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The following article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Ultimate Loss Bonds Area Gold Star Moms
-James Hawver, Staff writer

This is a club to which no mother wanted to belong.

Members often avoid the news. They can’t bear to hear another has joined.

“I don’t want to know,” said Mary Ellen Schramm, sitting in her Greece home, her voice weak, her face flush, her eyes wet. “I can’t do anything about it. It’s a heartbreak for me. I cry. I can’t imagine another family going through what we’ve gone through.”

Schramm became a Gold Star mother in October 2004. Since then, nearly 3,000 more American mothers have suffered through the same.

To be given a gold star means a son or daughter has been taken away.

And while most mothers today will receive a card, a phone call, maybe flowers or a visit, those like Schramm, whose children have died during military service, can only cling to memories.

“Holidays are tough,” said Schramm, who will spend her fourth Mother’s Day without her eldest son, Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Schramm, who died at age 22 in a mortar attack in Iraq.

‘Can’t wake up’

This is a club of weak eyes and strong bonds. “Our bond is loss,” said Georgian Davis, sitting at Schramm’s kitchen table on a recent Saturday afternoon. “Our bond is grief. Our bond is that I met someone who knows my feeling, who knows what I’m going through.”

Davis, president of the South Buffalo Chapter of the Gold Star Mothers of America, and fellow member Shirley Weaver traveled along the Thruway to induct the first five local mothers into the organization as charter members of the Rochester Area Chapter.

The mothers — Schramm, Nancy Cometa-Fontana of Greece, Rita Hasenauer of Hilton and Marcia Lyons and Cathy Pernaselli, both of Brighton — plucked tissues from a box in the middle of the table as they listened to Davis talk about her son. On April 19, 1989, off the coast of Puerto Rico, an explosion aboard the USS Iowa killed 47 sailors, including Nathaniel C. Jones Jr.

“I always think,” said Davis, crying, “would he have gotten married?”

Each told similar stories of young men who went off to war and never came home.

Anthony Cometa was 21 when he died.

Jason Hasenauer was 21.

James Lyons was 28.

Michael Pernaselli was 27.

Brian Schramm was 22.

“We have the right to cry for them and ourselves whenever we feel like it,” Davis said.

The five mothers grabbed more tissues, made their way to the back porch, raised their right hands and took the organization’s oath.

They returned to the kitchen table and signed their names to the back of their charter, officially forming the Rochester Area Chapter of the Gold Star Mothers of America. The mother of a Rochester man who died during World War I founded the pioneering chapter of the national organization in 1919.

The five mothers, along with others in the area, have been getting together nearly every month for the past couple of years. Although they were the first to officially sign up, they expect more mothers who have lost a child will join their chapter. Their bond is still the same, they say, just now official.

“We’re an organization that understands immediately, immediately, what you’re going through the minute that casualty officer comes to your door,” said Davis, wearing the official Gold Star Mothers white cap with gold lettering and trim.

After the intimate ceremony, Cathy Pernaselli and Nancy Cometa-Fontana slipped out the front door. They took cover from the drizzling rain under a maple tree, crossed their arms and held onto their cigarettes.

“There’s nobody else that can really help us besides each other,” Cometa-Fontana said.

Today marks the third Mother’s Day she will be without her son, and the fifth for Pernaselli.

Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Pernaselli was killed April 24, 2004, during an attack on an oil terminal in Basra, Iraq. Before he died, he wrote a Mother’s Day card but hadn’t sent it. One of his buddies found the card and passed it along until it finally reached home.

“It took me so long to be able to say that Michael was dead,” said Cathy Pernaselli, who raises her son’s two daughters, 8-year-old Dominique and 7-year-old Nicole.

Army National Guard Spc. Anthony Cometa didn’t have children.

“That’s what I’m going to miss,” his mother said. “I’m never going to have grandchildren from him.”

The two mothers finished their cigarettes and headed back into the house.

“It’s like a bad dream,” Cometa-Fontana said.

Pernaselli cut in: “And you can’t wake up.”

Not again

This is a club Rita Hasenauer has joined once; she doesn’t want to join again.

On a Tuesday morning early last month, she sat with her husband, Daniel, and her youngest son, 15-year-old Eric, in the back of a gray waiting room at the Hancock Air National Guard Base in Syracuse.

She waited for her two middle sons. Jeremy, 18, was taking a physical in preparation for entering the Air Force this summer after graduating from Hilton High School. Danny, 21, was filling out paperwork in preparation for entering the Army National Guard that afternoon.

