Date brings ache of loss, hope of change.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Every time she drives through the Cascades and descends into the valley, Linda McCright sees death. All over again.

She sees it in the faces of her parents, in the eyes of her sisters, and especially in every movement of the nieces and nephew who lost both their parents that tragic day.

And when she sees a yellow school bus pass by, she sees Paula.

"You think that things are going to get better, but unfortunately, they don't," says McCright of Redmond. Her sister Paula Ruth Benitez drove bus No. 93 for the Springfield School District until she was murdered here on Feb. 23, 2004, by her ex-husband, Tomas Ortega Benitez, who then shot himself during an extremely violent and public murder-suicide that galvanized Lane County into taking a long, hard look at domestic violence.

For many people, anniversaries are something to look forward to, whether it's a wedding, a birthday or some other milestone. But for those who have lost loved ones in such unimaginably tragic ways, anniversaries can be a nightmare.

Especially the first.

For the families of Paula Ruth Benitez, who was 46 when she was killed, and Tomas Ortega Benitez, who was 43, there is the time of year and the weather it brings - February's crisp, cold air. The bare tree branches. Just after Valentine's Day. Basketball season. President's Day weekend. All are triggers.

Feb. 23 will come and go, but then it will roll around next year. And the year after that. But nothing, most likely, will be tougher than this past year, says Jane Vogel, a Eugene psychologist who often works with victims of intense traumas. "The first year after a traumatic loss like this, everything is a first," Vogel says. "It's the first time you have to try and negotiate the world without her."

The deceased's birthday. Mother's Day. Father's Day. Your first birthday without them there. Christmas. "We've kind of come full circle," says Shellie Smith of Troutdale, one of Paula Benitez's three sisters. "We've gone through the first of everything."

For Clyde and Doris Drew, Paula Benitez's parents, not much has changed in 364 days. "I don't feel much different," says Clyde Drew, 77, sitting in his century-old farmhouse on Highway 126 in Walterville, as his wife - who comes home weekends from the facility she lives in for dementia patients - warms herself by the burning wood stove.

"It's hard for me to understand. If he wanted to take his own life," he says of Ortega Benitez, "he could have done it without taking hers, too. It's really too bad. She was in the prime of her life."

Cemetery shoes

"Who'd have ever thought we'd be driving around with cemetery shoes in our cars?" McCright says.

That's what the sisters call them - the shoes that McCright, Smith and their younger sister, Anmarie Ruiz of Salem, keep in the trunks of their cars and slip on when they come to walk in the cemetery's grass in the winter time, or in the summertime when it's dry and they need to lug buckets of cool water to her grave from a nearby tank to moisten the hard ground.

Paula Benitez is buried at Camp Creek Cemetery, a small graveyard with markers mostly from the 19th century that sits on a hill above Upper Camp Creek Road. Drive north past the turnoff to the cemetery, and you come to Camp Creek Elementary School, where Paula's bus delivered and collected school children.

Her grave is where the family, including the three children she had with Ortega Benitez - Carrie, Isabel and Tommy - congregate to remember her.

"I just sit there and be with her," says Smith, who moved from Tacoma to Troutdale with her husband last year to be closer to her parents and her nieces and nephew.

Paula Benitez's gravestone is made from rock that once formed the foundation of a barn on the family's Walterville property, where Paula and her three sisters and three brothers all were raised. The summer before Paula died, the barn was torn down and the unusual, flat rocks were discovered underneath. She wanted to keep the rocks, preserve them in some way, as did Ruiz. But Paula, living then in the Springfield apartment where her life would eventually end, had nowhere to put them. So Ruiz had them transported to her home in Salem.

"I told her, when she got a place again, I'd bring them back to her," says Ruiz, choking back tears at the memory. But she never thought she'd bring them back to her this way.

Not only is Paula's gravestone - which includes a photograph of her blowing bubbles and the inscribed words, "Precious memories of Paula Ruth Drew (the family used her maiden name) ... you'll always be with us" - made of the rock, but so are memorials in front of Camp Creek Elementary School and at the school district's transportation center on 42nd Street. Both memorials contain carvings of her school bus in the rock.

Separated at death

Jorge Ortega Benitez, Tomas' older brother, and his wife, Sandy, who live in Eugene, have no contact with the family anymore. Jorge Ortega Benitez followed his brother to America from Mexico and they were once close, he says. But things spiraled out of control after Paula Benitez divorced his brother. Jorge found it more and more difficult to convince his brother to stay away from his ex-wife despite the restraining orders, he says.

In November, Jorge, a trucker, was involved in a bad wreck near Portland on Interstate 5. The rollover accident injured his ribs, neck and chest, and he's been living on workers compensation ever since, he says. He thought he was going to die. He thought his brother was waiting for him, he says.

Jorge Ortega Benitez would like to be close to his nieces and nephew again some day, but knows it probably will not be soon. There's too much pain and guilt and blame bouncing between branches of the family, he says.

Not just another day

As of last week, the family had no formal plans for Wednesday, the one-year anniversary of the tragedy. "We really didn't feel it was anything we wanted to celebrate," Ruiz says. However, there's a good chance everyone will be in town this weekend or next and visit Paula's grave, she says.

"The kids had figured on all going up to the cemetery," says Doris Drew, whose husband visits her every day when she's not home. Her condition has worsened since her daughter's violent death, Clyde Drew says. But Doris Drew doesn't think much about that, she thinks about Paula.

"It seems to me that it gets worse, not better," she says of coping with Paula's death. "It's hard not to keep thinking about it."

Especially when everything around you reminds you of it. The home where Paula grew up. The streets she drove. Her photographs on the wall.

"It has to do with the way the brain encodes the trauma," whether we're even conscious of it, says Vogel, the psychologist. Children often cannot tell you the date that something traumatic such as the death of a parent happened, but they remember the weather that day, or what they were eating when they heard the news, Vogel says.

The trauma, the continuous grieving, is perfectly normal, Vogel says. But American culture typically does not give people enough time for grieving, she says. "We're impatient with grieving."

An anniversary such as the death of a loved one should not be ignored, Vogel says, and a ritual such as planting a flower or a shrub in the person's memory every year can help, she says. Prepare for it, Vogel says. "Don't just treat it as another day."

"The best in people"

For Carrie and Isabel Benitez, and their younger brother, Tommy, there are no ordinary days anymore. And the healing process will be long and slow.

"It really angers me," says Isabel Benitez, sitting in her two-story duplex here with her sister and Ruiz, her aunt. Although glad that changes have been made, such as an overhaul of the ranking system that let her father out of an overcrowded Lane County Jail last year hours before he killed her mother, she believes nothing else has changed. Believes that the same thing could happen all over again because police would not know how to deal with it.

"There have been some changes, but I'm still not happy with a lot of stuff," says Isabel, 24, who is expecting her second child, a boy, in April.

Tommy Benitez, now a sophomore at Thurston High School, lives with Isabel, her husband, Manuel, and the couple's 2 1/2 -year-old daughter, Alicia. A football player for the Colts, Tommy doesn't talk much about what happened, his sisters say.

But he gets a lot of support from his coaches and teachers, says Ruiz, now his legal guardian, even though she lives in Salem. And McCright adds that the family is proud of how the community and women's support agencies have responded to the tragedy of a year ago.

"We've had a chance to see the best in people," McCright says. "It's a chance I wish we hadn't gotten."

CAPTION(S):

Clyde and Doris Drew visit the grave of their daughter Paula Benitez at Camp Creek Cemetery near Springfield.