Torri Wightman

The unbearable loss of all that possibility
By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald Columnist

Thursday, May 18, 2006 - Updated: 01:33 AM EST

W hen you’re a reporter you interview many parents who’ve just lost their children. Rarely had you met the child who died.

I met Torri Wightman three months ago when I interviewed her about growing up with a mother who was perhaps the most famous exotic dancer ever in this town. This is what I remember: the coltish, easy grace of a then 15-year-old, 5-feet 9-inches tall; green eyed, a shaggy mop of hair, bangs hanging in her eyes. She wore, according to modeling photos she posed for but never much pursued, size 8 shoes and size 2 jeans, junior.

I remember the tentative looks between mother and daughter when Torri told of finding incriminating pictures of her mother, by accident, at age 11. I also remember when she said she was all right with her mother’s past life, even at moments when someone would say they remembered “Princess Cheyenne.” Did she mean all this, or say it to please?

Yet I remember too how fiercely she defended what she saw as cruel attacks against her mother. Lucy Wightman, then and now, has faced tough and repeated scrutiny from Fox 25 News. She has admitted practicing psychotherapy without a license. Now she faces multiple charges, possibly even jail.

I remember Torri’s embarrassment when Lucy bragged about her daughter’s considerable talents as a painter, songwriter and musician, like her father Donnie, a former Boston cop and now a manager for Aeorsmith. When they posed for a picture, mother’s arms wrapped tight around her girl, I remember thinking too how visceral the bond, no matter what, between mother and her only child.

Yesterday Lucy Wightman stood sobbing and rocking back and forth on the grass outside the Hingham home where Torri lived with her dad. Across her chest she held meticulously framed pictures of Torri and paintings by Torri and a photo of her soccer team when she was 6 or 7.

“I want to learn about psychologist,” the child’s hand wrote. “I want to learn about cats . . . dogs. My dads a polic (sic) man. I like fish.”

Lucy also held Torri’s framed drawing of a house: “warm, cossy,(sic) white, noisy, clean,” she wrote.

Lucy Wightman, herself an only child estranged from her parents and divorced from Torri’s father, held these pictures and rocked and sobbed and repeated over and over, “I just want this not to be true. . . .I just want her back. . . . I want to hold her.”

Mike Munhall, director of Torri’s charter school, said yesterday Torri apparently slipped out of school during a 10:30 mid-morning break and met up with three girlfriends to play hooky. She was pronounced dead about 11 a.m. when the Oldsmobile Cutlass carrying her and her friends, in heavy rain, hydroplaned into the path of an oncoming minivan.

“She’s very bright,” Munhill said. “And accepting of everybody. She has a serenity about her, and was trying to figure out how to reach her potential.”

When you’re a reporter you interview many parents who’ve just lost their children. What you learn is that it is impossible to capture a child’s life because the child, as Munhill put it, is still all potential, possibility, paths not yet taken.

What you also learn, as crass as this sounds, is that it matters how a child dies. If your child dies of cancer, you can join the cancer bereavement group, perhaps raise money for research. If your child is killed by a drunken driver, you can join Mothers Against Drunk Driving and fight to change the laws. If your child is gunned down on Dorchester’s mean streets, you can join other mothers who’ve lost children to guns and find purpose in bringing peace.

But if your child is killed in a senseless accident in the rain, there is no group, no cause, no crusade, “It’s nobody’s fault,” Lucy Wightman said yesterday on the grass. “But what’s the meaning? Three seconds in one direction, three seconds in the other. A little faster, slower. It could’ve changed everything.”

But as it is Torri Wightman was born March 24, 1990, at Quincy Hospital, the beloved daughter of Donnie and Lucy Wightman. She died May 16, the anniversary of her parents’ marriage, on a wet road less than two months past her 16th birthday. She was a young woman of enormous possibility and potential who “has no possibilities” her mother said, “anymore.”