In April, as Michelle Nash poured the concrete for her Little Free Library hutch, a man walking by stopped to ask: “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I told him, ‘if I can do a soufflé I can do this,”’ Nash said.
And yes, she does know what she’s doing: The 64-year-old Queen Anne resident is on a mission.
Nash’s Little Free Library, a place where people can take and leave a book, features a dedication on the outside: “In Loving Memory of Bob Nash, who walked with grace and dignity and showed me the way.” It stands in front of her 1917 home on Second Avenue West between West Boston and Crockett streets.
Though Little Free Libraries are springing up around the country — no doubt there’s a story behind each one — Nash’s story is as compelling as anything in the books coming and going outside her door.
Her husband, Bob Nash, was paralyzed from the waist down after the helicopter he piloted was shot down over Vietnam in 1966. Much later came the first signs of Parkinson’s disease. He took his own life in 2007.
Michelle Nash has no doubt it was a straight, if long, road between her husband’s service-related spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease and his suicide.
But because he committed suicide, Bob Nash’s name cannot be engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Michelle Nash, focused as she is on getting her husband’s name on “The Wall,” is also concerned about suicide among this country’s combat veterans. “We need to get over the stigma,” she said. “Someone with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is as much a casualty of war as being shot in the field.”
Of her own husband’s struggle, she said: “He endured 41 years.”
Nash said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray has done what she could on behalf of her husband, but the U.S. Department of Navy informed the senator by letter: “Mr. Nash died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound on September 27, 2007 in Mercer Island,” and is therefore “not eligible to have his name included on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”
Nash is not giving up — she’ll do more research, seek other channels and keep on pushing.
A college athlete who joined up
Nash relates her husband’s biography in the years before they met with impressive detail — names, dates, conversations, the type of helicopter he flew in Vietnam, the kind of boats he sailed, details that come through as clear indicators of her love and regard for him.
In 1961, as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, where he sailed and rowed toward a seemingly golden future, Bob Nash dropped out of school to join the U.S. Marine Corps. The Cold War was warming up: Her husband, Nash said, “took the world’s problems seriously.”
He touched ground in Vietnam in August 1965. Nash said her husband flew 650 Medi-Vac helicopter missions in five months. When his helicopter went down, its ammunition exploded. The crew got clear of the wreckage, but Nash says her husband’s gunner, seeing Bob was still trapped inside, ran back through the explosions to free him.
The couple met in 1967 at the Veterans Administration hospital in Long Beach, Calif. where she was a physical therapy student. Her future husband was on crutches.
“When he walked through my clinic, he caught my eye,” she recalled. “We sat and talked for one-and-a-half hours. We both knew. I had 38 years with a phenomenal man.”
The couple married in 1969 and moved to Mercer Island. Her husband started sailing again. Despite the constant pain, he became involved in community volunteer work. Michelle worked as a librarian, which she still does part-time. The couple had a daughter in 1984.
In 2000 came the first symptoms Parkinson’s disease, which the V.A. physicians determined were service-related, she said. One night while Michelle was fixing dinner, months from ending his life, she remembers her husband telling her: “I’m having trouble finding the words.”
“This was a man with a phenomenal vocabulary,” she said. “I think that was terrifying to him.”
Moving to Queen Anne after her husband’s death has been a balm, Nash stated.
“There are children around,” she said. “Neighbors share meals or produce from their gardens. There are social interactions I did not have on Mercer Island.”
Nash installed the Little Free Library in front of her home on April 20, which would have been the couple’s 43rd anniversary. The cedar-shingled hutch, which she built — “Bob taught me well, how to build” — can handle about two-dozen books at a time. And there’s a pad where people, especially kids, leave notes.
“I call it a magical ripple effect,” she said. “People can be personally involved with no strings attached.”
“I can’t thank these people,” Nash added. “I can’t intrude on them. But I am so thankful.”