‘God, take me. Don’t take them.’ A Hilton Head mom’s anguish in her own words

Toni Woods of Hilton Head Island called to ask if we could get her special letter in the paper — the one she wrote after her two boys, 12 and 13, were killed in a wreck by a driver who had been drinking.

That was 30 years ago Sunday.

Toni was driving when they were T-boned at a Boca Raton, Fla., intersection. Matthew, the 12-year-old dreamer and prankster, was ejected from the car. Toni said he had taken off his seat belt to pass a fishing pole they’d just bought at Kmart to his brother, Gregory, the young scholar of the family.

Greg ended up smashed against his trapped mother. She recalls thinking, “God, take me. Don’t take them. Please take me.”

The boys died 20 minutes apart.

The letter is considered a miracle — its beginnings scratched on a yellow legal pad as Toni drifted in and out of consciousness in a hospital. It was for her husband, Gary, to read at a funeral she could not attend.

It was later refined and has been shared for many years with friends and family. She wanted the world to know about her boys.

“Pain from the loss of a child is felt in every cell of your body,” she said. “For years it is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you think about when you go to bed at night. It is what defines you.”

Toni and her husband, Gary, moved to Hilton Head 22 years ago. Today they can sit in their large marshfront home in Windmill Harbour and calmly discuss deep pain.

Theirs is a story of a hard, ongoing recovery.

Choose to live

Toni was a successful pharmaceutical sales representative with Bristol-Myers.

Gary was an executive in high-level security, specializing in biometric security, even doing some work at the White House.

They lived in New Jersey when he took a job in Florida. Toni and the boys had just flown in to find a house.

The boys set the alarm clock for 6 a.m. on the day they died.

“They said it would be the best day of their lives,” Toni said. They fished from the Deerfield Beach pier.

Gary was in Ohio on business. He did not believe the call from police was real.

The former Navy special operations officer worked out his grief and anger physically.

“I ran and ran and ran,” he said.

“He cut the grass until there was no grass left, just dirt,” Toni said.

Today, their home is filled with his oil paintings of marsh and ocean scenes. That’s part of his therapy.

Toni could never work again, and she remains on medication.

And they remain miffed at a criminal justice system that saw the man who hit them spend a year in jail on two convictions of vehicular homicide, then get into another wreck with a blood alcohol level of .216 that left a child paralyzed. He told police he had two beers before the wreck that killed the Woods boys.

“Our present and our past were gone,” Toni said, “and we did not have a future.”

At one point, they considered taking a gun to the cemetery and ending their own lives there.

But that led to a conscious choice to live — and to live in a way that would make their boys proud.

Miracle baby

Toni was 42 when the wreck happened.

So it was a stretch when they decided to have another child.

They first looked into adoption, but their age and mental health at the time waved off the agencies.

Then came the big miracle. Peter Alexander Woods was born in 1988, 16 months after his brothers died.

They now had a focal point for their love and dedication. They had something sweet to occupy their minds.

“The love and dedication came easy,” Toni said, “but we had to work hard to find the joy and the adventure.”

She said she eventually learned, “I have to be happy and joyful for my kids. You don’t have to be grieving and crying to show respect for them.”

She got involved with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She then worked specifically with parents who had lost more than one child.

She said she was blessed to have Gary, when many marriages don’t survive the loss of a child.

She said she was blessed that Gary’s career success, and her disability from Bristol-Myers, could afford them long-term medical care.

And she has gathered a number of survival tips for others.

How to survive

Toni said you want people to talk about your lost children.

“People think if they don’t mention it, you’ll feel better,” she said.

Gary said, “It’s much more painful if they don’t recognize anything about your children. When they remember things with you, it validates their life.”

Get a therapist, Toni said, and it should be someone who has felt similar pain. Her best one was a psychologist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp at age 13. Another assured her, “Toni, you will smile again.”

“There are horrible, horrible things that go through your mind,” she said. “You need a professional who can handle that deepest, most horrible thing. Some people see it as a box. You put your grief in a box and you slam it shut. On the other hand, if you look at grief every day, you’ll end up in an insane asylum. You learn to control the grief. A therapist can teach you how to handle it when it comes up.”

She recommends anti-depressant medication.

And she said, “People can help you, but you are the only one who can make you better. Put one foot in front of the other and do it. You have to give yourself permission to get better.”

The wedding

One day stands above all others in Toni’s recovery.

It was the June day in 2014 that their son Peter married Lindsay Yarrison of Bluffton.

He had graduated from Hilton Head Preparatory School, where he played on the 2005 state championship football team. He met Lindsay at the University of South Carolina. He’s now a U.S. Marine Corps officer stationed in Okinawa, Japan.

Toni was able to stand before a crowd of some 150 at the Lowcountry wedding and say her heart was filled with joy.

She and Gary always mark the anniversary of Greg and Matt’s passing. The boys loved fireworks, so they usually shoot off a bottle rocket or two in the backyard — 20 minutes apart.

But on the 30th anniversary, they wanted to do something special.

They wanted to print the letter in the newspaper.

Here is the letter written as a eulogy to her sons by Toni Woods:

Remembrance of Gregory and Matthew

Who were these boys, our sons?

Gregory, born the day after Christmas in 1973, was our first born. If there was a scholar in the family, it was he. Gregory delighted in books, in his schoolwork, in the whole learning process. He was a gifted child, with a wonderful memory. Catalogs were one of his loves, be they for fishing gear, computers or radio-controlled vehicles. His room was crammed with books — often about sharks or military aircraft. His heart had been set on Annapolis and a future as a naval aviator. Knowing his tremendous self-discipline and his fascination with flight, we think he would have made it.

Matthew came along 18 months later. He was the creative one, the dreamer, the prankster. Matthew never did anything exactly like anyone else. He delighted in being just a little bit unorthodox. He was a boy who loved adventure, whether it was exploring a cave in Mexico or arranging the first fifth-grade boy/girl party at Pines Lake (N.J.) School. Matthew never could take his homework seriously, but he delighted in writing his own stories. His favorite efforts concerned a fictitious cartoon raccoon named Bandit and a fictitious cartoon dog named Nadjadog.

Greg loved sharks and airplanes, comic books and catalogs. Matt loved raccoons and stuffed animals, especially Ziggys. Mom’s spaghetti was their favorite food, with pizza and coffee ice cream following close behind. Greg loved bagpipes, while Matt loved rock ‘n’ roll. Both of them loved fishing, skiing, computer games and Nadja, the family Saluki. Both of them had a strong sense of right and wrong and both of them loved their Mom and Dad very much.

How do we remember our sons? We see them padding into our room to kiss us goodnight with childlike lips. We see them hiking up the path from the lake, fishing jackets stuffed with tackle and poles slung over their shoulders. They’re on the floor in front of the computer, doing battle in some exciting electronic game. We picture them in Boy Scout uniforms, soccer suits, and passing the baseball back and forth. We remember them participating in the countless adventures we enjoyed as a family, and we also remember them cuddling with us in our king sized bed watching TV.

Our two sons were so different, yet they loved each other so much. A night rarely passed when they slept apart. Either they slept in one of their rooms or on weekends in the basement playroom — often with arms and legs entwined. They would fight like cats and dogs, but they were always there for each other — Matthew the jaunty semi-daredevil and Gregory pushing him on and living a little vicariously in the process.

We loved these boys so very, very much and we pray you remember them with us.

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 1:03 PM with the headline "‘God, take me. Don’t take them.’ A Hilton Head mom’s anguish in her own words."