All along the Northeastern seaboard, Hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction. So many families are struggling to rebuild; entire neighborhoods have been all but lost. Yet today I read a fascinating story that reminds me that nothing is ever truly gone forever.
Donna Gugger was in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, helping members of the Sandy Hook Bay Catamaran Club clean up the debris from the hurricane. As she sifted through pieces of broken furniture, shards of metal and soiled clothes, she noticed one item of clothing that was unique: a gray, military-style dress jacket with big brass buttons. While wet and dirty, it didn’t seem to be damaged otherwise.
According to the Associated Press, Donna thought it was an elaborate Halloween costume. She took the garment home, shook out the sand and cleaned it. It was then that she saw, in faint lettering on the inside, the words “West Point” and “issued to deGavre.”
She contacted West Point’s Association of Graduates, hoping they could track down the owner. That’s when she learned that the jacket was 80 years old. It belonged to a 1933 graduate of West Point, Chester deGavre.
Chester had passed away, but his widow, 98-year-old Tita deGavre, was still alive, living in Virginia Beach, hundreds of miles away from where the jacket was found. Chester’s parents once lived in Red Bank, 10 miles away from Sandy Hook, but the house had changed hands many times since. There was no way the jacket had come from there. Tita didn’t know the jacket still existed. She had no idea how it could have ended up on the Sandy Hook beach, in such good condition.
“I found it most impossible to believe,” Tita told the AP, after Donna made the five-hour drive to bring her the jacket. “Where could it have been all this time?”
Tita plans to display the jacket along with her late husband’s other military items at the Deep Creek Plantation on the Virginia coast—a place where she found her husband’s lost West Point ring years ago. “It’s all a big mystery,” she says, “but I’m happy about it.”
It may not seem much, a jacket that gave an elderly widow comfort. Especially with so much damage left by the storm. But the very fact that such an unlikely, comforting moment can come from such catastrophe should give us all the eyes to look for hope where it seems unlikely to be found. Even in a pile of wreckage.
Have you been hit by a storm—either literally or figuratively? What unexpected thing did you find that gave you hope? Share your story in the comments below or send it to us for possible publication in Mysterious Ways.
