Warning: This post involves the death of a child. I'm not even kidding, here, so if you have young kids you probably shouldn't read this.
There was a little boy in my neighborhood who lived one street over. His parents bought him one of those kid-sized electric motorcycles, and he rode it all over the place, including places he was not supposed to be, like all through the park (no motorized vehicles allowed), up and down people's driveways, and across people's yards. (Hey! Kid! Get off my lawn!) He seemed awfully young to be gallivanting about the neighborhood unsupervised. I know that some of the neighbors were annoyed that his parents didn't keep a closer eye on him.
And he wasn't very careful about riding in the road, either. Granted, our neighborhood gets very little traffic, but many times I saw him pull out into the road from a driveway without even glancing to see if a car was coming. A couple of times I thought about going and talking to his parents about how he needed to be more careful, but I thought they'd probably tell me to mind my own business. I figured that the kid was going to be a handful as a teenager.
Last weekend?
His family went camping. And they took the motorcycle. And the little boy took it and went riding about, just like he did in our neighborhood.
Except he wasn't in our neighborhood. And he rode into the woods and over a cliff and into a creek and he's dead.
And I don't even know what to say about that. It's awful? I'm sorry?
Yeah, I got nothin'. I hope the family's faith - they belonged to the neighborhood church - is a comfort to them. I hope they are able to make it through this intact.
And I sure as shit hope that death stops hovering around the periphery.
And you know what? I'm still here. Little Girl's still here. And all the grief in the world won't change what has happened. Maybe I need to start being glad for what is now, and stop mourning what was then.
Because I don't know what else to do.
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3 comments:
What a nightmare. That sucks.
Maybe I think in weird ways, I believe in Fate and "Plan". It occurred to me that there were probably a lot of good people in the neighborhood who thought they ought to say something, but didn't.
So although it was fated to happen, it was "arranged" to happen in a very different way from everyone's fears, in a place away from the neighborhood, thus releasing everyone from the torture of guilt.
Curiosity - about how old was the kid? I would feel no guilt, not having known about it, but I can certainly feel indignation toward the parents, even at a distance.
Who "arranged" it? That's what would stump me.
And the boy was seven. He was about to start second grade.
And yeah, at first I was angry at the parents, but I can only imagine what they're going through right now. I'm sure they're punishing themselves more than anybody else ever could.
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