- Feb 5, 2002
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Fifty years after the freighter vanished in a November storm, the families left behind — ‘the wives and the sons and the daughters’ — say their faith in Christ has carried them through every wave of grief.
Why does God allow tragedy? Is he absent in our worst hour of suffering? Or, as musician Gordon Lightfoot sang, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Those lyrics from Lightfoot’s famous ballad, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, capture desperate faith reflections in the immediate aftermath of one of the worst tragedies in Great Lakes history. This month marks 50 years since the loss of all 29 men aboard the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, when the cargo ship sank into the icy depths of Lake Superior. The 729-foot American freighter, en route from Superior, Wisconsin, to a steel mill near Detroit, disappeared from radar as it succumbed to a powerful storm with hurricane-force winds and mountainous waves the night of Nov. 10, 1975.
“I was very angry that God took away my father,” said Debbie Gomez-Felder as she thought back 50 years. Oliver “Buck” Champeau, her father, was a 41-year-old engineer aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald. Debbie was 17 years old at the time, a senior in high school at St. Pius XI in Milwaukee.
“I just couldn’t understand any of this,” she said. She recalls banging on the rectory door of a local parish, demanding answers from the priest. But no answers could limit the pain. “I stopped going to church. I said some very bad things to God.”
Continued below.
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Why does God allow tragedy? Is he absent in our worst hour of suffering? Or, as musician Gordon Lightfoot sang, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Those lyrics from Lightfoot’s famous ballad, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, capture desperate faith reflections in the immediate aftermath of one of the worst tragedies in Great Lakes history. This month marks 50 years since the loss of all 29 men aboard the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, when the cargo ship sank into the icy depths of Lake Superior. The 729-foot American freighter, en route from Superior, Wisconsin, to a steel mill near Detroit, disappeared from radar as it succumbed to a powerful storm with hurricane-force winds and mountainous waves the night of Nov. 10, 1975.
“I was very angry that God took away my father,” said Debbie Gomez-Felder as she thought back 50 years. Oliver “Buck” Champeau, her father, was a 41-year-old engineer aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald. Debbie was 17 years old at the time, a senior in high school at St. Pius XI in Milwaukee.
“I just couldn’t understand any of this,” she said. She recalls banging on the rectory door of a local parish, demanding answers from the priest. But no answers could limit the pain. “I stopped going to church. I said some very bad things to God.”
Continued below.
Edmund Fitzgerald at 50: ‘The Gales of November’ and the God Who Remembers
FEATURE: Fifty years after the freighter vanished in a November storm, the families left behind — ‘the wives and the sons and the daughters’ — say their faith in Christ has carried them through every wave of grief.
