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She deserved better than this. Lashanda Armstrong lay, completely alone, in a plain white casket perched at the front of the First Baptist Church of Spring Valley. In her last moments on earth, she was denied the last thing she wanted in life — the company of her three sad, dead children.
Thank their father for that final cruelty.
Lashanda’s sole surviving son, Lashaun, 10, tiptoed stoically and dry-eyed into the tragic, tiny church looking as if he’d seen the devil. The stunned boy walked past his mother’s pure-white casket, festooned with flowers and flanked with pictures of her in happier days with her kids.
He did not sob, cry out or yell like a child. He said nothing. And that was far worse.
In the awful week since his mom plunged her minivan into the Hudson River, killing Lashaun’s three little siblings and herself — while Lashaun miraculously escaped — the boy has borne witness to a tragedy so profound, so senseless that its very mention was enough to hush the overloaded church.
But on a day of extreme sorrow, mourners could not understand why the dead children’s father, Jean Pierre, decided his kids should be represented not in the flesh but with three sagging blue balloons, each bearing the name of one of the lost children. It was too awful to bear.
The Rev. Eugene Jones took a shot at the father, who made the final months of Lashanda’s life a living hell from which she could find no living escape. He said the dead kids were denied a presence at the funeral “in body.” The congregation nodded in assent.
“You don’t know how much strength you got, son,” Jones cried out, gesturing toward the devastated boy.
“Even though Lashanda is no longer with us, nothing can take your memories. Lashanda loved God, and God loved Lashanda,” said the Rev. Naomi Lauture.
Twenty minutes into the program, and this was the first time the mother’s name was said aloud.
It was too much for her sole surviving child to bear.
Less than halfway through the funeral, Lashaun fled the service on the arms of two female relatives. He tried to exit out front but was pushed back by a throng of mourners and curiosity seekers. He turned around and walked up the church’s aisle, his mom’s tragic casket staring him in the face, and left via a back door.
It was enough that Lashaun could not stand to hear his siblings’ names read aloud, as a church official recited Lashanda Armstrong’s obituary.
“She leaves one son, Lashaun Armstrong,” the woman read.
Then she recited the dates the three dead children were born — Landen Pierre, who came into the world on Dec. 14, 2006. Lance Pierre, born July 29, 2008. Lainaina Pierre, born April 20, 2010.
“Jesus! Noooo!” a woman’s sob filled the church.
On a day that should have been spent mourning and celebrating the lives of four people taken too soon, Lashanda’s relatives were fuming. Her aunt, Angela Gilliam, stood outside the church railing against Jean Pierre, whose troubled relationship with her niece may have led Lashanda to commit the ultimate act.
“Submerged in the water, the angels stood by!” sang Pastor Weldon McWilliams, daring mention something that, until the end of the service, was left unsaid.
“That could have been my daughter-in-law, my daughter, my two grandkids,” sobbed Sharon Frazier, who employed Lashanda’s dad, Larry Edge, as a teacher at her day-care center. “As the pastor said, we all make mistakes.”
The mourners, the pastors, and God all found forgiveness, but not the man who drove Lashanda into committing the ultimate tragedy. Lashanda Armstrong. Dead at 25.
She deserved better. Sadly, in death, Jean Pierre took everything away.