Dear Coffey Grounds Readers,
A little programming news . . Today, and every Saturday until the end of time (or at least until midtown Manhattan is free of traffic and Washington, D.C., is populated by elected officials who really care about you), I will be posting a piece that will be free to all subscribers. Additional posts, which will be timely and possibly compelling, will go up during the week, though only to the paid subscribers. If you want to consider joining that ever-growing fold, well, we’d love to have you.
Think about it. Enjoy your Saturday. And I hope you like this piece on a remarkable author named Eileen Bellew.
She never wanted to write a book. She certainly never wanted to write this book. But for the better part of the last three years, Eileen Bellew did just that, sitting at a small wooden desk in a room with walls the color of sea foam. The room is just off the kitchen in her home in Pearl River, New York, a place that has seen the best that life has to offer, and the worst. She’d open her laptop and look out the window at the birds and the rose bush in the front yard, and painstakingly put down words that chronicle her love, her loss, her PTSD, her crippling grief and anxiety, but also her strength and resolve, and her determination to leave readers with something positive and empowering.
“No matter what trauma life hands you, life lessons of resilience, hope, and happiness can ultimately be learned and felt,” Bellew says. “And maybe in the end, we don’t have any control over it all, so find your rainbows . . . they are waiting for you if you are open to receiving them.”
Eileen Bellew’s book is called After John Jumped: The True Story of a Family’s Rise from the Ashes. It is a jarring title and it is told with jarring candor, tracing the beautiful life she shared with her husband, John, and their four young children, ages 6, 3, 2 and 5 months, until it was shattered in the early-morning hours of January 23, 2005.
John Bellew, a former bond trader on Wall Street, left the finance world to become a firefighter because he longed to serve people and save lives, to find meaning in his vocation. He wasn’t supposed to work that day, but a blizzard the night before made it impossible for the scheduled firefighters to make it to the house — Engine 46, Ladder 27 — in the South Bronx. John stayed to cover for them. He told Eileen he’d get home as soon as he could to take the kids sledding.
Dawn broke frigid with light snow and wind gusts up to 45 MPH. The temperature was 17 degrees, but it felt much colder. The alarm in the station house sounded just before 8 a.m. Ladder 27 was one of three companies that were initially called. The fire started on the third floor of a tenement at 236 East 178th St. Before it was under control, some 150 firefighters and 35 pieces of equipment would be on the scene. Everything seemed to go awry from the start. The street was unplowed so it took the trucks extra time to get there. The wind was a wicked accelerant. The nearest hydrant turned out to be frozen. Six firefighters raced up the stairs, into the blaze. They were searching for residents on the fourth floor when the fire flashed through a closed door. The building had been illegally subdivided, and the drywall partitions left the firefighters trapped, with no access to a fire escape. The fire was raging, the temperatures approaching 800 degrees. The options were getting burned to death or jumping. All six firefighters jumped. Four of them survived but sustained severely disabling, career-ending injuries. (One, Joseph Di Bernardo, would die six years later from complications related to the jump.) Two of them did not: Lieut. Curtis Meyran, the commanding officer of Ladder 27, and John Bellew, who was the driver of the truck (or chauffeur, in firefighter parlance) that day. He only went in when he realized how bad things were. Both men died of massive trauma.
That same day, firefighter Richard Sclafani perished in a two-alarm fire in Brooklyn. It was one of the deadliest days in FDNY history, and the worst since Sept. 11, 2001. It became known as Black Sunday.
Eileen Bellew has suffered enough loss to last several lifetimes. She found her father dead of a heart attack when she was 16 years old. Two of her sisters died in middle age. Now her husband and the father of their four kids was gone. She had an understandable reaction.
“I don’t want to be surprised ever again,” she says.
Bellew did not write After John Jumped to throw a 313-page Pity Party for herself. Quite the opposite. The inspiration for it came from her daughter, Katreana. She was 2 years old when her father died. She is 23 now, a graduate of NYU and the author of a screenplay, Black Sunday: Trial By Fire, that is currently under development. In writing the script, Katreana Bellew had questions for her mother, scores of them, about what kind of man her father was, what happened that day, about the ill-fated decision by the FDNY in 2000 to take away the rope system every firefighter was equipped with, partly because the belief was that after 10 years or so the ropes were prone to fraying and were no longer safe. She wanted to know everything. Answering her daughter’s questions got Eileen Bellew thinking about telling the story in her own words, fully and authentically, instead of through the teary-widow soundbites she’d been reduced to in an endless procession of TV interviews.
