Digital Extra: The Station Fire

The loss of his fiancée will haunt Station survivor Robert Feeney forever, but meeting other burn victims is helping him rediscover the purpose in his life.

08:28 AM EDT on Friday, October 15, 2004

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

Journal file photo

"You have to tell yourself it's all right to move on." Robert Feeney, Station fire survivor.

DURHAM, N.C. -- His voice rasps by the end of the day and it hurts to tie his sneakers, but Robert Feeney feels stronger this fall than he did a year ago. It seems strange, but he is more at home with himself now than he was before the Station nightclub fire burned his hands, scarred his face and damaged his throat and lungs.

"I feel like I'm someone else," Feeney says of his life 20 months after the fire. "Like I'm more who I wished I was for most of my life."

Losing the person he loved most, his fiancée Donna Mitchell, in the fire first plunged him into despair. Then came multiple skin-graft surgeries and blinding physical pain, the loss of his independence and lawn-specialist job, and the evolving grief of a future without his fiancée. Life really was over, he thought.

Feeney, then 31, made a nine-year plan. He'd just try to hang on until Mitchell's two daughters, then 9 and 11, went off to college. "Beyond that, I figured I had nothing," Feeney said. "I just didn't care."

Then came something unexpected.

A conference for burn survivors, run by the Phoenix Society, a national support group, was scheduled in Cleveland. The Station Nightclub Fire Relief Fund was sponsoring about a dozen survivors to attend the society's World Burn Congress. Would he go?

Feeney went. At the September 2003 conference, he met 300 people who, like him, had lost their old bodies, their old lives. Some had also lost their best friends, their spouses, their children. He listened to a speaker talk about burn survivors as caterpillars becoming butterflies. You go from being burned to being a new human being, the speaker told him.

It was hard for Feeney to be there: to be in public with his physical wounds, to consider himself part of the burn community, to try to move his life forward. He forced himself to talk to other survivors. The power of doing something so difficult gave him resolve. He began to feel more confident. He felt a flicker of something else.

"When I left Cleveland, I was curious," Feeney said. "For the first time, I was curious about what I'd have after the nine years."

THIS WEEK, Feeney has returned to the World Burn Congress, held this year in Durham. He went with 27 other survivors of the Station fire and 18 of their relatives and friends.

"I think there is more I need to learn, more growing I need to do," Feeney says. "I still feel like there is something missing. I'm just hoping there's something I can learn to help other survivors."

The Station group joins more than 300 survivors from five countries, plus 300 of their caregivers, family and friends at the nation's largest gathering of burn survivors. Each person faces his or her own challenges and each heals differently, says Frank McGonagle, a Phoenix Society board member who lives in Swansea. McGonagle, 73, was burned four decades ago in a car explosion that killed his first wife.

"It's a long journey and people progress at different rates," he says. "They are grieving what's been lost. Skin is an organ we often take for granted."

Some survivors struggle with guilt; some turn to alcohol or drugs to dull the pain. Suicide is a frequent thought of some burn survivors. McGonagle says he battled all three: guilt, drinking, depression.

"There's an equal kind of trauma to the psyche -- not to diminish the physical," McGonagle says. "People who burn automatically have to concentrate on the physical. That's why some of this stuff doesn't kick in until the physical side is handled, to some degree."

But many burn survivors reach a point when they realize they cannot restore their old lives and they have to begin anew, McGonagle says. "It's a transcending kind of thing, and it doesn't happen overnight," he says.

With his second wife, McGonagle attended his first burn-survivor conference 12 years after his accident. It was the first time he'd ever met people more severely burned than he was, and he remembers crying privately throughout the week.

"What it does, mostly, is give survivors role models for hope," he says. "They see and meet other people who are struggling to surmount the same issues, who have been terribly burned and who have gone on to do wonderful things with their lives." McGonagle calls them "two-legged miracles."

THEY TOLD Feeney that Donna Mitchell was gone when he came out of a 10-day, induced coma. That's also when he found out that both of his hands were severely burned and that he would need several skin-grafting surgeries. When doctors removed the bandages from the donor sites on his thighs, he prayed for the end; even on morphine, the pain was indescribable.

He had burns on his nose, head, right eye, ear and shoulder. He had suffered hypothermia, double pneumonia and severe inhalation burns that turned his smooth voice gravelly. Feeney was released from Rhode Island Hospital after a month, but needed nursing care and had to move back home to his parents' house in Plymouth, Mass., leaving behind the home in Fall River that he had shared with Mitchell and her daughters.

Feeney began a laborious, painstaking recovery, his days filled with visiting nurses, physical therapy and burn-cream applications. But all the medical treatments -- and even the love and support of his and Mitchell's friends and family -- could not help him heal what hurt the most.

"For me, it was more mental and emotional than physical," Feeney said. "I lost my fiancée.

He taught himself to drive with his fingers and picked up his guitar a month ago. "I just know the pain means I'm working something out in my fingers," he says. He misses playing baseball and hockey, but forced himself to play some racquetball last week. Feeney still wears tight fabric gloves on both hands, to reduce swelling and prevent infection. He weaned himself from painkillers, antidepressants and sleeping pills shortly after the Cleveland convention, and refused to take pain medication home with him after his last two hand surgeries.

But he still has trouble falling asleep at night and feels restless without a job. "I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since the fire," he says.

Feeney doesn't know when he will be finished with surgeries and be able to go back to work, or live on his own. Seeing Mitchell's daughters, Brooklynn, now 12, and Joslynn, now 10, whenever he can helps him.

Building a new life is painful, but it has also given him confidence he never had before, Feeney says.

"Before, I was very confused. I could almost see where I should be, but I was afraid of taking the steps," he says. "You have to tell yourself it is all right to move on."

Two weeks ago, Oct. 2, was the day Feeney and Mitchell were to be married. He planned to spend the day alone, and went first to the Fall River cemetery where she was buried. As he was leaving, headed toward the Station site, Mitchell's father called and asked to meet him for a drink.

"The last time we were out alone having drinks was the night I asked him if I could marry his daughter," Feeney says. It somehow felt right to be with him again. "That's how I was supposed to spend that night anyway, at the wedding. I don't know what it was, but it felt like divine intervention."

The next day, Feeney got two tattoos: "The Station" written on a cross surrounded by red roses on his right calf and an angel on his left shoulder, the one that's not burned. "I couldn't think of a better way to do a personal memorial," he says. "I was going to spend my life with her anyway, and now I'll bring her with me everywhere."

The angel is holding a banner with Donna's name, her date of birth and the date of the fire. Feeney made sure the angel also had Mitchell's auburn hair.