Littlest Washington Boulevard flooding victims buried
The pastor stood before a tall wooden cross, faced the rose-colored caskets of two young sisters and their mother, closed his eyes and prayed for the faith of Job.
Brenna Griffith, 12, and her sister Mikaela, 8, lay together in one casket. Their mother, Kimberly Griffith, 45, who died with her girls in Friday's flash flooding in Highland Park, lay in the other casket. Beside each was a small, white statue of an angel with wings folded, head bowed over a spray of brightly colored flowers. The survivors of a family torn by grief -- Kimberly's husband, Chris; 17-year-old daughter Emily and 15-year-old son, Christian -- sat in the front row.
"There's a sense in which we can find some degree of comfort here today, some small sense of closure, even. There's another sense, though, in which we can't, because this is not over. It's not over because our pain, as much as we don't want it to, is going to endure," said Kevin Labby, pastor of Murrysville Community Church.
More than 250 people gathered at the church on Wednesday, filling the main hall and two overflow rooms, before the interment at Plum Creek Cemetery.
The drownings on Washington Boulevard left "our souls aching for redemption, and now grappling with life's deepest questions, not as a matter of theory, but as a matter of reality," Labby said. "How do we go on?"
Chris and Kimberly married nearly 22 years ago. Chris' brother, Scott, stood as his best man; Kimberly's sister, Megan Frantz, was the maid of honor. During the wedding toast, Scott recalled that he and Chris had been best friends growing up, but that Kimberly changed that.
"Kim had become his best friend," Scott Griffith said yesterday. They "were able to lean upon one another whenever the hard times came ... Last Friday, I was the first person Chris called after the accident happened, because he couldn't call his best friend anymore."
The flooding trapped the Griffiths in their minivan and swept another woman, 72-year-old Mary Saflin of Oakmont, to her death. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl this week promised to find a solution to persistent flooding on Washington Boulevard. He attended the Griffiths' viewing Tuesday night.
Family photos show Kimberly volunteering with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, with her daughters at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and paddling a canoe across a tree-lined lake. One photo shows Brenna and Mikaela trick-or-treating, one dressed as a witch, the other as a pirate, both smiling.
Brenna was "witty, an animal lover. ... Her loving sister Mikaela was sweet and innocent," Frantz said. When Frantz mentioned Mikaela's smile, sobs broke out around the sanctuary.
"When you love someone, it changes your life. It doesn't just change it while it's happening. It changes it forever," Scott Griffith said. "In 12 short years, Brenna changed my life. She made my life better. She made other people's lives better forever. And that's also true for Mikaela. I think that's their legacy."
