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Where there is sorrow, let there be comfort.
Where there is pain, let there be strength.
Where there is darkness, let there be love to light your way.
— Words of wisdom from Sarah Mullenbach’s foundation Web site, www.sarahmullenbach.com
HOLMEN, Wis. — Three years after her daughter, Sarah, was killed by a drunken driver, Cece Mullenbach is still trying to make sense out of something senseless.
Through a foundation she and husband, Dan, created in Sarah’s name, Mullenbach wants her daughter’s life and death to have meaning — and do some good in this world.
The foundation awards two scholarships every year, holds an annual fundraising golf tournament and has helped the Students Against Destructive Decisions chapter at Holmen High School, where the 17-year-old Sarah was to be a senior before she was killed.
Mullenbach said the foundation has tried to educate teens about making responsible choices and has funded leadership opportunities and academic projects for students.
Now, she is bringing Miss America 2006 Jennifer Berry to the La Crosse area next week to give presentations about her community service platform — building intolerance to drunken driving and underage drinking.
“I’m doing this for a grieving mother. It’s not about bringing Sarah back,” said Mullenbach. “This is my personal mission, supported by my husband, to make an effort to prevent this from happening to some other family. I don’t want someone else to go through what we have.”
Sarah was coming home from a friend’s house July 3, 2004, when her vehicle was struck by a pickup truck driven by a 49-year-old grandfather who had spent the day drinking. Gary L. Nehring was sentenced in February 2005 to eight years in prison.
“We lost our innocence that day,” said Mullenbach, 50. “We really had nothing bad happen in our lives, and our attitude was: if you live your life straight and narrow, you’d be OK.”
Mullenbach said she never worried about getting a phone call in the middle of the night about her daughter. “She was never one to stay out late, and I could trust her,” she said.
Instead of a phone call, a police captain and chaplain came to her door.
Mullenbach said an incident during junior prom illustrates Sarah’s attitude on drinking and driving. She and her classmates were out to dinner, and a limousine was late to pick up her and her friends.
“A man heard about their dilemma and offered Sarah and her friends a ride back to the high school, but she said she couldn’t get in the car because the man had been drinking,” Mullenbach said.
Mullenbach figures Sarah would have started her junior year this fall at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She would have been 20 years old.
“It seemed like she had unlimited potential,” Mullenbach said.
She was ranked No. 3 academically in her high school class and was a talented musician. But she perhaps was best known as a golfer, winning many tournaments and finishing in the top five of the Mississippi Valley Conference two years in a row.
“Golf was not really a passion for Sarah,” Mullenbach said. “She was good at it, but she really enjoyed the friendships and meeting the girls from other schools.”
When her daughter’s classmates graduated in May 2005, Mullenbach said going to graduation parties was difficult, but she was amazed at how many graduates had photo albums of Sarah. Sarah’s picture was included in the class of 2005, and she was listed as a graduate.
“Hardly an hour goes by today that I’m not thinking about her,” Mullenbach said. “The whole first year was about survival, trying to make it through an hour and then a day at a time.”
She said she and her husband were lucky to have great support from family, friends and the community.
“I was in such severe shock, and I’d get a panicky feeling and react physically,” she said. “It helped to stay busy. You can’t face grief 24 hours a day.”
Other difficult times were seeing other parents take sons or daughters to college or shop for school supplies, she said.
She said she was helped by Compassionate Friends, a support group for families who have lost children or young adults.
“You feel alone and separate from anyone else,” Mullenbach said. “And no one really understands. The group was a great source of support. I connected with a woman who lost her son two weeks after Sarah’s death.”
Mullenbach said the second year after Sarah’s death was even more difficult because reality set in as she was learning to survive without her daughter.
“You think maybe she will come home some time, and you realize her death is real,” she said.
Now in her third year of grieving, Mullenbach said she is ready to educate and help do some good in the community.
“I feel like I was destined to do this,” she said. “There’s nothing good about Sarah’s death, but now maybe some good can come from it.”
As a laboratory technician at Franciscan Skemp Healthcare for 26 years, Mullenbach has drawn a fair amount of blood-alcohol tests, and testified in drunken driving cases. She said she hasn’t found many people a little drunk — most were two to three times over the legal limit.
She doesn’t draw blood-alcohol tests anymore. “It would be personally difficult for me, and I wouldn’t be a credible witness,” she said. “I don’t want to ruin a prosecution’s case.”
She’s bothered by the alcohol ads that target kids and glamorize drinking as fun, sexy and cool.
She said celebrities need to stop making light of drinking and driving. “I’d like to slap celebrities up the side of their heads,” Mullenbach said. “Why couldn’t they just say they made a mistake?”
“It’s not OK for us to drink a lot, and there’s a limit,” she said. “We need to say we’re not going to tolerate drunk driving or underage drinking any longer.”
She said if she would have made drunken driving and alcohol abuse her mission before, perhaps her daughter would be alive today.
“We need to keep bringing up the topic, and make the public more aware of the alcohol culture and the big problems with alcohol,” Mullenbach said. “We need to keep bringing it up again and again.
“If I save one life, then this is worth it to me,” she said.
Terry Rindfleisch can be reached at trindfleisch@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 791-8227.
