KHAO LAK, Thailand (28 Apr 2005) -- "I've lost Carol!" Betsy Shellhorn Levy, the oldest of Bud Shellhorn's four children, and her family were here for the Christmas holidays with her dad, and she answered the phone that morning after Christmas. And those three words — "I've lost Carol" — were burned into her memory. Forever. Just three words from Carol's husband, Tim Massey, calling from Thailand on his cell phone. "I've lost Carol!" Tim repeated. "I can't find her!" And the phone went dead. All Betsy could tell her dad and the rest of the family — her brother, Dr. Doug Shellhorn, and her sister, Susan, from Charlotte — was exactly what he'd said. "It's a call you don't ever want to hear," Doug Shellhorn says. Lost Carol? How? When? Questions. No answers. "The time difference between Salisbury and Thailand is so confusing," Doug says. "They're 13 hours ahead of us," he says. "And it was early Sunday morning here, the day after Christmas." But it was already evening of the same day there. "We were all, except Carol and Tim, together for Christmas, and Dad had spoken to Carol Christmas morning," Doug says, "but it was evening there, and they were having a wonderful time. "She was really excited about her trip, and we were so excited for her ... "Then the next morning, around 8 or 9, we heard from Tim ... "Of course, we'd heard about the tsunami in the news, and we were concerned because Carol and Tim were scuba diving in the ocean, and on television we heard concern that there could be loss from scuba diving. But some people were saying that was the safest thing to be doing because the boats kind of ride up, and the waves weren't that big until they they came up on shallow water ... " But they were anxious. *************************** Betsy called Doug that morning as soon as she lost Tim's call. Doug listened. "And felt powerless," he says. "You sit there helpless, waiting, hoping he could get to another phone. "That day was chaos. No one had a clue how much devastation there was. Initially, it was fishing villages." Now the world knows the tsunami was one of the deadliest in history, affecting 12 countries with a death toll that could exceed 200,000. "Our worst fear was that they got separated," Doug says, "but we hoped maybe she was alive somewhere ... "On Tuesday and Wednesday we were able to call him." Tim confirmed their fears. He and Carol were separated by the huge wave overwhelming their hotel, and he was searching desperately to find her. Friends who had left the Thailand resort the night before had come back to help him search. "We watched television and searched the Internet, trying to pull up anything we could," Doug said. And he kept remembering his mother's death. When she died, Doug realized it was more difficult for his grandmother to bury her daughter than for Doug to say goodbye to his mother. He searches for words. "Losing a child is the worst thing in the world," he says, "and to see my dad have to go through this. She was his baby girl. It was devastating." *************************** Carol and Tim lived in Half Moon Bay, Calif., where she was national marketing director for Mondosoft, a company that produced specialized software for the Internet. But it had been sold and was moving. "So she took the opportunity to go to Africa with friends," Doug says. He never got to talk to her about her trip. "But I got pictures of her visiting different villages and animals, and I think she loved being there. "She'd already accomplished a lot in her life, and I think she was probably looking for something else to get into, trying to think about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life ... "A lot of people want to go to school, get a great job, make a lot of money," he says. "But a lot of other people are thinking how they can give back. What else is out there?" Carol was one of those. "She truly loved animals. She had two golden retrievers. She got Maggie when she lived here, right after she got out of college. Maggie was her baby. And Tucker was a pound puppy. "She really loved helping at the pound, and that's when and where she found Tucker. Both were spoiled rotten. She'd had lots of dogs, a squirrel or two and a raccoon and rabbits. " Maybe she wanted to do something with animals ... Not that Doug knows that, but he knew his sister. Later, after her body was identified and returned, at a memorial service in California, a friend said Carol was "the most grounded person I know. She simply knew what was important and acted on it. "She didn't measure success by her social status, professional position, her money or possessions. Those things didn't resonate with Carol. "She measured success in the personal freedom to pursue things she felt were important, things like time to spend with her husband, walk her dogs, run, backpack, camp, time to spend with her neighbors, try new things and travel to distant places." *************************** At 38, Carol was the youngest of four children born to Bud Shellhorn and his late wife, Faye. Carol had always wanted to see the world. She'd been to Europe earlier, so with her business moving, she decided to join friends going to Africa and then go on to Cambodia and Thailand. "The plan," Doug says, "was for Tim to fly over and meet her." They met in Bangkok and, with two other friends, went to Khoa Lac, the beach resort in Thailand. "They were at a very nice resort, but none of that survived the tsunami. All of that was destroyed. Everything was destroyed. Only the trees survived." Later, when Tim was searching for his lost wife, Doug says, "he walked us through what happened." "They were checking out to go back to Bangkok, when they saw the big wave coming toward them. "They couldn't see the beach," Doug says. "But they saw everybody swimming and running, and they took off and ran about 100 to 200 yards inland." When the family went to California for the memorial service there, Tim showed them pictures he took before and after the tsunami. Pictures of the resort where they stayed showed two buildings some distance inland and another little shed about 100 yards behind the two buildings, and they ran in that direction. But the first wave overtook them and pushed Tim to the shed, and he grabbed hold. The second wave knocked him off of the shed. Then the third wave hit. "He never saw Carol again after the first wave hit." *************************** That wave, Tim told them, wasn't just a massive wall of water that came and went. It was turbulent, dirty water full of debris, glass, broken buildings, trees, everything as it roared onto land. "It wasn't like a river going in one direction. It would hit buildings and go in another direction," he told Doug. "I think the reason it killed so many people was they probably were knocked unconscious. I don't think many people suffered," Doug says. But a thought harder to accept pushes that one aside. "As much as I miss my sister, I feel for Tim," he says. "They were just perfect for each other. They camped. They travelled, and they had a wonderful, wonderful time." *************************** Doug sighs — and picks up Tim's story again. | | | Tsunami victim Carol Massey |
