Peggy Johns offers comfort to those who visit a memorial in her Gorham front yard, where Derrick Cote, 19, of Gorham died after losing control of the car he was driving Nov. 24. John Patriquin/Staff Photographer
They stood at their window that awful night as police reconstructed the single-car accident that had just turned their front yard into an inferno.
A young man was dead. And even now, her mind still reeling, Peggy Johns knew what that meant.
“They’re going to come,” she told her husband, George. “They’re going to bring flowers.”
George, who was leaving early the next morning for a weeklong hunting trip in Pennsylvania, didn’t hesitate.
“Let them do what they have to do,” he told Peggy.
Three weeks later, the makeshift shrine still sits outside the Johns’ home at the intersection of Dingley Spring Road and Buck Street. Bouquets of flowers surround the charred oak tree. Handwritten notes fill a clear plastic bag. A mobile made of ceramic stars tinkles in the cold December breeze.
And the cars keep stopping. Sometimes, the kids just sit in their vehicles and stare. Other times, they get out, walk over to the crash site and break down in tears.
“To see what I’ve seen, these boys standing there crying while their girlfriends hold onto them,” Peggy said last week. “What this child must have meant to them … my heart just melts for these kids. As a parent I just want to scoop them up and wipe it away like you wipe the tears away when they were little.”
Peggy didn’t know 19-year-old Derrick Cote, who was alone behind the wheel of a friend’s car when he lost control on the night of Nov. 24 and slammed into the tree, backwards, in the Johns’ front yard.
But from the moment she saw that he’d perished in the fiery crash, Peggy knew she had no choice: This tragedy, which landed literally at her doorstep, was only beginning. And like it or not, she had a role to play.
The procession of grief began shortly after the crash.
While police and firefighters secured the scene, two teenage boys came running down the road toward the lights. Peggy heard one of them scream. Then she saw a police officer intercept them before they could get to the car.
“It was awful, just awful, to watch,” she said.
The next morning, a group of Derrick’s friends arrived, tumbled out of their cars and gathered in somber silence around the tree.
“You guys are more than welcome to come,” Peggy told them. “Stay as long as you like. Just please pull the cars over to the side of the road. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The boys thanked her. Then, fanning out over the yard, they began picking up tiny pieces of wreckage and adding them to a small debris pile at the base of the tree.
“You guys don’t have to do that,” Peggy told them gently.
“No,” they replied. “We have to.”
“It was really strange to see them walking around the yard, picking up something, examining it,” Peggy said. “It was like they were looking for an answer – something they weren’t going to find.”
The cars and kids kept coming all that day. Then the next morning, two vehicles pulled up and four people – a younger couple and an older couple – got out.
“Is this where Derrick Cote had his accident?” the older woman asked.
“Yes,” Peggy replied sympathetically.
With that, the older woman fell to the ground wailing. The others knelt around her, trying to comfort her. The younger man looked up at Peggy and silently mouthed, “His grandmother.”
Peggy hurried over to the house and returned with a plastic lounge chair.
“Then I had to leave,” she said. “It was just too painful to watch.”
And so it has gone. Peggy, who works out of her home office for UnumProvident, looked out the window one day and saw kids scouring around for scraps of paper to write notes to Derrick.
Out she came a few minutes later with a stack of blank notebooks, a bag of pens and markers, a hammer and nails so they could tack their messages to the scorched tree.
Another day, she looked out and saw it had started to drizzle. She grabbed a resealable food bag from the kitchen, hurried outside and carefully tucked the notes inside so they wouldn’t get soaked.
“I’m going to give them to his mom,” Peggy said. “I assume she’d probably want them.”
But of all the things Peggy has done, perhaps the most important has been to just be there when people want to talk. Especially the kids.
“When I see them out there, I go out and say to them, ‘Tell me something about Derrick. Tell me something that he taught you,'” she said.
Thus she has learned how Derrick loved life, how he didn’t care if his buddies razzed him about the brightly colored shirt he wore the night he died, how he was, in the words of a boy named Adam, “an awesome, awesome friend.”
“And his smile,” Peggy said, blinking back tears. “I’ve heard more about his smile.”
Her compassion has not gone unnoticed. Just last week, a neighbor Peggy had never met stopped by with a small African violet.
“You’ve seen so much,” the woman told her. “I wanted to give you something beautiful to look at.”
And on Peggy’s front step sits a small potted evergreen. She found it when she returned home the day Derrick’s grandmother came.
“This is from my heart and to thank you for letting us remember Derrick here,” the attached note said. “We all remember his true love and spirit – but there is a need for this memorial to start to heal. You are special neighbors! – Derrick’s Grams”
Peggy has no idea how long this will last. Another crash at the same intersection took the life of an elderly woman four years ago – and her cross and flowers still sit at the edge of the woods just across the road.
But however long it takes, she’ll be here. Watching with one eye while she works to see if someone out there needs a hug, a few words of comfort, maybe a shoulder to cry on.
She even told Derrick’s family at his memorial service (“I just needed to be there – I don’t know why.”) that they’re more than welcome to place a permanent marker in the yard when they feel ready.
No, Peggy Johns never met Derrick Cote. But with each day, they seem to get more acquainted.
“I say good morning to him when I open the shades in the morning and then at night I say good night to him,” Peggy said. “We all do what we have to do to get through.”
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