I had just turned 11 when I lost my best friend and his three-year-old brother in a freak accident. We had just arrived home from a week at camp, it was hot august day in late summer, our parents were either gone for the day or in my friends' case home but unaware of our plans. You see we were forbidden to leave the safety of our yards but on that particular day the lure of the Columbia river pulled much too hard on our young, sweat covered bodies. My two dear friends drowned. His mother later claimed she had not given us permission to swim in the river but I can still hear his begging and I know all too well how she would later regret having given in. You see on that late August day in 1964 she lost two sons and I lost my childhood sweetheart. Beryl Feiks and his younger brother Mark. Both are now buried in unmarked graves in a cemetary in Gresham, Oregon. Their parents never placed a tombstone to mark their final resting place. Two lost children. We, although we still love and remember them are not allowed to place any markers on their graves... they are just places set on a map that the caretaker points to when forget the gravesites. The mother's name is Ramona, the father's name is Daryl, surviving brothers are Luther, Lynn, and Stephen, sisters are Faye and Aprill with the last name of Feik they had relatives in Utah that are Mormon. Mom says an abundance of little yellow flowers come up each spring where she knows they are buried, she goes there every Memorial day to remember their passing and to also give thanks that I had not drowned with them. How it changed my life:I have always wondered WHY they left their children with out so much as a marker to identify their grave sites
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