She had visited the building just a month before, to witness the dedication of the Jason D. Hasenauer Ceremony Room, named after her eldest son, who died at the age of 21 when his Humvee rolled over Dec. 27, 2005, in Afghanistan. Twenty-two days after his death, Jason’s fiancée, Collette Kopp, gave birth to their only child, Kayla.

On Feb. 29, the day of the dedication, Danny became the first soldier to take an oath of military service in the room.

“I’m getting empty-nest syndrome already,” said Rita Hasenauer, a 47-year-old software engineer.

Danny turned angry after Jason died, his parents said. His temper grew short. He snapped easily.

He wanted to sign up for the service right away. But the thought of his mother worrying for his safety held him back.

“I said I better hold off,” Danny recalled when he returned to the waiting room after completing the day’s first round of paperwork.

“Thank you,” Rita said, with a sigh.

Danny’s call to military service rekindled last summer at a Fourth of July ceremony at the First Bible Baptist Church in Greece honoring local fallen soldiers, including his big brother.

As the family waited at the Syracuse air base, they periodically glanced at the television in the front of the room tuned to CNN Headline News.

“Four U.S. soldiers died in Baghdad yesterday,” the anchor said, and went on to talk about Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony to Congress that day.

The news, Rita said, doesn’t bother her as much as patriotic country songs. They get to her. She flips off the radio quickly before they make her cry.

After a couple of hours of waiting, an officer called them into the ceremony room. Outside, Rita made sure Jeremy tucked in the brown, button-up shirt that she had brought for him.

Rita snapped photos from the corner of the room as her two sons raised their right hands as Jeremy was sworn into the U.S. Air Force.

After the ceremony, the half-dozen officers in the room clapped, and the Hasenauers posed for pictures next to a photograph of Jason and some of his medals hanging on the wooden wall.

“I can’t think of a more American family right now,” Air Force Capt. John Valezaquez said.

A half-hour later, Danny was gone, off to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for at least six months of basic training. If he reaches his goal and is accepted into the military police, it will be more.

“I want them to do what they want to do,” Rita said. “Everybody’s got to find their own way, and if that’s part of their life, we’ve got to back them — with lots of instruction to be careful.”

She has given her sons one specific demand. One of their walls at their home is a memorial to Jason, filled with photographs and keepsakes.

“They have orders not to add to the wall.”

Helping others

This is a club where mothers who have lost sons gain new ones.

“I’m worried about Danny Hasenauer,” Mary Ellen Schramm said a few weeks after he left for boot camp.

The Hasenauers have since heard a rumor that Danny’s unit will be deployed to Afghanistan in a year.

Schramm realizes that her two other sons, 19-year-old Kyle and 17-year-old Mike, are that much closer to signing up for the armed services themselves.

Kyle, a freshman at Monroe Community College, has been talking about joining the Coast Guard.

Mike, a junior at Greece Olympia High School, has been talking about joining the Marines, like his brother, through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

“He wanted to go into the Marines because it’s the hardest,” Mary Ellen said of Brian, who hoped to be a sheriff’s deputy or state trooper after leaving the service. “It was in him.”

She said she cried every day for three years after he died. Over the 43 months since he has been gone, Brian’s scent has been lost from his clothes. Mary Ellen often sits on his bed and buries her face in his old sweatshirts, longing for a piece of her son.

Now, she and other Gold Star mothers have dedicated themselves to helping others, raising money for organizations like the Veterans Outreach Center.

“We couldn’t help Brian, but if we can help other kids coming back, that’s our goal,” she said. “This is our cause now.”

They help each other. Nancy Cometa-Fontana, who calls Schramm for support, calls her Greece neighbor her “lifeline.”

And they help new members, going together to the funerals of other local fallen soldiers.

“If we have to belong to this, at least we’re together,” Schramm said. “We’re family.”

Like Schramm says, holidays are tough on Gold Star mothers. After what they’ve been through, after what they’ve lost, they make sure to appreciate every moment with their remaining children — no matter how small or how short.

Like, today, when Danny Hasenauer makes his weekly five-minute phone call home from boot camp.

Gold Star mothers now make sure their last words in each conversation are always “I love you.”

“I think it’s a privilege to be a mother,” Schramm said. “I think it’s something that God chose for all of us to be in some way, and it’s a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted.”

JHAWVER@DemocratandChronicle.com

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