Iowa City boy honors father’s memory with book

When his dad died, 7-year-old Logan Trumbull sat down to write.

Logan loved to throw a football or wrestle over a fumble in the yard with his father, but what seemed at first like a pulled muscle for Ray Trumbull, and then a stomach ache, turned out to be cancer. Logan spent the next year watching his father decline. He remembers clearly the day he died, and he describes it in “Logan's Story,” a book he wrote, which will be available starting Thursday at Iowa City Hospice.

“One day, Mom comes to pick me up. My brother Austin and my sister Jessica are with her, too,” he wrote. “But (football) practice is not over yet. They get out of the car and come over to me. Mom speaks softly and tells me that Dad died peacefully. We all hug for a long time.”

Logan, now a well-spoken 10-year-old in fourth grade, doesn't want to be a writer - he's a sports fanatic and wants to play football or coach - but he wrote about his father to make sure he always remembers and to show other children that there's hope, even when a loved one dies.

“We did it for the other kids to know that it's fine to lose somebody - not fine, but it'll be OK,” Logan said.

His mom, Deanna Trumbull, thought it would be a short project, maybe a few minutes. Logan worked on the story for several weeks and later asked Mary Moye-Rowley, a neighbor and artist, to illustrate the book. She agreed and created illustrations of Logan, his mom, his brothers and sisters, and his classmates at Weber Elementary School.

The book is interactive, with word scrambles, dot-to-dots and other puzzles.

Ray Trumbull was a corporate sales consultant for the Midwest Athletic Club in Cedar Rapids. The father of three was in excellent shape when he found out about the cancer.

“At the beginning, I thought, ‘This isn't really anything,' but then it got worse and worse and worse,” Logan said.

After a while, his father couldn't play catch anymore. He sometimes watched Logan play outside from a back window. Logan helped where he could, brought his dad something to drink, gave him a massage. The two shared Popsicles. In 2007, Iowa City Hospice was brought in to help. In October of that year, at age 42, Ray Trumbull died.

Before his death, he recorded a video for his children, telling the kids what they were like as babies, talking about his funeral, saying he wanted them to be happy.

Deanna Trumbull, sitting on the couch with Logan in their west Iowa City home this week, asked Logan if he still has sad times.

“Well, not many. The only sad times would be like Dad's movie or when we're really, really talking about him, not like right now, but talking head to head,” he said, looking at his mom, nudging her knee with his foot.

Logan will give a book reading Thursday at his school.