By Bruce Karnick

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Editor’s note: This profile of Donna Mathiowetz originally appeared in the Hastings Journal two years ago. It’s a story worth revisiting often.

March of 1992 forever changed the lives of many people in Hastings. Timm Mathiowetz, a 16yearold student at Hastings High School, would call his mom on a Friday night in March to ask if he could spend the night at a friend’s house. Little did anyone know, this would be the last time Donna Mathiowetz would talk to her son. Later that evening, Timm would be at a party with his friends where he would decide to play a deadly game involving a revolver.

“The combination of a group of teenagers, with their yet to be developed brains, because they’re immortal and nothing bad is gonna happen. That’s the common theme that runs through most kids’ heads, ‘ahhh we’ll be fine’. Then there was beer, and then there was a gun. You can’t find a more deadly combination,” Donna says calmly.

I know, as a reporter, you are supposed to stay out of the story. You are supposed to just report it. See, the thing is, I lived it. I went to school with Timm. I knew Timm, I knew many of his friends, I knew his parents, I knew the people at this party, and I know how this story affected Hastings 28 years ago. I was 18, it was my senior year and like it or not, this was part of my story now too. Every graduating class has their tragedy. Every class loses a classmate in some way. Classes around mine lost people to a deadly car crash, other classes since have lost some to illness, some to suicide. Death is part of life. It’s part of growing up. It’s part of growing old. It’s part of school even though it shouldn’t be. But this was different. This one hurt. Some it hurt right away, others it hurt years later and others continue to live with the hurt. It was not gun violence, something we hear about all too often these days. It was not even an intentional act of violence. It was a deadly combination of very poor choices made by normally decent people. I had the opportunity to sit down with Donna for nearly an hour to talk about her new book, but we talked about so much more. She made the conversation easy for such a difficult topic.

“A lot of Timm’s friends are married, have kids, gosh a couple even have grandkids. I talk with them once in a while. All their kids know the story,” Donna explains.

“They shared that story with their kids as soon as they were old enough to understand.” These parents were telling their kids, “This was one of my best friends, here’s what happened.”

The story of Timm Mathiowetz’s death was really an anomaly in the early 90’s even though grief was not. It took Donna until 1997 to be able to tell the story clearly and effectively. That’s when Donna and her husband Dick were asked to start a grief group called “The Hastings Area Grief Coalition’ “We became a part of the core group who birthed this grief group in Hastings that is still going today.” Donna stated. She then began speaking more and more. Her first book related to the topic of grief was called “The Journal for your Journey.” She also created a 52card deck that helps folks that are grieving with their journey. “You pick one card a week and it gives you something to work on, how am I doing with this aspect of grieving?”

Donna and Dick Mathiowetz also lost a second son, Oleg, two years later. They learned of Oleg, a Ukrainian orphan who had cancer. They adopted Oleg in the hopes that they could get him to the United States, get him in to treatment and with medicine that was more advanced than he was able to receive in the Ukraine, heal him.

“We made the decision to be his family, and for sixandahalf months we were, and then he succumbed to the cancer. So, it was two years between Timm’s death and Oleg’s death. Very different types of deaths, of course. What I always felt was, because of the way Timm died, I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t be there for his final moment of life. I went from seeing Timm off to school that Friday morning, to seeing Timm laying in his casket at the funeral home.” She recalled. With Oleg, it was different. She was able to be there for another child. They did a Makea-Wish trip and hospice care. “I just drank in whatever I could get from being there for another child that needed a mom and a dad going through this,” she recounted.

The journey with Oleg was short but taught the Mathiowetz’s some important aspects of grief, aspects that would help them help others.

As grief support groups were much less readily available in the late 90s, they were also much less diverse. There would be families that were experiencing completely different types of grief. A family that lost a child due to suicide is grieving vastly different from an 80yearold widow that lost her husband to a car accident. Yes, the widow can empathize with the family, but they may also think ‘I can’t imagine losing one of my children.’ “We knew there was a need for a separate group just for parents, so we then created what we called “Gone too Soon,” a group just for parents who lost children,” said Donna.

This specialized group bonded quickly, and many became friends outside of the group. They will often engage in social gatherings at each other’s homes.

Donna’s new book is called “”What Have You Done Since I Left?” The title came to Donna’s husband Dick. One night, Dick

See CONVERSATION, Page 6