By Dan England
The Salina Journal
November 24, 1997

    John Mueller still dreams about his parents. His mother will call and ask about his studies.
    "Where have you been?" John will ask. He will be so excited to finally hear from them.
    Then he'll wake up. And the hole will still be there.
    "It doesn't make the day really great," he said in an interview.
    Mueller, 22, a Hanover native and Kansas State University engineering student, has had a hole in his heart, in his soul for 11 years since his parents were killed on a walk by a drunk driver.
    Last month, Mueller was honored for an essay he wrote about his grandparents, who raised him and his brother, Ben, after their parents were killed. The essay won a contest at Kansas State University, where John and Ben are students.
    The brothers' lives were changed on May 12, 1986, when John and Ben, now 19, went for a walk with their parents. The boys were on one side of the county road riding their bicycles. Their parents were on the other side.
    When the drunk driver came around the bend, sweeping too far around the curve, John looked over and saw a cloud of dust. John went to Dad. Ben went to Mom.
    The boy's father David Mueller, 42, was killed instantly. Their mother Judy, 36, died the next morning. John, 11 at the time, and Ben, 8, were suddenly without parents.
    But they weren't without family. Dave's parents, their grandparents, Emil and Helen Mueller, also lived in Hanover. Their last child had left the home 10 years ago. But there was no question what they had to do. Emil came out of retirement. Helen set up a bedroom for two boys.
Emil and Helen became parents again.
    "You don't even stop to think about it," Helen Mueller said. "It's just something that you do."

One angry teen

    "Why me?" It's a question that a lot of brooding teenagers ask of the world.
    John didn't understand why his parents were taken from him. And though he appreciated his grandparents, he would see other families go camping, go water-skiing, just hang out with each other, and he was mad that he didn't have that.
    "You can't just unplug your parents and just plug new ones in," John said. "My grandparents loved me a lot. But there was just a generation gap."
    Aunts and uncles who were closer to his age but lived in Overland Park, Kan., helped close that gap, but John many times still found himself alone. There wasn't much to do in the town of about 650 people.
    By his own admission, was hard to get along with. He had flashbacks of the tragedy, and he had those dreams.
    "At that age, you feel sorry for yourself to a certain extent," he said. "It really hurt, and I may have taken it out on other people. I made it hard for people to like me.
    "I wanted my grandparents to be my parents, but they weren't my parents. They couldn't be as hard as they tried."

Back to work

    Dave Mueller was the president of the Mueller Sand and Gravel, but when he died, Emil went back to work full-time as president of the company he started that grew into a successful ready-mix concrete plant.
    Emil served twice as president of the Kansas Aggregate Producers Association, on the school board and was president of his church's council several times. He was a hard-working man who liked to help the boys play sports and also liked having the boys around to help with the business.
    "He tried to be a good father to them, and I think he was," Helen said.
    Those first two years were difficult.
    "John was mad at the world," Helen said. "He was always honest, and he was a good child. He never did cause too much trouble. But he was angry, and he was always worried about everything. We always said he was 11 going on 21."
    As time went on, the boys' anger seemed to fade little by little, and Helen and Emil began to enjoy raising them. He had raised four children before. These were two more. "We just tried to raise them like we would our own," she said.
    "We tried as much as we could. You don't take the place of parents, but as they got older, they realized that. We enjoyed them a lot. Even when they had problems, we enjoyed them a lot."

Coming to terms

    Three years ago, Emil died of a heart attack. The loss shocked John. Ben didn't want to comment for this story.
    "I couldn't believe it," he said. "I still can't believe it."
    Earlier this year, John tapped out an essay about his grandparents and entered the Chimes' 1997 Honorary Family Essay Contest. Chimes is a junior honorary. In his essay, John wrote:
    "I cannot imagine being at retirement and suddenly taking into your home an eleven- and eight-year-old. Not only did they completely alter their lifestyle but my grandfather came out of retirement to run the family business....  "I feel that this honorary family award should go to my grandmother, and also in memory of my grandfather. They gave me, and my grandmother continues to give me, something which I can never give back: a home and a loving family."
    John's essay won the contest, and he, and his brother and grandmother were honored during K-State's homecoming Oct. 10 weekend in Manhattan.
    John wanted to be an electrical engineer so he could make a lot of money. Now the only objective listed on his resume is to "find out what God wants me to do."
    John became a born-again Christian in May, and his faith now probably is the biggest part of his life. It has taught him a lot. It taught him how to forgive. He forgives the man who killed his parents.
    "If he walked up to me right now, I'd probably talk to him," he said. "If you can't learn to forgive others, God can't forgive you."
    He will carry what his grandparents taught him forever.
    "They worked hard for everything they got," John said. "They taught me to appreciate things."
    Especially two grandparents who did the best they could to replace at least some of the love that was lost in a cloud of dust and could only be fully returned in a dream.

(you can read the essay that I wrote here.)