The pain of becoming a Gold Star family “is indescribable and never goes away,” but a local Gold Star mother said she found “just a little bit” of comfort from working to bring to Thurmont a new monument to families like hers.
Julie El-Taher lost her son in February 2020 to a motorcycle crash while he was serving in the U.S. Navy in Florida.
Her son, Patrick G. Stellitano, 21, was an Airman Apprentice who did Naval helicopter maintenance. On the day he died, he had helped fellow sailors move into their barracks at Naval Station Mayport, El-Taher said.
El-Taher found that going through the grief process at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns was an isolating experience, she said.
“Grief support, comfort, visiting your loved ones — that doesn’t happen,” she said, “so the world went really dark for a while for my husband and I.”
When attending a grief seminar several years later, El-Taher learned about a way she could publicly honor the grief felt by Gold Star families, those immediate relatives of people who die while serving on active military duty.
The Woody Williams Foundation, named in honor of a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, had created a template for raising monuments to Gold Star families in towns all over the country.
This is the third memorial of its type in Maryland. The other two are in Annapolis and Havre de Grace.
El-Taher said that forming a committee to bring a Gold Star family monument to Thurmont, where her son spent most of his life, became an extension of her grieving and healing process.
“When you help others, it kind of helps lift that burden,” she said.
And when she started the project over a year ago, she quickly found many in the community who stepped forward to help raise over $62,000 to purchase the monument.
The Thurmont Lions Club, which she belongs to, agreed to hold the funds during the collection, using its tax-free status to protect them, and held several fundraisers to boost support.
“In the Thurmont Lions, we’ve done a lot of projects that are central to the military …,” said Susan Favorite, a member of El-Taher’s monument committee. “This was a continuation of that, and certainly fit right in with a lot of other things we do as a club.”
Favorite said she worked on the effort personally because El-Taher is a friend and she saw her grief from losing her son.
“Just to see the devastation and everything, your heart just goes out to the Gold Star moms, the Gold Star families that have to go through this,” she said. “I was fortunate I didn’t have to go through that and I feel for those folks that do.”
In addition to the many people who contributed to the monument’s purchasing fund, many local businesses offered free products and services related to the installation, El-Taher said.
When the monument was dedicated at Thurmont Memorial Park on Sept. 27, there were 21 Gold Star families in attendance, El-Taher said.
The monument, which features a large cut-out silhouette of a saluting soldier, has no names listed on it because it’s meant to represent all Gold Star families.
“It pays homage and recognizes the families of military personnel who died serving our country,” Mayor John Kinnaird said. “All monuments honor the memory of the individuals who’ve passed or who’ve served, but this is an interesting monument in that it honors the families.”