It was also her chance to tell people about the big-hearted man with ice-blue eyes she fell in love with. The man behind FDNY Badge No. 4915.
“It brings me so much joy that readers will find out more about John,” she says.
Brielle, Jack, Katreana and Kieran Bellew — John and Eileen’s kids — aren’t big fans of their mother’s choice of book title. They think it makes it sound as if their father committed suicide. But for Eileen, it was a non-negotiable issue. Even 21 years later, the anguish she feels about what her husband’s final moments in that deadly inferno must’ve been like is almost too much to bear.
“It has to be that God took him after he jumped – that his soul was gone the moment he left that window,” she says. “In order for me to live life, it can’t be anything else.”
Perhaps the bravest parts of the book are when Bellew explores the depths of her PTSD and the way it manifested itself in her anxiety. Gripped with fear that something bad would happen to one of the kids, she worried about everything. She held fire drills at home and set up fire ladders by their bedroom windows. When Brielle was invited to a slumber party, and Eileen found out it was in a basement, she texted the mother to make sure there were two routes of egress. As the kids got older, she equipped them with pepper spray and a special glass-breaking hammer in case they drove off a bridge and had to escape their car when they were underwater. When Kieran and Jack were baseball pitchers, Eileen insisted they wear padding to protect their hearts in the event that a line drive came up the middle. Later, when she learned that there was a protective skull cap for pitchers, Eileen made sure Kieran wore that, too. She writes about all of this in a chapter called “Living With an Anxietyholic.”
She can laugh about it now.
“My kids show me so much compassion, love and patience,” she writes. “They understand my disability and tolerate me. They saw firsthand what PTSD does to a person’s mental health, yet they accepted me for who I have become and handled my craziness with beautiful compassion.”
Grief has no timeline, and neither does recovery from trauma. Eileen Bellew is immensely grateful for the people who’ve stayed by her side, and for the kindness and skill of the therapist who has done so much to help her get her life back. She has found love again, with a man named Kevin Houston, who lost his own spouse, Liz, after a prolonged illness. Together, they have seven grown children. Houston was there the other night when Eileen gave a talk about her journey and signed copies of the book.
“It’s such a tribute to how courageous she is,” Houston says.
Kevin Houston and Eileen Bellew were married on Feb. 20, 2012. That’s a story unto itself. The ABC program Live! With Kelly had a contest called “Hawaiian Dream Wedding Getaway” and viewers were encouraged to submit their stories for consideration. Kevin Houston, who in a previous life led the nation in scoring as an All-American point guard at Army, wrote a letter.
He began:
Dear Kelly,
To fall in love once and marry your best friend is an amazing feeling. It’s a dream come true. Falling in love a second time, after all of your dreams are tragically shattered, is even more amazing.”
Houston’s letter was a winner. The official announcement came on Jan. 23, 2012 — seven years to the day that John Bellew jumped out of a burning building in the Bronx. Kelly Ripa was a bridesmaid at the wedding. Mark Conseulos walked Eileen’s mother down the aisle. Eileen is convinced John orchestrated the whole thing.
After years of being furious with God, Eileen Bellew says she has new-found spirituality. Whenever she sees a rainbow, she takes it as a sign from John. She can feel his presence, feel him looking out for her and the kids. Not even three months after John’s death, Eileen, who was having an awful time with insomnia, looked up at the foot her bed one night and saw John’s silhouette. He didn’t say anything, but it was unmistakably him. She is 100 percent positive. A feeling of serenity and safety came over her in that moment, and then, as much as she wanted to stay awake and make it last, she felt more tired than she’d ever been in her life, as if she had no choice but to go to sleep. She closed her eyes. It was April 15, and it would’ve been John Bellew’s 38th birthday.
Purchase the book for the whole story here.
Thanks for sharing her story. I’m sure I’ll be reading her book very soon.
❤️