on a T-shirt or a name on a wall. What’s harder is to find out who these men and women are, the lives they led both on and off the battlefield. These were people who broke up parking-lot fights when people were getting bullied. They sent roses to their mom, or took a duty for somebody else. And you learn these stories and you become inspired.”

Several months after that hike up Mount Whitney, The Summit Project (TSP) was born, and on Memorial Day weekend 2014 Cote led 36 volunteers on the nonprofit’s first official hike up Owl Mountain. The project has grown ever since. Today, TSP leads two hikes each year: a weekend-long event in Baxter State Park over Memorial Day weekend and a second, smaller ceremony atop Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain in September. At its core, TSP honors any service member with a connection to Maine who has died, either on the battlefield or even after he or she returned home, since 9/11.

“The world changed on 9/11,” Cote explains, “and that’s the generation of service members who are now struggling to come back.”

Atop the peaks, hikers sit in a circle around the stones they’ve carried, and one by one tell about the life of the service members they’re representing. Some have a direct connection to the person they’re honoring; others are volunteers who learned about TSP and want to be involved. Cote has assigned stones to hikers as young as 14 and as old as 75.

The rocks are more than just markers; they’re symbols of each person’s life. As part of his work, Cote meets with the families and explains TSP’s mission. He asks them to select a stone from a place that meant something special to their loved one—a backyard, a favorite swimming hole, a treasured walking trail, a farmer’s field. For Justin Buxbaum, the Army specialist whose story I told on Owl Mountain in May, his grandfather, Don Buxbaum, found a stone on a footpath near his home on Chebeague Island, where Justin grew up. “I’ve walked that trail a million times,” Don told me. “Then one day I was heading down to the water and just happened to turn my head and see this rock. It’s like it was waiting for me. The moment I saw it, I knew it was perfect.”

The story doesn’t end after the mountaintop ceremony; Cote wants to reach a wider community. It’s why some 70 stones live in a dedicated section of the Military Entrance Processing Station in Portland, which is open to the public. Throughout the year, memorial stones are also taken on the road and shown at schools, libraries, hospitals, and museums. At the Baxter State Park event in May, a team of motorcyclists, escorted by state police, carried the stones from Portland through downtown Millinocket, where Main Street was decked out with welcome signs. For Cote, these memorials possess the power to not just remind others of what’s been lost but to maybe inspire people to also do something that has impact on their communities.

“These stones and these stories are what we’re honoring and using to sustain the memories we love,” Cote says. “And when we do that, these people whom we’ve lost can continue to influence us, to inspire us to make better choices for our own lives.”

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A cool breeze moved across the peak of Owl Mountain as the 12 of us settled around the stones for the TSP cere-mony. Over the next 20 minutes stories about those we’d come to remember poured out. A medic who lost his life to a roadside bomb in Iraq, an Army major killed in a firefight in Afghanistan, an adored younger brother who’d left two young children behind. Then solemnly we packed our stones back up and made the hike down.

It wasn’t until we had returned to Twin Pines Camp in Millinocket, which Cote had reserved for families and volunteers for the weekend, that the power ofThe Summit Project came into focus. There, on a big stretch of lawn with sweeping views of Lake Milli-nocket and Katahdin, the families—parents and siblings, grandparents and spouses—of the late service members awaited our arrival. Their appearance revealed the everyday nature of the tragedies. Carpenters, teachers, and corporate executives—people you might easily pass in the supermarket or run into at the post office—they carried with them a silent but unspeakable loss. As hikers and families met, there were laughter and smiles, warm embraces, and a certain relief that came with the fact that after such emotional hardships, there was an event that celebrated the life that had been lived, not just lost. “For these families,” Cote told me, “this is the homecoming they never received.”

Beyond the remembrances, there’s also a healing that happens at TSP events. Grieving families share a moment with other grieving families to learn that they’re not alone. As things started to wind down, Cote remained at the far end of the lawn, consoling Don Rivard and his wife, Jane, who’d lost their son, Chief Petty Officer Robert Michael Paul Roy, two years before. Roy had served 16 years in the Navy, working on aircraft carriers around the world, and was stationed in Pensacola, Florida, when he was hit by a drunk driver and killed in April 2013.

Like the other stones there that day, Roy’s had come from a personal place. His father had unearthed it at the family camp in Lincoln, Maine, digging through three feet of snow to locate a stone inside the firepit. “We learned about Robert,” Cote said in a hushed tone. “We are inspired by him. His spirit lives on.”

After Cote stepped away, Don Rivard stood by himself and watched as his wife and daughter spoke with other families. Rivard’s eyes were red, and he kept shaking his head as he looked over at his wife. “I’m just hoping something like this can help her,” he said. He looked up. “What can you say? What can you do? But maybe this will help her to see that there are other folks like her out there who are going through the same thing.”

For more on TSP, visit: thesummitproject.org

Flower Power Roberta Hershon

Roberta Hershon and Beverly Eisenberg were the kind of friends who fed off each other’s talents. Hershon loved to cook. Eisenberg had a passion for sewing. Hershon had an eye for design, while Eisenberg could tackle almost any home repair. Even their personalities differed and complemented each other. “I’m a much more realistic person,” Hershon says. “Beverly always saw the world as being three-quarters full. She never had a bad word to say about anyone. She was the kind of person we all want to be. Everything was always great.”

Eisenberg maintained that attitude even when she was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer in October 2004. Ten months later she died at the age of 55. For Hershon, her friend’s illness and death were devastating. As her best friend fought her illness, Hershon decorated Eisenberg’s home in Sharon, Massachusetts, with flowers in the winter, then spruced up her garden when spring rolled through. Even as her friend’s health deteriorated, Eisenberg treasured the plantings, and her mood brightened whenever she saw them.

“After she passed away, I didn’t know what to do,” Hershon says. “I felt like I’d lost my arm. And then one day I thought about the garden I’d made for her—how much she enjoyed it, being out there smelling the flowers, feeling the breeze on her face. I thought, What if I could do that for somebody else?”

In 2007, Hope in Bloom launched. In the eight years since, Hershon’s nonprofit has installed gardens for people actively receiving cancer treatment. Projects range in size from simple indoor flower displays during the winter to more robust in-ground installations in the summer. Helping Hershon is a team of 850 volunteers across Massa-chusetts. The plants, the work, even the machinery when required, are all free to the recipients.

“When you’re sick, you have little choice,” says Hershon. “You’re told when to go to the doctor, what to do, and how to do it. You have no color in your life. Everything is a sea of white, from the doctor’s coat to the hospitals to the pills you’re taking. It makes such a difference to drive up to their house or look outside and see something colorful.”

For Hershon, the work is also a way to honor her dear best friend. “She truly made the world a better place,” she says. “Every time we plant a garden, I believe Bev’s spirit lives on.” 

For more on Hope in Bloom, visit: hopeinbloom.org