Perhaps it was a mother’s intuition, or maybe just an instinct forged from a life of loss, but Pat Ramsey had a feeling her son was dead when she answered her phone last July and heard the words “I’ve got some bad news.”
Her youngest son, Jeff Ramsey, and his wife, Tanya, had driven from their Lewisville home to camp in the Texas Hill Country for the Fourth of July. Biblical rains fell overnight, her middle son, Kelly, called to tell her, and the Guadalupe River swelled to unthinkable heights. Jeff and Tanya, who had parked their Airstream along the water’s edge, were missing.
No, she thought. Not again.
She hung up the phone and a familiar wave of emptiness swallowed her.
“Lord,” Pat said, “you’ve gotten me through this a couple of times. Please.”
The 90-year-old sat in the wood-paneled living room of her Highland Village home, staring down the possibility that she had, once again, lost a child.
Of Pat’s four children, Jeff was the one who always wound up in precarious situations, usually with accompanying injuries. There was the time he yanked a television off a shelf and broke his leg. The time he came down with appendicitis at the top of a ski run. The time he jumped off a second-story deck with a handmade parachute and broke another leg. And the time he crashed a motorbike and mangled his braces the day before they were supposed to come off.
He was restless and rowdy. Hard to parent but easy to love.
“Do you think God just doesn’t want me to live?” Jeff asked his mother in high school as he lay in a hospital bed, this time recovering from a brown recluse bite.
“No,” she said, “it’s because you act like such an idiot.”
As a mother, even the mother of a daredevil, Pat didn’t worry too much about her children, aside from the usual concerns. Were they safe? Were they kind? Would their broken bones heal correctly?
As her children grew, her concerns became self-reflective. Had she been a good mother? Did she spend enough time with them when they still needed her? Did they pray?
She never dwelled on the what-ifs or the worst case scenarios. She knew she had done her best to raise kids who were capable and discerning, and that brought her peace.
In 2019, that peace was shattered. Her first-born, Michael, died suddenly at 61 from an aneurysm. She was already grieving her brother who died less than a week earlier, but losing a child was incomprehensible.
“It was just total shock,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he was gone. But you’re never prepared to lose a child.”
Several years later, Pat walked into her bedroom and found her only daughter and youngest child, Robin, lifeless in her bed. Paramedics tried to revive her in the living room. The next thing Pat knew, she was sitting in a fluorescent-lit waiting room. A young doctor reached for her hand and told her Robin was dead. An overdose at 54 years old.
“Again, I was just in shock,” Pat said. “Thinking about it, it’s kind of like it was yesterday.”
When she answered the phone last summer, the nightmare returned. Despite her certainty that Jeff was gone, she grasped for hope through memories of her fearless boy. He had been a foolhardy kid, but he grew up to be strong and resourceful. He had faced every other challenge in his 63 years. Maybe, she thought, he had managed to pull himself and Tanya from the raging water. It felt foolish to be hopeful, but she had to try.
Shortly after the flood, Tanya and Jeff’s whippet, Chloe, was found alive along the river. The discovery fanned Pat’s flicker of hope. Days later, however, Tanya’s body was recovered. There was still no sign of Jeff.
“It wasn’t long until I realized he was going to stay missing,” Pat said. “It never entered my mind that I would lose another child, especially Jeff who had escaped so much during childhood. I just never thought anything could happen to him.”
As she grappled with her own tragedy, she was also processing the news that dozens of other people were killed in the floods, including 27 girls from a summer camp 13 miles upriver from where Jeff and Tanya were pulled in. Thoughts of the parents grieving those children consumed Pat, and still do. They didn’t have her decades of experience with death, nor had they gotten to see their children become adults, fall in love, and have their own families.
“All those parents are so young. And those kids,” she said, shaking her head, “they were so young.”
Of the more than 130 people killed in the July 4 flooding, Jeff is one of two people who remain unaccounted for. The other is 8-year-old Camp Mystic camper Cecilia Steward.
One recent afternoon, Pat sifted through a mound of photos spread across her kitchen table. Snowy family vacations in New Mexico. Black and whites of her flight attendant days. Road trips through rural Texas. Her children cradling their own children for the first time. Jeff swimming with dolphins. Memories, frozen in 4×6 prints. More sat in a plastic bin next to her, their frames coated in dust.
“I want the kids to come see what they want,” Pat said, referring to her grandchildren. “Then I’m tossing the rest.”
Despite a life pockmarked by grief, Pat is forever moving forward. Nearly a century of life and loss has taught her the art of letting go — of guilt, of shame, of dusty photos, of her children.
“A lot of people say, ‘I just don’t know how you do it. I couldn’t do it,’” she said. “Sure you can. What choice do you have? What choice do I have? You have to accept it.”
Pat’s capacity for acceptance has been a lifeline throughout her difficult life, but especially under the circumstances of Jeff’s death. There are no answers to her many questions, and no body to bury.
“What are you going to do with a bunch of bones anyway?” she said. “He had a beautiful memorial service, beautiful. And that, to me, was closure enough.”
She credits her spirituality as the reason she has been able to endure it all. Her children, she believes, are with the God she talks to every day. Pat prays when she wakes each morning. She prays when she thinks about her kids. She prays when she swears. Her prayers, she said, aren’t sophisticated, just the “plain old words” of a woman who has grown accustomed to asking for mercy.
“Through it all, it was faith that kept me as good as I was,” she said. “It’s just so hard to believe. My gosh, losing three kids? It’s a hard thing to go through. I think it’s an ongoing process of grief, but not something you have on your mind all the time. It just kind of continues.”
Church is a balm for Pat, but these days it takes a lot of effort to get there. A chronic lung disease labors her breathing, macular degeneration fogs her vision, and her body is still recovering from the pneumonia, sepsis, and broken pelvis she survived in the last eight months. Still, she rouges her cheeks and puts in her earrings as many Sundays as she can.
“You can’t help but feel good when you’re shown so much love, and I really am there,” she said of BridgeWay Church in Copper Canyon, where she has attended for nearly a decade. “I’m not as wonderful as they all think I am, but it’s just a good feeling to be prayed for.”
Earlier this month, she arrived at the non-denominational church ahead of the first service as she does many Sunday mornings. Leaning into her cane, she stood near the entrance to greet everyone walking in. It’s her small way of paying it forward to the community that has cradled her in her lowest moments.
“She’s usually clogging up the doors with conversation,” said Kyle Cunningham, the church’s lead minister.
In this place for people seeking hope and meaning, Pat has become a celebrity of sorts. She can’t go far without being stopped for a hug. Everyone knows her name but she loses track of theirs. There are too many.
Cunningham watched Pat navigate the loss of her three children along with a handful of other heartaches and hardships in the nine years he’s known her. She’s met each one, he said, with resilient, unflinching joy.
“Her disposition is to look for the good, the hope,” said Cunningham. “She is a remarkable woman.”
As the doors of the church closed and the band started, Pat slowly took her usual seat in the back row, her bones aching from the rain.
“In Christ alone my hope is found,” she sang along softly, “firm through the fiercest drought and storm.”
The river may have Jeff, but Pat has God.
Claire Ballor is a staff writer for The Lab Report. She wrote about the historic Texas Hill Country floods and the search for Jeff Ramsey last year for the Dallas Morning News. Find those stories here and here. claire@labreportdallas.com.