Searching for Easter's freshness and hope

Edward Cone
News & Record
3-31-02

This morning in New York a woman named LaChanze will outfit her 2-year-old daughter, Celia, in a new Easter dress, the one with the matching hat and purse that Celia's grandmother gave her. She will get herself ready while trying to fix the flyaway hair of her 5-month-old, Zaya. Then she will put her daughters in the car and drive them to the big church in Brooklyn where she used to worship with their father, the church where she gave his eulogy six months ago.

"Easter has always been a huge deal for me. It's always been an uplifting holiday," says LaChanze Sapp-Gooding. "The seed was planted somewhere deep inside me as a child, and it's grown into this feeling of excitement and hope and freshness."

Those are the feelings she wants Celia and Zaya to associate with Easter throughout their lives, so she is working hard to keep this from being a sad holiday. "This year, I'm thinking of ways to project to the girls a lack of any lack, even though it's going to be there," she says. "I am trying to set them up for hopeful memories."

On Oct. 11, when LaChanze stood up in front of some 1,100 mourners at her husband's funeral, excitement and hope and freshness were in short supply. She was eight months pregnant and the World Trade Center was still a smoking ruin, and her husband, Calvin Gooding, was dead along with hundreds of his colleagues at the Cantor Fitzgerald bond-trading firm and thousands of other people. LaChanze spoke that morning with the skill of the Broadway actress she is, but it was obvious that her toughest role was ahead of her.

That Calvin would end up with a wife so talented and beautiful came as no surprise to those of us who knew him well. He was always at the center of things, the college point guard who became a player on Wall Street. He was also the product of a loving family and wanted very much to find the right person and have a family of their own. He had done that, and now he was gone.

Losing her husband in a national tragedy means that LaChanze has a loss that is in some way felt by all of us. "This is something that happened to everyone," she said on the phone last week.

But the historical events that flowed from 9/11 are happening in a parallel universe. They have nothing to do with the personal drama of this family. There are relatives and friends who love her, there are strangers across the country who grieve sincerely for LaChanze without even knowing her name, but it still comes down to the mom and the kids and no dad at home at the end of the day and at the start of the next one.

She has put aside many of the frivolous things about this holiday, at least on her own account. Eggs have been colored and baskets filled, but she hasn't even thought of buying a new dress for herself. "I don't have the time," she says. "Easter season for me used to last a couple of weeks; it started as soon as Hallmark hung up the first display in the window. New shoes, Easter shoes. This year I haven't planned to buy anything."

Still she wants this Easter to feel right for her daughters, to plant the seed that promises to give them freshness and hope and excitement in the future. Easter felt right last year, Calvin beaming with his young family at church and then taking them to his parents' home in Queens for dinner, so LaChanze and the girls will go to Queens again this afternoon and carry on the tradition.

For all the hours when hope and freshness are still hard to find, LaChanze is intent on reclaiming as much of her old life as she can. She's working on a reunion concert with the cast of "Once on This Island," a play for which she was nominated for a Tony award. The concert will be featured on an upcoming Rosie O'Donnell show and benefit 9/11 families. The other day she even did something just for herself.

"It sounds trivial," she laughs. "I pulled out my yoga mat for the first time since September and did some stretches and read my Oprah magazine. It was a pure 'me' moment. It felt really good."

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com), a magazine journalist and Greensboro native, contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.