‘Too many memories’ Sherry Izaguirre, widow

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Carlos Izaguirre knew he would die if he were ever in another vehicle accident.

A Honduran native who was a worrywart by nature and superstitious by upbringing, Carlos already had been in two accidents when the powerful premonition came over him.

First there was the incident in 1998 when he hit a moose with his truck. He wasn’t seriously hurt.

Then, a year or so later, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and hit three trees off Route 11 south of Ashland. That time he almost died. Carlos was hospitalized for nearly a month with head and leg injuries, but was nurtured by a physician named “Dr. Hope.”

“I’ll never forget that name,” recalled Carlos’ wife, Sherry, a northern Maine native, during a recent interview at a restaurant in Presque Isle.

The second accident so rattled Carlos that he often would tell Sherry that “the next accident he was going to be in was going to take his life.”

It did.

“Carlito,” as Sherry called him, drowned Sept. 12, 2002, when the van in which he was riding plunged off John’s Bridge and landed on its top at the bottom of the Allagash River. Thirteen friends died along with him. One survived.

Why he was in the van that day, Sherry says, she will never know. He wasn’t supposed to be.

Every morning, Carlito, who was the crew’s chief, would drive two co-workers who lived with him from Presque isle to Caribou, to the parking lot outside Sonny Tracy’s Gun Shop, to meet up with fellow workers. The two men would get into a 15-passenger van, and Carlito would follow behind that vehicle in his truck for a 21/2-hour ride into the northern Maine woods, where the men thinned trees.

But that morning, he got into the van.

A year later, Sherry believes her husband would not have been able to live with himself if he had witnessed his friends’ deaths while driving behind them in his truck.

Reminiscing about her husband, Sherry laughed as she recalled a conversation she had with him the night before he died. She had just come home from work at about 11 p.m. and Carlito was hoping she would help him clean his steel-toed boots by running them through the washing machine.

“I told him, ‘You can go to the Laundromat to do that. You’re not putting steel-toed boots in my washing machine,'” she said. “He just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him put steel-toed boots in the washing machine.”

As she talked about her husband during a two-hour interview, Sherry often spoke of him as if he were still alive. Her facial expressions, the tone of her voice, her hand gestures when speaking were those of a woman who was gossiping with friends while her husband was away at work.

“It’s hard to sleep, especially when you expect him to come home at any minute,” she said.

With a job at a nursing home working a late shift, Sherry usually was sleeping when Carlito left for work every morning, hours before the sun was up. And every morning, he would tell her he was leaving, but not with words.

“He had a thing for my nose,” she said, moving her hand to the center of her face. “He’d bite it, you know, with his lips over his teeth. It used to aggravate me, but now I miss it.”

His body arrived in Honduras at the home of Sherry’s mother-in-law on a Friday, more than a week after the accident. The metal casket had been sealed with grommets. Donkeys and 19 men working shifts carried it up a mountainside. Carlito’s family waited for Sherry to arrive before opening the casket, beat-up and dented from the trek. She arrived late Saturday night.

“It was hard because he didn’t look well,” Sherry said. “He looked fine when we had the funeral up here [in Caribou].”

By the time the body arrived in Honduras, however, “he had bloated up because of the heat,” she said.

The open casket was placed at an angle in a corner in the main room of a one-bedroom house owned by Carlito’s mother. That Saturday night, Sherry’s mother-in-law insisted she sleep on a mattress on the bedroom floor. Ten other people also were sleeping in the room when Sherry turned in, and when she woke up, “there was like 30 people asleep in the room, in hammocks and on the floor,” she said.

In the next room lay her beloved.

“I had to sleep in that house with him there,” Sherry said. “I hated it.”

In the days that followed the accident, Sherry wrestled with many difficult moments.

She couldn’t bring herself to identify her husband’s body at the Maine State Medical Examiner’s Office the day after the accident.

“I told them, ‘No,'” she said. “That’s something I did not want to remember.”

When her mother-in-law called, Sherry couldn’t tell her Carlito was dead. Sherry had to let a friend, Greg Reed, talk to her.

“I remember Greg telling me that he could hear the phone drop on the floor,” Sherry said. “I don’t know if she passed out or what.”

Then Sherry had to tell her 9-year-old son, Dustin, when he returned from school that day that his stepfather was involved in a terrible accident.

“He knew, by the look on my face,” Sherry recalled, her eyes staring at nothing as they filled with tears. “He was crying, ‘When are Delkin and Juan coming home?’ He didn’t realize they all were gone, and that’s when he lost it.”

In the last year, Sherry and Dustin have been treated and counseled for depression. Dustin now lives with his father in the Caribou area and Sherry is planning to move to Georgia.

“Too many memories,” she said. “To walk into the bathroom and see his toothbrush there … ”

A few months after Carlito’s death, Sherry finally went through some of his belongings. Her husband loved to keep just about everything that ever touched his hands – greeting cards from Christmases, Valentine’s Days and birthdays, photographs, and even receipts dating back to 1999.

Sherry knew about her husband’s pack rat tendencies. But there was one thing she didn’t know about him until it was revealed to her upon opening a box.

She found a testament to her husband’s life in the form of business cards.

Fifty thousand of them that if they could speak would say, “Carlito was here.”

“He had cards from hotels, mechanics, everywhere,” she said, with a surprised look on her face. “Everywhere he went, he had a card. Why would he have those?”

Sherry buried her husband in the same clothes he was married in: black pants, burgundy shirt, burgundy tie and black shoes. Their first anniversary would have been April 5.

Carlito had promised his mother that when he ever came back home, he would return as he had left, wearing the very same clothes he had on when he left Honduras, jeans and a T-shirt.

“I wanted to, I really wanted to …” Sherry said, her voice trailing off. “I did bring them back because he promised his mom.”

Sherry and her mother-in-law remain in contact, and Sherry would like to go back to Honduras to visit her husband’s grave and his family.

“I loved it there, especially his mom’s house on the mountain,” she said. “It was so quiet and peaceful.”

Dozens of people attended Carlito’s funerals in Caribou and in Honduras. Sherry said she is comforted knowing her husband rests in a tranquil setting in his homeland.

“He was buried by his father in a cemetery on top of a mountain,” Sherry said. “Gorgeous.”