Frank Adu remembers the last time he talked to his daughter, Lexie. Lexie, a 15-year-old freshman at St. Scholastica Academy, called him after school May 24 to make sure he had her application for Gordon Tech High School and would drop it off that day. She told him that she and her friends from St. Scholastica — which closed at the end of the school year — were going to the park, and that she loved him.

Hours later, she drowned in Lake Michigan after she and two friends went in the water near a metal breakwater at Loyola Beach and got caught in strong currents. Bystanders were able to rescue her friends, but they couldn’t find Lexie in the water. Chicago Fire Department divers found Lexie’s body the next day — the day lifeguards were scheduled to begin watching Chicago Park District beaches.

Now Frank and Millicent Adu are relying on the Ghanaian Catholic community at St. Ambrose Parish to help the family come to terms with losing Lexie, a smart and friendly girl who wanted to be a doctor. Her siblings are Gregory, 23; Elise, 13; and Frank, 11.

“I’ve had more than 1,000 people come through my house,” said Adu on June 1. “Some of them didn’t even know it was me they were coming to see. They just knew what happened and came to comfort us, and when they saw me, they were surprised.”

The church was packed June 2 for her two-hour funeral Mass.

Blessing plans changed

Frank Adu was not raised Catholic, but his wife, Millicent, was. They had their daughters baptized last year, and the couple was planning to have their marriage blessed in the church in a festive wedding-type ceremony at St. Ambrose in July. They were to receive Communion together for the first time then, with their children as bridal attendants. Lexie was to have been maid of honor.

Frank mailed the invitations the day Lexie died. The family ended up cancelling the ceremony; Frank and Millicent had their marriage blessed and took Communion together in a small, private ceremony at St. Mary Queen of Apostles Parish in Riverdale two days before Lexie’s funeral.

“We couldn’t have the wedding,” Frank Adu said. “I know the American way is to say we should do it because Lexie would have wanted it. But even if we waited five years, it would be like another funeral, because she isn’t there.”

He spoke during an interview at St. Ambrose the day before the funeral. He had come to the parish, where the Ghanaian community regularly gathers to worship, with friends to help set up chairs.

She planned to be a doctor

Lexie was born in Chicago, he said. She decided to be a doctor when she grew up because when she was a child, doctors at Stroger Hospital removed a cyst from her spine that was impairing her ability to walk.

It was a delicate surgery, but she came through with flying colors, suffering no lingering complications.

In 2007, Frank and Millicent Adu moved the family back to Ghana so that the children could learn their parents’ culture. While Millicent started a business there, Frank travelled back and forth from Chicago, where he drives a cab that is handicapped- accessible.

Three years later, Lexie talked her father into moving the family back to Chicago, because she wanted a better chance at fulfilling her dream of becoming a doctor.

“She got her mom on her side, and they ganged up on me,” he said. “When the women gang up on you … it’s because of her that we came back.”

Because she missed part of seventh grade in Chicago, she was not eligible to take the exam for selective enrollment public high schools, so she persuaded her parents to send her to St. Scholastica, about three blocks from her North Side home. When St. Scholastica announced it was closing, she spent two months visiting other Catholic schools before settling on Gordon Tech, Adu said.

She was an A student who worked a couple of years ahead of her grade level in math, he said, although she did not always appear to be studious.

“I’d get up at 5 or 6 in the morning to go to work and she would be up on her iPod,” he said. “She said she was always reading on her iPod. Or she would be painting her nails and I would say she should be studying. She’d say, ‘I paint my nails and get As. I can stop painting my nails and maybe I’ll stop getting As.’ So I’d say fine, keep getting the As.”

As he drives his cab, he thinks about Lexie. He also thinks about the disabled children and their parents who use his cab.

“I always wondered how they did it,” he said. “I know they love their children, but it’s so much work to take care of them. But now I would take Lexie back with no hands and no legs, if I could just see her face every day. Now I understand. I’ve always been nice to them, but now maybe I’ll be nicer.”

He also plans to get more involved with the parish at St. Ambrose. He already volunteered with jobs like setting up chairs and cleaning, he said, but the way the community came together to help after Lexie’s death has made it seem more like a family, and he hopes to take a leadership role in the parish.

Adu said he can’t comprehend God’s plan if it included Lexie’s death. Now he prays that no one else has to go through such a tragedy.

“I ask God for this not to happen to anyone else,” he said. “Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children.”