Ten years before the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Nancy Wilder Trapp, a surgical service manager at St. Thomas DeKalb, experienced a tragedy that would shake the foundations of her soul. On Sept. 11, 1991, Trapp’s brother-in-law, Jerry McLemore, murdered her sister in a plot that her husband, Jimbo Perkins, “accidentally helped” plan.
“They were sitting around the deer camp … drinking beer and running through scenarios of how would be the best way to get rid of their wives,” Trapp remembered. “My husband also [later] said, ‘I thought we were joking around, doing the good ole-boy thing.’ He never realized until the pieces started falling together of how he (McLemore) killed her that it was one of the scenarios.”
On that unseasonably warm night in West Monroe, LA, Trapp’s sister, Anne, was sitting in her husband Jerry’s truck at camp when someone shot her in the chest through the back glass with a high-powered rifle. With Trapp’s husband as the prosecution’s lead witness, the state began to piece together what transpired. As more evidence mounted, McLemore was arrested and made bail. In the two years before he went to trial, the townspeople rallied around Jerry, believing in his innocence.
“He was very likable, and he was very smooth,” Trapp said. “He helped with the softball program and anything that had to be done at the school, helped with programs at the church. They couldn’t see how we would not be supportive of him and be very standoffish toward him until we found out [the verdict].
“I felt victimized every time I went somewhere. It just appeared that everywhere I turned, people were trying to protect Jerry from our family and from anything we would do or say to make him feel guilty.”
The families, who had once been best of friends, were ripped apart by rage and unbearable pain. Anne’s daughters were forbidden to be with the other side of the family; altercations ensued at ballgames; and Trapp’s marriage collapsed. But through it all, Trapp, a Sunday school teacher at Smithville First Baptist Church, never blamed God.
 “None of us held up our fists and screamed at God for doing this,” Trapp said. “We would say, ‘No, God didn’t do this. Evil did this. God is going to see us through it.’ Saying it and feeling it in the deepest part of your heart is not the same thing. That wasn’t coming from the broken hearts that we had. It was coming out of our minds. We were still holding on to maybe even a hair width of our faith.”
Filled with pain, anger, and disappointment,  Trapp left the area where five generations of her family had lived, and in 1999 moved 600 miles away to Smithville and close to Cookeville where her brother, Randy, lived. Ten years later, the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground, provoking Trapp to collapse the defenses she had held up the past decade.
“Unfortunately, for the whole world, that was what made me realize that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life holding onto the anger and pain of one incident, just for me. because I would never be able to live to my fullest and be maybe even who I was supposed to be if I didn’t find some way to let it go,” she said.
It still took her a few more years before she could hit her knees and forgive the man who killed her sister.
“Lord, I forgive Jerry for taking Anne’s life,” Trapp tearfully recalled her prayer. “Please let me learn that my forgiveness comes from you.
“Such a burden was lifted off of me. The whole walk was helping me to understand we all carry bitterness and anger and sometimes even regret.”
There had been times she had questioned why God had placed the tribulation in her family’s life.
“I would occasionally say, God, if I just knew why or why is my life turning out like this. Somewhere along the way I would figure out that it is what it is. Some of these things don’t have an answer. I had to grow in depth to realize that I’m nobody special and I don’t need an answer,” she noted.
During her journey of forgiveness, Trapp was led to a place that allowed her aspirations to come to fruition. She earned her master’s in nursing at U.T. Knoxville, which eventually propelled her into a management position at St. Thomas. Personally, her devastating life circumstances opened her mind and heart to help others find their way to forgiveness.
“Without realizing it or knowing it, every step I’ve taken or decision I’ve made actually led me closer and closer to the forgiveness and lifting of that burden,” she said. “I’ve gotten to minister to people at the hospital and church that may or may not realize they’re carrying a lifetime worth of anger; that they don’t even have to face the person because a lot of what we carry, we create and carry in our own self. We have to be willing to let that go.”
Since then, Trapp suffered the loss of her brother, mother-in-law, father, and husband (Terry Trapp) in a short 14-month period. But she was able to survive the pain, thanks to the renewed faith and different perspective she had discovered. And now she longs for other people to learn this point from her life story.
“No matter what happens in our life, the Lord will forgive what we think and how we feel. Christ wants to free us from our anger and bitterness, so we can focus on what we’re supposed to be for Him,” she said.