"Like a river to the sea, Lauren. See you for a swim." ... Bono dedicated 'One Tree Hill' to Lauren, who was aboard the terrorist-hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 when the San Francisco-bound jet crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, with her unborn child. It was at Oakland´s show last november. Her husband Jack Grandcolas met Bono.
"Jack Grandcolas
Husband of Lauren Grandcolas:
The other night, Lauren Grandcolas appeared again in a dream to her husband, Jack. She was smiling, as she always is in these visions, and giving him a thumbs-up sign.
Jack asked her, "How are you here? You made it. This is great, but you haven't told your family. They're mourning your death."
Lauren didn't say anything. She never does.
"Maybe it's her way of somehow getting back and letting me know that she's OK and that she'll see me again," said Grandcolas, 43.
Five years ago, Grandcolas said, he and Lauren "were going down the highway of life at 85 mph, living the American dream." They were young, attractive and about to become parents. After Lauren died at age 38, Grandcolas felt like "somebody reached into my chest, ripped my heart out, tore it in half, shoved in back in my chest and put me barefoot on a rocky road."
Depressed, he lost 30 pounds. Often it was all he could do to choke down soup. He began to think about his own mortality. And about whether he'd be happier with Lauren, wherever she was.
"I'm not afraid to die anymore," Grandcolas said. "In fact, a certain part of me almost wishes for it. But then you realize that your loved one wouldn't want that."
After Sept. 11, it seemed everyone had advice. People told him he should move out of his house. They told him to start dating again. They told him to get rid of Lauren's clothes.
"To hold onto those things is part of the purging process," Grandcolas said. "Only you know when you're done. You know when you're sick and you throw up? You say, 'I'm not done throwing up because I still feel sick.' "
A couple of years ago, he took a deep breath and said, "OK, these clothes are not doing anybody any good. They're nice clothes, and they might do some people some good, so take them to the Goodwill."
Two years ago he moved into a home in a quiet nook of the San Rafael hills, where he lives alone. He has been on a few dates. And he thinks he's ready for more.
He thinks Lauren will bring him love again.
Last November, Grandcolas got a bit of advice from an unlikely source: U2 singer Bono.
Grandcolas' first date with Lauren was at a U2 concert in 1985. He keeps the ticket stub in his wallet. At the urging of a mutual friend, Bono dedicated one of Lauren's favorite U2 songs, "One Tree Hill," to her at the band's November concert in Oakland. In the song, a tribute to a friend of the band who had died, the river is life and the sea is the afterlife.
Afterward, Grandcolas thanked the singer at a private party, then confided in him his nagging fear: He worried that he would "mortgage his opportunity to see Lauren again."
" 'Ah, we all (mess) up,' " Grandcolas recalled Bono saying. " 'I (messed) up last week. That's why God gave us forgiveness.' "
Then Bono wrote an inscription -- to Lauren -- on the ticket that paraphrased "One Tree Hill": "Like a river to the sea, Lauren. See you for a swim."
Grandcolas holds the ticket and smiles. "That was one of those little chapters of closure.""
9/11: FIVE YEARS LATER / Slow road to healing / The grief cycle is endless and unflinchingly public for some Californians who lost family in the crash of Flight 93, their hearts torn by life's daily references to Sept. 11.
YouTube - One Tree Hill to Lauren
