Aspen – It’s been nearly a dozen years since the accident. But Art Daily remembers a time, shortly afterward, when he would start sobbing while driving, or stop beside the road to scream in frustration and sadness.
“They are still present,” Daily, 65, said of the wife and boys he lost.
He remembers seeking out the classmates of his children following the tragedy that claimed their lives, because he knew they were also in pain.
The fifth-graders who had shared a class with Daily’s son Tanner sat in a circle on the floor with him and asked piercing questions: “What did Tanner look like? Was he bleeding? Was he awake, in pain, crying? How did he die?”
Daily remembers answering each question “as directly and truthfully as I can, tears in my eyes, holding their hands.”
On Feb. 26, 1995, Daily was driving his family home from a children’s hockey game in Vail when a 1-ton boulder fell in Glenwood Canyon and crushed his 1992 Chevy Suburban.
His wife, Kathleen, 47, and their two sons, Tanner Arthur Daily, 10, and Shea Rider Daily, 6, were killed.
One family out of two
So in November, when a driver ran down and killed Frank Bingham’s wife and two children while they took a stroll in downtown Denver, then sped away, Daily understood Bingham’s anguish and felt the urge to reach out as others had reached out to him.
He recently called Bingham to offer his friendship and hopes to meet him sometime to talk.
“It’s almost instinctive to speak with other people” who undergo such tragedies, Daily said. “I just wanted him to know that I was out there.”
Robert Stone, Bingham’s brother-in-law, said Bingham would very much like to speak with Daily.
Since the hit-and-run crash, Bingham has moved to a different house and has begun his second semester of law school at the University of Denver but has been struggling with short- term memory loss, Stone said.
“He’s getting on with his life,” he said. “It is a hard time.”
That was Daily’s experience, too, after his family died.
“This loss was so catastrophic,” he said. “You think, ‘I can’t live without them. Life doesn’t have much meaning.”‘
He has since found renewed happiness with the help of an adult daughter by a previous relationship, Piper Rothberg, as well as friends and counselors.
When she learned about the accident, Piper, now 35, stayed with her father to comfort him. Counselors – including spiritual leader and author Ram Dass – personally navigated him through deep emotional trials.
Daily remarried June 3, 1996, roughly 15 months after the accident, and started a new family. He and his second wife, Allison, have two sons, Rider and Burke, ages 10 and 8.
He has had two families, but in many ways they are just one. Rider and Burke are very familiar with their older brothers.
“They have always known them as their angels,” Allison Daily said.
Art Daily, administrative partner in the Aspen office of Denver-based law firm Holland and Hart, said he longs for Kathy and the boys he lost but that he no longer is tormented by grief. He said his happiness is related to the choices he made.
“I’m a fortunate guy,” Daily said. “I trust that in time, good things will happen. I didn’t know what the rest of my life would be like. I wanted to give it every chance to be a good and full life.”
Art and Allison have written a book, “Out of the Canyon.” The yet-to-be-published manuscript describes the accident, a tragedy in Allison’s life and their love story.
Art called Allison a woman who would not be jealous of the memory of his first wife and family.
“She’s the most extraordinary blessing,” he said.
Today, Allison Daily lights candles on cupcakes, celebrating birthdays for Shea and Tanner. Family pictures of Daily’s first family prominently adorn the walls of their home.
The couple met days before Allison, who is 25 years younger than Art, was to move from Aspen back to Texas.
Allison Snyder – then 28, a waitress and former tennis pro – was still dealing with the suicide of her older brother, Rod Snyder. She wrote Art Daily a letter.
“You don’t know me personally or I you but I have grieved with you over your wife and two sons,” it said.
“I can’t imagine the pain you feel. There are no words to describe it or words to say. I understand and have been through some pain myself.”
She sent him an audiotape of her favorite songs. They later met at a restaurant. “The basis of our relationship was shared grief,” Allison Daily said.
Completing the circle
At first, Art Daily said he was apprehensive about getting emotionally involved with a woman shortly after his family had died.
“I wish I had a way to check in with Kathy and the boys,” he writes in the book. But he felt strongly that his first wife and sons would approve.
For Allison Daily, unusual events during a trip to the Grand Canyon soon after meeting Art solidified for her what direction she would take in her life. In a hike down the Tanner Trail into the canyon, she felt closeness to Art Daily’s past family, particularly his son Tanner, whom she said she saw in visions.
“It was very clear to me I was supposed to pay attention,” she said.
Soon after Art and Allison married, the topic of children came up. Art Daily had surgery to reverse a vasectomy, and two boys followed.
As the boys grew, Art Daily noticed how history was repeating itself. That was never more apparent than the day he returned to Vail for a 2005 Mite hockey game for Rider and Burke.
“The whole day was about reviving and reliving the experience through the eyes of my children,” he said.
Art Daily was quiet and reflective as he listened to blades, pucks, sticks and collisions.
“These sounds have become part of my own rhythms, part of being a father, and they are the sounds of before and of now,” he writes in the book.
After the game, the family stopped at the same ice-cream shop Art Daily had taken his family to a decade earlier. Rider and Burke picked the same flavors Tanner and Shea had a decade earlier.
As they drove back to Aspen, Art Daily stopped at the spot where the accident happened. He left flowers on the canyon wall and looked into the river.
“The waters swirl around and over the boulders in the creek bed,” he writes. “One of them crushed our lives, senselessly, without intent, without meaning.”
That day was not meaningless to Art Daily, though.
“It literally completed the circle in a way I didn’t expect,” Daily said. “I was very aware of what it meant to me and both of my families.”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
