A Message of Thanks - Windham Community Gathers in Goodness and Grieving

WINDHAM - There have always been, and still are, constant companions in the life of Levi Dempsey, says his father, Pastor Ryan Dempsey.

The community is gathering in incomprehension for services for 12-year-old Levi at the Mitchell Hollow Mission Church, this Saturday.

A river of grieving and goodness is flowing over the family at their home in the hamlet of Maplecrest where the boy was killed in a UTV accident on July 31 that also seriously injured his 10-year-old brother Cade.

Cade, after multiple surgeries, has returned to the hearth, expected to fully heal after a “long road” of rehab, says Pastor Dempsey, wanting to deliver a message of thanks to all those sharing in the split-second sorrow.

“We aren’t the only parents who have lost a child or are losing a child but there is something about having that happen in a small town,” he says.

“People come together. That’s what we are seeing. The outpouring of support and prayers is overwhelming and humbling.”

Pastor Dempsey shepherds the non-denominational Mitchell Hollow Mission Church on the opposite outskirts of Windham, but he won’t facilitate the August 22, noon service.

“I don’t think I could make it through,” he says, lowering his head in his hands.

His wife, Alisa, “is a mom. There are no words,” he says.

Pastor Dempsey confesses to screaming words, “not fit for a follower of Christ” after he and a neighbor saw the mayhem of the early evening accident. They were close by, within earshot, and ran to it.

The boys, moments earlier, rode up a long, gravel driveway to where the pastor was, asking if they could go swimming. “They’d driven on that driveway hundreds of times,” the pastor says.

“I was shutting the tailgate on my truck, getting ready to follow them back down. I heard shouting that sounded like a cannon.” 

There were four riders including an older brother and Levi’s compadre from just down the street. Those two were tossed from the machine, receiving minor physical injuries. Levi and Cade were pinned.

They were loosed by neighbor Glenn Beechert and the pastor, separately airlifted to Albany Medical Center amid a parting sea of rescue personnel. 

An image indelibly etched in Pastor Dempsey’s mind is of a county sheriff’s deputy gently holding Cade who suffered a fractured pelvis, partially fractured femur and deep scalp wound. 

Levi was helicoptered out first. A makeshift landing pad had been formed in a cow pasture, ripping out fence, doing anything to save precious time.

“This is where you find what faith truly is,” the pastor says. “One moment you think ‘Yes,I believe,’ and the next moment you’re thinking, ‘What the heck is going on? Me and God have some things to work out.’

“How do you say, ‘God is infinitely Good and knows what He is doing?’ But He knew it. He was not busy somewhere else. There is a way God will reach down, letting you know you are in the right place. Even this.”

Pastor Dempsey says his family is, “moving forward, not moving on, which sounds like we would be forgetting him,” an impossibility anyway and particularly within the presence of Levi’s perpetual playfellow.

“Levi’s best friend, ever since he was little, was his great grandfather, Alisa’s grandfather, Gil Vining,” the pastor says. 

“They were inseparable. Gil was an 80-year-old man but Levi loved talking to him. He was learning the olden ways of doing things.

“Where else do you have such wisdom that was inside Gil Vining? Levi is an old soul too,” the pastor says. “He loved his John Deere, the green and yellow.”

Constant companions, Levi Dempsey and his great grandfather Gilbert Vining Sr.

Levi was a cowboy at heart and a little league baseball all-star, somehow, to the dismay and delight of his mother, combining the two.

“He’d always wear his Wrangler jeans, the hat, the cowboy boots,” Pastor Dempsey says. “One day he went to baseball practice, rushing out.

“Alisa noticed the boots were missing. She looked at me and said, ‘please tell me he’s not wearing those things!’ He was.”

Levi Dempsey, once a cowboy, always a cowboy at heart.

There is a timeworn wooden swing in a swaddling maple tree in the front yard of the Dempsey home, the same swing Alisa played on, in her childhood summers, as her children do now.

“We are allowing the kids the space to miss their brother, our son,” says Pastor Dempsey, the foster son of a pastor, raised in Ohio and likewise longing to be a cowboy before receiving The Calling.

The family lived for a while in Wyoming, where Levi would feel kinship, out in Big Sky Country, an infinitesimally smaller place than heaven, says the pastor, where Levi is saddling up with his Imperishable Buckaroo.

“God knows what he’s doing,” the pastor says, mentioning Psalms 22, “where David is aching,” and wherein David writes:

‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?’

Pastor Dempsey says, “this is a big reason we treat every Sunday [at Mitchell Hollow Mission Church] like a family reunion.

“This wave of hurt hurts so much because we love someone so much. We know we are going to see Levi again. My family relies on that. Meantime, there is no church way to put it. It’s…whew,” the pastor says.

“It’s okay not to be okay with this. In some way…however the Mystery works…He is with us. Maybe my definition of Good is not complete.”