Digital Extra: The Station Fire

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 25, 2004

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

The Rev. Gary Lemery's epiphany came when he saw people suffering after a plane crashed on Block Island nine summers ago.

Hundreds of people witnessed it; many were crying in the street. Father Lemery's wife, Kate, a recovery-room nurse, rushed to help. Father Lemery, an Episcopal priest serving the island that summer, was by her side.

He hugged a group of shaking waitresses who had jumped from restaurant windows when the Cessna hit the gas station next door. He spoke with traumatized firefighters who realized one of the victims was their chief's mother, and that the chief had discovered this only when he arrived to put out the blaze. The priest consoled distraught shopkeepers who spilled out of their stores when they saw smoke and smelled fire.

None of it seemed enough to him.

"I felt very frustrated that I couldn't help them more," Father Lemery says. "I wanted to understand what was happening to them so I could better help them."

A few days later, Father Lemery heard about something called stress-management training.

Suddenly his path became clear.

In the weeks that followed, Father Lemery took classes on how the human body responds to tragedy, how to work in a team, how to identify post-traumatic stress disorder, how to be a comforting presence when there is nothing comforting to say. He joined Rhode Island's Critical Incident Stress Management Team, a specially trained group of police officers, firefighters, EMTs, psychologists and clergy who respond to disasters, and continued to receive advanced training.

"If you'd told me when I was ordained that I would be certified for mass disaster and terrorist response, I would have said -- what are you talking about?" Father Lemery, 55, says today.

The priest put his training to use -- helping his current congregation, Church of the Transfiguration in Cranston, process tragedies such as the Columbine school shootings; speaking to American Airlines employees at T.F. Green Airport after the Sept. 11 attacks; responding to a plane crash in Matunuck.

. . .

Early in the morning of Feb. 21, 2003, Father Lemery was called to The Station nightclub in West Warwick.

He was the first clergyman at the scene. For 10 hours he prayed with the firefighters over the bodies of the victims in a makeshift morgue that grew in the club parking lot.

Sometimes the prayer was a silent plea.

"Praying over some of the victims, my mind went blank," Father Lemery says. "Prayers I've been saying for 27 years."

His training told him his body was shutting down, unable to absorb the pain and grief.

But the priest in him searched for words.

"I just said 'Lord, you know what I want to say. You understand.' "

. . .

In Father Lemery's mind, God does not cause events such as The Station fire. But He does give people strength to get through them.

"God, keep me going," he remembers praying at the fire site.

He says first responders performed sacred work that night; as a priest he was there to support them.

"Sometimes I look at what they do and stand in awe," he says.

The firefighters walked in a solemn procession toward him, carrying each victim with care, faltering only when they stepped over a thick fire hose.

Father Lemery saw the emotions on the firefighters' faces -- anguish and reverence -- and knew they reflected his own feelings.

"When you are on a scene like this, you are there to absorb other people's pain," he says.

For Father Lemery, this meant absorbing the anguish and horror of firefighters who had to return to the charred debris up to five times each to remove the dead. It would take almost two days to retrieve what they could of the 96 victims who had died at the scene.

As firefighters stood in line, preparing themselves to enter the wrecked nightclub, the priest tried to make eye contact with each responder. Just a silent acknowledgment of how difficult it was to go in again, knowing what they would find.

"You take their pain," Father Lemery says. "That's what clergy do."

As a rector, Father Lemery deals often with death. But his ministry usually leads him to hospitals, nursing homes and funeral parlors -- clean, even antiseptic places.

At the Station fire scene, death was raw. Dozens of bodies were in open body bags on plastic tarps that rescue workers had laid down, to cover the ice that had formed from the fire hoses' water.

He couldn't smell anything, because of sinus problems. A blessing, he thought later.

Despite fire engines, emergency lights, generators and, later, cranes and helicopters, Father Lemery remembers a serenity at the scene.

"There was a presence there that I sensed," he says. "Peace, calm and quiet in the midst of all the chaos."

The bodies came out in waves. During occasional lulls, Father Lemery looked into the cars surrounding him. He saw beads and graduation tassels dangling from rear view mirrors, photographs and work badges tucked in visors.

"Looking in the back seat and seeing someone's dry cleaning and thinking this is what they were going to wear tomorrow." He pauses. "That was difficult."

. . .

Around 10 a.m. that Friday morning, when all but one of the bodies recovered had been transported to the state morgue, someone asked Father Lemery if he wanted to get a cup of coffee.

No, the priest said. He would not leave the last victim.

"I felt that what we had on the tarp with these deceased persons was really sacred ground," Father Lemery says. "I could not leave her alone."

In the days after the fire, he found solace talking to two fire chaplains. He also spoke at length with a funeral director who had prepared several of the fire victims for burial. Father Lemery felt able to ask him questions that had plagued him about the condition of some of the bodies, questions he knew he couldn't ask anyone else.

"That helped tremendously," Father Lemery says. "I knew the deceased were OK."

Father Lemery remembers another thought he had during his 10-hour vigil at The Station, as he watched the firefighters do their work.

"God's love is there. In the midst of disaster, there is still compassion and caring."

. . .

Father Lemery tried to avoid death after the fire. But it kept finding him.

"To be honest with you, the week after the fire, I got a call to go to Cedarcrest [nursing home] and anoint someone," the priest says. "The last thing I wanted to face again was death."

He went.

He told psychologist Anne Balboni, head of the stress-management team, that he couldn't go to a disaster scene for a while.

A few days after the fire, he woke up angry.

The rector did not realize this until he tried to put something in the toaster and became enraged by a few items out of place on the kitchen counter.

"This anger welled up in me," he says in his gentle voice. "It was like a rage within me."

When Father Lemery reflects on the Station fire now, he has flashbacks to that night.

"It pulled everything I had out of me to respond there," he says.

Was it the hardest thing he has ever done?

Father Lemery thinks a moment.

"Was it harder than going into the infant ICU and anointing a dying baby?" he asks. "I can't compare."

. . .

Gary Lemery was raised in the Buttonwoods section of Warwick as a Roman Catholic and attended Roger Williams College, as it was then called. He remembers going to The Station site when it was an Italian restaurant offering 1-pound spaghetti suppers.

He felt drawn to a religious life, but couldn't fully relate to the Catholic role models around him. Eventually, he found his calling in the Episcopal Church and entered seminary.

He remembers thinking he would learn the answers to life's mysteries there -- life and death, good and evil, hope and despair.

He finished seminary with fewer answers than before.

"There are no answers," Father Lemery says. "It's the questions that we ask that are important."

What is the question he asks after the Station fire?

He pauses.

"Why didn't they get a pyrotechnics permit?"

. . .

Father Lemery doesn't try to elude death now.

"When you face the ultimate that life has -- which is death -- there is very little left to fear," he says. "I fear less in life."

Loss, grief and bereavement are becoming an even larger part of his ministry. Father Lemery resumed his work with the stress-management team late last year. He started to work with a new hospice group this summer and will help the terminally ill and their families face death.

The magnitude of human loss he witnessed at the fire scene remains with him.

"I think it has brought me closer to caring for people who are going through the death and loss process," he says.

Father Lemery has had to recite the familiar prayer of the dead many times since the fire and the words come easily today.

"May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace."

Staff writer Jennifer Jordan can be reached at jjordan [at] projo.com