Upper West Side Tragedy and Everyday Miracles

By Christoper Brimer

Getting inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine isn’t easy, but I’ve still gone there several times a year since 2021. That’s the year my husband was run down by a truck on Central Park West. His ashes are there, so I visit at least twice annually to light votive candles. I go on his birthday and the anniversary of his death and sometimes on holidays. When I arrive, I have to go through a metal detector and allow the guard to search my bag. Then there’s a ticket desk where visitors are charged a $15 admission fee. St. John’s soaring ceiling and stained glass are glorious, but its policies make me feel like I’m boarding a flight at JFK instead of finding refuge in a spiritual  sanctuary.

Another anniversary visit loomed recently at the end of June and I was already cranky. Near 109th Street, I passed Morningside’s most recent street memorial. Six weeks old, it was cluttered with desiccated bouquets, sooty candle holders, and rain-smeared photographs. It was created for two neighborhood regulars who were killed by a speeding car that crashed into the exact spot where locals have gathered for years to chat and play games. Three others were seriously injured. It could have been much worse.

Piles of flowers and devotional objects began growing even before all the police barriers were removed. Eventually most memorials become eyesores, but they still matter. They whisper “Don’t forget what happened here. Our neighbors stood exactly where we are standing now and lost everything in an instant.”

So riffing on the idea of street memorials, I called my son, Bennett Williamson, with a question: “What if instead of going to St. John’s, I put the candle for your dad in the ambulance bay of St, Luke’s hospital [now called Mount Sinai Morningside] this year?”

He didn’t hesitate. “That’s a great idea,” he said.

A bit of background helps explain why our decision wasn’t as random as it sounds.

Jeff Williamson was a quintessential Upper West Sider. He was brilliant and a nonstop doer. He was so capable that he was still working in advertising, a profession that worships youth, at the age of 71. He loved New York. He loved his 50-year-old Italian racing bike.  He was proud of his fitness, but his stellar HDL levels didn’t help on June 29, 2021 when, as he biked home from work, he was run over by a USPS truck making an illegal right-hand turn onto the 86th Street transverse.

Two traffic cameras documented every second of him being knocked down in the crosswalk and crushed. An ambulance rushed him to Mount Sinai Morningside, but he was probably dead on arrival. Bennett, who is a paramedic, and I got there almost immediately. Bennett put up a good front, but he slipped off quietly to cry in the ambulance bay when he got the chance.

So the first tears for Jeff Williamson were shed in the Mount Sinai ambulance bay and the first genuine condolences were offered there by Bennett’s fellow paramedics.

The bay is a tidy square that exactly fits two ambulances, but on its north side there’s an extra space about the size and shape of a closet. It seemed like the perfect spot for the votive, but standing alone on the concrete floor, the candle looked forlorn. So I walked to a nearby store and bought four small bunches of silk flowers. They gave the votive presence. My makeshift grotto didn’t have the grandeur of St. John’s, but I felt its fragile message of loss and loyalty was vivid.

The candle burned for a week. A few more days passed before the memorial disappeared. A month later, I was walking my little dog along 113th on the way to the park. Mount Sinai doesn’t waste much money on landscaping, so my eyes lingered on the surprisingly pretty flowers in the two tree pits near the emergency room entrance. It took a second to hit me — they were exactly like the silk flowers I had left in the garage, except instead of four bunches, there were now 40. They transformed the tree pits into something beautiful.

Over the last two years, my life has been chockablock with everyday miracles. I helped introduce Bennett to an amazing woman and they were engaged within a month. Then, my new rescue dog pulled out of her collar on Broadway and 108th Street and ran away. She had been gone for five days when a good samaritan named Bennett Perez made it her mission to find her. She didn’t contact me, she just printed out the posters I’d put online and leafletted Marcus Garvey Park. In short order, someone spotted Lola roaming the cliffs. Thanks to this angelic woman I got my dog back unharmed.

And now, my silk flowers had multiplied and been transplanted 20 feet away to brighten the emergency room entrance.

“You’re the one who left those flowers in the ambulance bay,” one of the security guards said. “I remember them!”

I asked the guards to try and find out who had invested their time and money in this unofficial beautification project. They seemed very pleased to spread a bit of happy news. I imagined the story of the flowers drifting upward from the emergency room, passing from staffer to staffer, adding a bit of levity to an otherwise normal shift.

It is hard to pinpoint what makes this little tale so encouraging. Is it that the memory of a dead man sparked a collaboration between absolute strangers? Is it that two small acts of imagination — one person putting flowers in an ambulance bay and another using those flowers to bring cheer to all who visit the emergency room — had struck a hopeful chord? It felt as if Jeff Williamson’s unique life force had briefly visited the Upper West Side and dusted it with a tiny bit of magic.