Illustration by Sol Linero
You’d think an article on grief would quote a lot of experts. But Beth Lewandowski’s expert was her son. And even after his tragic death—four days before his 21st birthday—his voice rings in her ears.
Xander Wohlstadter worked at Baileys’ Range downtown and as a barista at Shaw’s Coffee, and he learned “hello” and “goodbye” in foreign languages to greet the regulars. They brought him old textbooks to feed his voracious curiosity; he could converse with enthusiasm about nearly anything. He was also a clear-eyed, artistic photographer, and a master of ethnic cuisine, thanks to his mom’s tutelage, and he loved to travel, and to bike through industrial grunge and find its beauty.
At Shaw’s Coffee, he’d fallen in love with a pretty young co-worker, Emma Casey. Last New Year’s Eve, they were driving on Chouteau near Lewandowski’s place, a cool rooftop apartment in an old warehouse. She thinks he was planning to stop and pick up an envelope of his photographs before going to First Night at Grand Center.
At 9:30 p.m., a 26-year-old slammed his car into Xander’s Mitsubishi Lancer, killing Xander instantly and throwing Emma into a coma.
The shock hit so hard, Lewandowski felt like she was outside her body.
But when reporters asked whether she wanted punishment for the driver who’d killed her son, she said no. “The only thing I want is for him to come back,” she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “So my putting bad energy out into the world isn’t going to do anything. That wasn’t my son. I’m just trying to think of what my son would want me to do.”
Deep down, she already knew. Xander was so sweet-natured, people often called him Smiley.
So she met with his father, even though her emotions were still raw from a divorce that had become final only eight days earlier. And because they’d both loved Xander so much, she and Michael Wohlstadter managed to tell their daughter the horrific news together, as gently as possible, and talk every day from then on, making arrangements and planning a memorial service, without a single tense word. Xander wouldn’t have wanted them angry. And he wouldn’t have wanted the service to be sad.
The best of Xander’s many friends spoke at the memorial, and afterward they took to texting her, calling her Mom. Looking after her for him.
Lewandowski spoke too, with Michael and her brother on either side for moral support. At the potluck dinner afterward, people brought a recipe and a story of why they chose the dish, which turned into a story about Xander. They left with bags of biscotti baked by Lewandowski and tied with strips torn from his jeans. She recalls, “People walked out saying, ‘I feel like I know him—and I want to be a better person.’”
The toughest moment came later, when Lewandowski and her ex-husband took apart their son’s first apartment. It bore so many signs of a life lived fully—and interrupted midstream. His dishes were washed, his kitchen well stocked—he had the big bag of rice she’d given him, recipes they’d shared, the bulk spices she’d taught him to buy at Jay International Food Co. He’d gotten more and more serious about becoming a dietitian. “He loved to cook, and he liked to tell people what to do,” she says with a twinkle.
“I was so glad I hadn’t pushed him to go straight to college,” she adds. Xander graduated from Metro High School in 2012 and wanted to explore possibilities. Lewandowski bit her tongue, bought him a camera, and gave him enough money to travel a bit. When he came home, he worked two jobs; studied Russian and German; stuffed a notebook and his camera into a tattered backpack and rode his bike; made friends with college profs at the coffeehouse; watched sunsets with his elderly landlord, who spoke in broken English.
“He was an old soul,” she says. “He made people happy. He made people smile. And he made a difference.”
A lawyer, Lewandoski has always helped clients make their divorces as collaborative as possible, which felt like irony when it came time to tackle her own, but she and Michael managed it. She also conducts mediation. “And I always bring them back to their kids,” she says. “If I can remind them how much they both love their kids…”
She doesn’t bring up her own loss often, but she will, especially in her work as a guardian ad litem, “when they fight about silly stuff. I just kind of put it out there as something to think about. You can’t predict, and you can’t plan. Life can change in an instant.”
People tend to feel like it’s a betrayal to feel joy when someone they love is gone. She feels the opposite: “You have to appreciate all of it. You live for them. You don’t take anything for granted. You show your appreciation.”
The man she’s seeing now lost his son at 18. “We lost adult children—what are you going to do to us that can come close?” she says. “We’ve never had a spat. We don’t complain about the little stuff. Someone ahead of me, if they don’t move fast enough, I’m not honking, because I don’t know if they just lost someone.
“That’s how Xander was. He wouldn’t let you be judgmental. He would always call you out. He’d say, ‘Mom, you never know.’ So, yeah, I guess I’m a softer soul now. I know what’s important—and that gives you a lot of freedom.”
She grins, remembering how random their conversations could be. “You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. That’s the other thing he taught me: to throw love at things. We were probably talking about some conflict, and I was bitching about it. He said, ‘Just throw love at it. You can’t go wrong.’”
Her bright blue eyes—same as his—shine with tears. “He was out there doing it. That’s given me a lot of peace. He had a purpose, and he was living it. Some people get to 90 and never figure that out.”
When she worked up the courage to look back at their texts, she was glad she’d sent so many, just out of the blue. “That’s what I tell my clients: Take time to tell people you love them, now and every day. I have no regrets, and that’s a huge blessing.” She pauses. “I’m taking the blessings where I can find them.”
