Graham has learned to live in here and now
By KATHY HAGEMAN
Staff writer
For a woman who's not yet 30 years old, Elizabeth Graham has already experienced a lifetime worth of tragedy.
Widowed a little more than two years ago when her husband died in a tragic explosion, Elizabeth barely had time to recover from the shock before discovering she had cancer.
Yet, she can still laugh through the tears and says the sense of humor God gave her has helped her deal with the various traumas — of which she's had more than her share.
Elizabeth Graham is a name few Marion area residents will recognize.
A new resident, Elizabeth moved to Marion in November to work as the designer at The Flower Shoppe located in Kraft Korner, There, she uses her talents to create lovely floral bouquets and arrangements.
Elizabeth came to Marion from her hometown of Bonner Springs. There too, she worked in a flower shop.
"I started working as a delivery driver on Valentine's Day 2000, and worked my way up," she said.
Learning floral design through "hands on experience," Elizabeth went on to complete a vo-tech class and obtained a certificate in the field.
"I like to see other people happy. Flowers tend to do that," she said.
This past summer Elizabeth made the decision to leave her hometown and move closer to her fiancé who makes his home in McPherson.
"I wanted to be near him but I needed to find a job," Elizabeth explained. "So, I got out a map and set my boundaries from McPherson — Marion to the east, Wichita to the south, Salina to the north, Great Bend to the west.
"And I landed here," she said.
Elizabeth believes a higher power intervened in helping her find work in her chosen field in Marion.
"I found this job the first time I looked," she said, explaining she found the position through a help wanted ad on the Internet.
With a new fiancé, new job, and new environment, 28-year-old Elizabeth is starting over after a whirlwind string of calamities that started in the summer of 2001 with the death of her husband's brother.
Two weeks later — to the day — her husband 37-year-old Donald Graham died Sept. 4 in an oil tanker explosion near Tonganoxie.
"Between September 2001 and February 2002, seven people in my family died," she said.
Married just a little more than a year, Donald Graham had taken a second job checking oil tanks as a means of helping the small family make ends meet.
Besides wife Elizabeth, the family also included her daughter Jennifer and son Michael from a previous marriage.
"Donald was checking oil levels on a battery of tanks when the explosion occurred," she recalled. "No one knows for sure what happened. All of the police reports were different."
Although she doesn't know the details, Elizabeth does know that Donald was checking the oil level in a 1,000-gallon tank when he climbed the tank and opened a hatch to look inside.
Since the tank was only partially full there was plenty of room for fumes. Either a match was lit or some spark occurred which caused the explosion, she said.
Donald's nephew and a woman were also at the scene when the accident occurred, but they were both uninjured. Her husband's body was found about 31 feet from the tanker. He died instantly.
"I found out about the accident on TV from breaking news reports," Elizabeth recalled. "When I heard there was an explosion and it was in the area where he was working, I called the station.
"They told me one person had been found and another was missing," she recalled. "My daughter Jennifer was staying overnight with a friend and I called my mom and said, 'Mom, you have to take Michael,' because I knew something had happened.
"Mom tried to calm me down and said 'You're imaging things.'"
A second call to the TV station confirmed the missing person had been found but another individual was dead.
"The police didn't call me. They called my mom. She told me I should come over with her so we could listen to the TV together," Elizabeth recalled.
"Donald died one year and three months to the day (after) we were married. You don't expect your husband to die in his mid-30s," she added. "You know how sometimes we wish bad things would happen to people? I wouldn't wish what happened to me on my worst enemy."
Fighting deep depression, Elizabeth credits her mother for helping save her sanity.
"I don't know what I would have done without my parents," Elizabeth said. "When you're young you don't think Mom and Dad know anything. But as you grow up you find that Mom and Dad were right.
"If it weren't for my mom I wouldn't be around today," Elizabeth said. "She took care of the kids and helped keep me going."
Elizabeth also found it hard to go back to work in the flower business. "Working with flowers was therapeutic to a point, but I found it was really hard to do a funeral after my husband's death," she said.
Elizabeth spent the remainder of 2001 and 2002, attempting to recover from his death. Just as she was beginning to rebound, Elizabeth learned in early 2003, that she had cancer.
"I had a lot of pain and kept getting sick," she explained. "Then the doctors discovered I had uterine cancer."
Elizabeth went under the knife to have her uterus removed. But in typical fashion, something went wrong.
"It was supposed to be an in-and-out surgery but the doctors cut my bladder and I ended up being in the hospital a week," she said.
This time, however, there was a silver lining to the cloud because just a few weeks earlier she had met a man named Vince Hager.
"My best friendm Brent and his wife Suzee, both said 'there's a guy you've got to meet.' So Vince and I started instant messaging each other on the computer," Elizabeth recalled with a smile. "We talked for two weeks before we ever met."
When Vince made a trip to Bonner Springs the two hit it off.
"You have this image of what you think someone is going to look like," Elizabeth said with a laugh. "He wasn't what I expected."
That, however, proved to be of no consequence. Faced with an unexpected lengthy recovery after the surgical accident, Elizabeth's new friend volunteered to take care of her.
"Even though we'd just met, Vince came down and spent his vacation taking care of me," she said. smiling at the memory. "It wasn't much later and we decided to get married.
"I told him, 'You've seen me at my worst. It can only get better,'" she said with a smile.
Although the decision to marry was made quickly, the couple decided to delay the wedding for awhile.
"We thought we'd be smart about it and set the wedding date in the future," she said.
Currently, the wedding is set for either Oct. 16 or Oct. 31. They are planning a medieval wedding and hope to marry during the annual Bonner Springs Renaissance Festival.
"I worked there for 12 years doing everything from being a street performer to cooking, to whatever," Elizabeth said.
Vince too, also has a taste for the Middle Ages. One of his hobbies is sword fighting.
"He's involved in a sword fighting club in McPherson," she said. "I'm looking forward to getting involved too."
Besides a shared fondness for hand-to-hand combat, the couple also share a sense of humor, something Elizabeth uses to conquer her "down moods."
"I find it very easy to laugh," she said. "Sometimes I say things that get me a lot of strange looks from people. But I figure that's better than the time where I wouldn't even get out of bed."
Although their plans are still in the formation stage, Elizabeth said she and Vince would like to make their home in Marion.
This summer, Elizabeth's children seven-year-old Jennifer and four-year-old Michael will join her in Marion. Currently, they live with Elizabeth's mother in Bonner Springs.
"I like the smaller city. People here are friendlier and most of them have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome," she said.
As for the past events in her life Elizabeth has found a degree of peace.
"It was his time to go. God has a plan for us all," Elizabeth said, speaking of her late husband.
"One thing I've learned is to enjoy the moment. They'll be snags in the road, but God doesn't give any of us more than he feels we can handle."
