WaPo: ““It just does me good to come out here and talk to him,” Peggy Williams said on a blue-sky morning at the brink of fall.
She had returned once again to the quiet spot by the North Toe River where, for decades, she shared a life with Lenny Widawski, a Yancey County musician who was known for his soaring violin playing and his ever-present fedora.
Sometimes when she is here, she tells Lenny how she aches thinking about what he endured that morning last September, when Hurricane Helene turned the sleepy river into a raging torrent that carriedaway the small home where they had lived.
Sometimes, she tells him she’s still angry he didn’t evacuate, despite her pleas. Williams, who was in Virginia at the time recovering from back surgery at her daughter’s house, sometimes blames herself for not being there to convince him.
Sometimes, she reckons aloud with God, asking why the floods took the 78-year-oldman she loved, and why he remains one of only a few Helene victims whose body has never been recovered.”