Even now, more than six months later, Neal and Monica Bower can’t drive past the site where their son, Rod, was killed. They can barely set foot in his room, which they have left intact. And they are spending Christmas with family in New York.
“Normally we don’t travel at the holidays, but this is not the year for us to be home. It’s too hard,” said Monica Bower.
Roderick Bower died in a single vehicle accident on Democracy Boulevard in Potomac at 3:40 a.m. May 22. The 17-year-old junior at Walter Johnson High School had not attended the school’s prom that night and was preparing to compete in a lacrosse playoff game later that Saturday. Rod was wearing his seatbelt and had not been drinking. He had slipped out of the house without his parents’ knowledge and was driving after curfew.
For Neal and Monica Bower, there are no easy explanations for why they no longer have their son. They were actively involved in Rod’s life: attending sports games and practices, participating in the PTA.
“We did something right along the way and unfortunately it didn’t turn out very good. That’s something you can tell the parents, that sometimes you can do everything right and it doesn’t matter. We yelled at him, we hugged him, we did everything we could. But in the end they make their own decisions,” Neal Bower said.
THE POLICE have never precisely pinpointed the cause of the crash. The road was slick and it appears that Rod was traveling too fast for conditions, but not driving in a reckless way. He lost control of the car and spun out, crossing the center line and hitting a tree on the north side of Democracy.
“There’s never been any definitive answer on why. We’ve kind of resigned ourselves to that fact, that that’s just the way it is. Sometimes there is no answer,” Neal Bower added. More details won’t, both parents said, do anything to bring Rod back or help their grieving process.
“There are so many things that have gone through my brain about, ‘Would it have made a difference?’ And probably not. It was just a freak set of circumstances all going wrong at the wrong time,” Monica Bower said. Perhaps, she said, if they had locked up the keys.
But the Bowers aren’t beating themselves up. They know from the reactions of the community after Rod died that they had raised him well (see box “An Outpouring of Love.”)
“They demand their liberties and they earn their liberties and you can only hope that what you taught them holds up,” Neal Bower said.
‘Everybody Was His Friend’
As a child, Rod was the one to gather up boys for a game in the Bowers’ close-knit Kensington neighborhood. He was the one the one to instigate all the harmless hijinks of childhood, his mother said.
Rod grew up playing hockey on travel teams throughout Montgomery County and through hockey he had made friends not only at Walter Johnson but at Whitman, Churchill, Magruder and Gaithersburg high schools, from private schools like Landon and Bullis, from Frederick County.
“And we knew they were friends, but we didn’t really know the effect he had on them as a person until this came out and the kids started telling us things that he did for them to make them a better person, how caring he was about them as a person,” Neal Bower said.
“The word exuberant I think is probably the best word to describe him,” Monica Bower said. “He was just one happy kid, loved everybody, loved to have a good time. Everybody was his friend. And that’s one of the things that amazed us after he died was this outpouring of love for him. The numbers of people that he touched was just overwhelming.”
Rod was a fearless defender on the ice who led by example rather than “rah-rah exuberance.” By his junior year, Rod’s love for lacrosse had equaled and perhaps begun to eclipse his love for hockey. The lacrosse goalie not only blocks shots but orchestrates the defense, calling out directions. Neal Bower said that watching Rod in the net one day, watching his teammates look to him for directions, he knew that Rod had “turned the corner” into adulthood, had begun to become a leader.
More powerful than his presence on the athletic field, though, was Rod’s simple power to bring cheer into the lives of friends, even just casual acquaintances.
Neal Bower recalls a female student telling him after Rod’s funeral about how she once came to Rod distraught after doing badly on a test. He cheered her up, telling her, “There’s a lot better things than school.” Rod’s parents laugh, but they know Rod was right, that Rod had a gift for seeing things in perspective.
Rod, it seems clear, was a heartthrob for teenage girls.
“One of the funny things that came out of it though was the battle of who had the first kiss with Rod at the earliest age,” Monica Bower said. “A girl came up after the funeral and said, ‘You know I had my first kiss with Rod’ and that was in 6th grade. Then they had a special pullout section in the school newspaper and they had all these reminiscences and one was a girlfriend from 5th grade and it showed her diary with his name all over the page.”
Grieving
The Bowers have moved on slowly. Seven months, they know, are just the beginning of a lifetime without their son. And while they feel they have grieved healthily, they still face their son’s death day by day.
“You go for a couple of days now where it’s tolerable and then there’s moments where it’s completely intolerable,” Monica Bower said.
“We struggle every day,” said Neal Bower. “It’s been six months, almost seven months and I still haven’t had a good day. Not all day. At some point during the day something happens, and it doesn’t have to be an outside influence, you can be driving to work, listening to the radio and all of a sudden something pops into your head and you find yourself just crying your eyes out, or just, your chin goes to your chest. You work through it, you get over it because you have to. You have to continue to live. … Every day I think about him and I feel sad. And I don’t see that ever stopping. Not completely.”
Equally affected were Rod’s 20-year-old sister, Gage, and 13-year-old brother, Patrick.
“I miss him for Pat, because there’s so much education that goes on between brothers. There’s so much to learn, just by watching. And he’s missing all that,” Neal Bower said.
Next Steps
The Bowers would do anything to keep another parent from having to experience what they have experienced.
Raising the driving age is not a good solution, they say.
“Penalizing 98 percent of the kids for what happens to 2 percent of the kids—I don’t think is correct, I don’t think that’s the right way to do it. Now giving the kids more education on driving, yeah that’s the way to go,” Neal Bower said.
The Bowers believe that better driver education, with more hours behind the wheel and more stringent testing standards are the best way to prepare young people for the road.
“And somehow getting them to slow down,” Monica Bower said.
The Bowers are continually affected by the continuing series of tragic teen deaths in the Washington area.
Every time I open the newspaper and read [about an accident], it’s the parents I think about, because I know what they’re going to experience,” Neal Bower said.
“I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I’d be on my soapbox, trying to help other kids, trying to help other parents to avoid what we’re having to go through. My biggest concern is trying to make sure other parents don’t have to experience what we did.”