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"Tim was told to hold on to something until the wave receded. He said it seemed like forever, but probably it was only half an hour or a little more. "Right after that, he found a lady from Switzerland looking for survivors, and he was looking for Carol, and they tried to help each other and get to higher ground away from the coast. "He was concerned about other waves, and he spent about 36 hours in the jungle, not coming out until they felt it was safe. "I saw a (media) picture of him. "You could see absolute exhaustion and utter desperation after what he'd been through physically, emotionally, mentally." *************************** "When we got the call that they had found her body," Doug says, "it just confirmed what we already knew. "It was the day after Easter when we found out. Tim lost her the day after Christmas. "They had to deal with tens of thousands of bodies over there. "We talked to the contact person in the State Department in D.C. For the first two weeks it was just pure chaos. The State Department couldn't help. "They didn't have the resources. No one had a real clue as to what had happened. The U.S.promised $35 million in aid, but that was nothing. Everybody had an underestimate of what had happened. "Tim told me that he hoped to find Carol after he came out of the jungle. He summed up pretty quickly that he had to search all the hospitals, all the aid stations, and he went through one morgue in a field, a cleared sand lot under some palm trees. "But the goal was to find her alive, so he searched all the places she'd be if she was alive." But he didn't find her there. And those terrible fields of debris? Could bodies be there? There were three collection centers for bodies. The Swedish government flew in mortuary facilities in refrigerated tractor trailers, where they could store the bodies. "The Thai people were unbelievably gracious," Tim told family and friends. They let Tim and others walk through rooms of injured people or places where bodies were kept to see if they could recognize anybody. And that's what Tim did the week after the tsunami. "We were going to fly over and join him," Doug says, "but we didn't have passports up to date. Margaret Kluttz in Senator Elizabeth Dole's office helped us update the passports, but by then all hospitals and the aid stations had been searched twice. "We heard news stories of victims being flown out to Bangkok, and a good friend's father was a general in the military and able to search. Another couple in Bangkok searched all the hospitals there. *************************** "Finally my father, sister Susan and I were planning to go, and we talked to Tim and his friends. But even though they had gone through this devastating event and loss, we were able to look at reality, the reality of finding any body that long after. "The sheer reality of it came home. "We kept hoping something would happen, like that guy found floating in the ocean on a palm tree.You keep hoping. "And Tim was there. He looked at all the places to see bodies. He posted flyers just about everywhere. He handed out flyers." And the whole family was struck by Dr. Paveen Posang, a general practitioner and wonderful woman from Thailand who now lives in Salisbury. "She has family there, and she called and found out things, and that was amazingly helpful. "She called Tim and gave him contacts. She was always upbeat, helpful, optimistic, a wonderful support. "We were very appreciative of her help, even as it became reality that we weren't going to find Carol ... "Maybe we weren't supposed to find her. "Carol was never one who wanted a tombstone or a burial spot. Carol was one who wanted to have her ashes spread somewhere, and in the back of your mind maybe that's the way it was supposed to be. "I think we all kind of realized fairly soon that we weren't going to find her, might never find her. "It makes you wake up. "You hear friends who have lost children, and something like this makes you realize you have to spend that time with each other. "If you don't ... "You don't know when something will happen, and you'll never get that time back. Life goes on, but you're blessed to have had that. "I think the good Lord knows the blessings we have received — and I look at them every night." But he knows people have no control over some things, and for Americans, that's hard. "If something happens, we want to go help it. "But here you have to sit back and rely on other people, and that's a very helpless feeling. It's gut-wrenching." *************************** The call finally came. They'd found her body and contacted Tim. She'd been identified by her dental records. "She'd had some dental work done in California, and Tim got the records." A memorial service took place at Half Moon Bay, Calif., where they lived, "and we all flew out there for that" as well as people she'd worked with. Her family here had always heard about her friends there. "And it was nice to put a face with a name," Doug says. "It really helped me see a different side of my sister. "Everybody grows, and meeting her friends, hearing the stories, you get a better sense of who she was." And several good friends will sing at a service for her Saturday morning at 10 at First Presbyterian Church. Dr. James C. Dunkin, pastor, and Dr. Randy Kirby, associate pastor, will lead the service. "It seems like things have been on hold for three months, and after the first week or two you realize it, and you come to terms with that," Doug says, and another service will re-open the wounds. "But Carol grew up here and had so many wonderful friends here that we feel like it's important for us to be with those friends. Everyone has a lot of wonderful memories and stories to tell .... " And what happened to her has become part of history. "I think it brought a tragedy here and gave it a face," Doug says. "I was amazed by it. We all actually had someone who was a victim of the second largest tsunami in the Pacific," that took an estimated 200,000 lives. They've seen an unbelievable outpouring from people here who want to help the survivors there. "And I think if Carol hadn't been there .... " But she was. And life goes on. Tim couldn't go to South Africa and Thailand with Carol because he was starting his own company. "And it is taking off," Doug says. Two days after Carol was supposed to come home, Maggie, her retriever, died of old age. "Betsy and Susan and I flew out to be with Tim and spread her ashes over the bay at Half Moon Bay," where Maggie and Carol had lived so happily. |
