Let’s go… Slaho!

When I woke up this morning I had a strange urge… chocolate milk. It had been a long time since I had chocolate milk, one of my favorite treats as a kid. When I was growing up my dad would wake me up every morning with a nice cold glass of chocolate milk, sometimes made with Hershey’s syrup, and sometimes made with Quik. Regardless, I remember thinking as a kid that there was no better way to wake up. And these were the thoughts that were going through my head as I drank down my cup. Man, those little things in life can sometimes spark the best memories.

Last night I was looking for a spark because I was a bit down. Looking through Facebook I read about the meteor shower that was going to coming into the Earth’s path (or vice versa) over the next few days. I’ve always liked shooting stars and this was going to be the best opportunity to see one for a long time, and the best time to view it was going to be between midnight and 5 am. So after watching a DVD with Dania last night, I decided to head out. But before I headed out I did something then that I usually reserve for right after I finish my run, or sometimes even until the next morning. I gave Dania a big kiss and told her I loved her, and then went to the beds of my sleeping kids and gave them each a big kiss also (thank God they didn’t wake up, and in particular the baby, because Dania would have been REALLY ticked off). NOW, I was ready for my run. You see, I realized that however unlikely, leaving for my jog may be the last time I see my kids. Any moment just might be my last. Just 36 hours ago that was true for an acquaintance of mine.

Yesterday was August 11. It was my mom’s 79th birthday. 79 years is a long time, but it seems that nowadays a lot more people are reaching that age. My mom has gotten there but only after going through a number of trials, most specifically a long bout with cancer, which fortunately she has overcome for the time being. But it has left her week and tired. The treatments really left her a shell of her former self physically. She’s nowhere as strong as my grandmother was at that age, and she went on to live to be 100. I’m not sure how long she’s going to be around, but I must admit that I am very fortunate to still have her, and I have to take advantage of the time she has left here whether it be for another year or for another twenty. You never know when that moment will come.

Today is my cousin’s 36th birthday. It’s very possible though that she wouldn’t be with us today celebrating that birthday. Seven and a half years ago she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease - CANCER. It has been said that of all the cancers one can have that would be the “best” one (like if having any form of cancer can even remotely be thought of as “good”) because it is very treatable and has the highest survival rate of all cancers (from what I’ve been told), but it’s cancer nonetheless. After a good fight and many a treatment, she too overcame this, and I’m sure that she will have a great day celebrating her birthday today. 36. Still young. That’s about how old that acquaintance of mine was when his time came. 36. TOO YOUNG.

This individual whom I’m referring to was really no more than a passerby in my life. I barely knew him. His face came in and out of life fairly quietly, actually. I saw him mostly at the Boys and Girls Club of Kendall where both of us have coached baseball, where both our sons have also played flag football. This past football season, our boys were on the same team. Actually I can’t be 100% sure of this last statement because I only saw him at one game this season, and I couldn’t pick his son out of a lineup. But we were both rooting for the same team, so I come up with this conclusion. I’m pretty sure that he travelled for his business so this is not surprising, seeing him but once in a short season. We really never spoke. I think every one of our interactions consisted of “hey”s and “what’s up?”s and “how’s it goin’?”s. I can’t even say that I had much of an opinion of the guy, I just really didn’t know him. So why am I spending so much time writing about this guy?

For one, his wife’s brother in law has been a friend of mine for over 20 years. He and I went to high school together. We led retreats together. We worked together for a cruise line. And after many years of not seeing much of each other, we found our kids in the same school, we played together for a co-ed softball championship team, and he even wound up coaching football where I teach for a living. We have mutual friends, and I even wound up as an assistant coach on his son’s basketball team last year. When I went to my 20 year reunion, I went out to eat with 7 of my old buddies. He was one of them. And I’ve known his wife almost as long as I’ve known him. I pretty much followed her whole summer schedule this year on Facebook, trying to get ideas from the ones she shared on Facebook of how she kept her kids entertained this summer… she always seemed to have an activity up her sleeve. And the activities she planned seemed to include her sister and her kids - the family of that acquaintance that I’ve been talking about.

You see, in seeing this particular guy meeting his fate, I can’t help but think that it could have just as easily been my friend… it just as easily could have been me. It could have been anybody. But for some reason it was him. I can’t imagine losing my wife, my brother, my child, even a parent. The closest persons I lost were my grandparents. My grandfather died when I was 10. Death was still largely foreign to me at the time, other than my grandfather is gone. If I had lived with him it may have been different, but in my mind he was an old man. It helped justify what happened. My grandmother passed away two days before my 7 year old was born. I really loved her, but she was 100. It was actually a relief to see her go because I really hated to see her deteriorate the way she was. So, as you see I still can’t grasp this thing fully. Sure, there’s been a bunch of people I know who have died from age 16 through 40-something whom I have known, but none have died at a time when we were close, which definitely softens the blow. The toughest death I’ve had to deal with has been my father-in-law. He was only 63. But he too had deteriorated to the point that we almost wanted him to go already so that he wouldn’t have to suffer any longer. We were ready for him to go, though we didn’t want him to. This is so different though… not for me, but for his family. There was no way to prepare. One moment you feel totally safe from being hurt in any way. The next it’s as if you’ve been emotionally raped without warning.

There have only been a handful of times that I can say that I felt a glimpse of that kind of dread in my heart. First was when my aunt died. We knew that at any moment she could go because of an illness she had, but it didn’t seem imminent. Still, I had seen her but 3 or 4 times in that year before she passed. There was the time that I was 14 and a fellow altar server 2 years my senior died. That was shocking to me because I didn’t know of anybody young before who had died. But I only saw him sporadically, so the initial shock was much greater than the lasting sadness. Then there was the time when one of my students died during the school year. That was more than anything a wake up call to all my students. It brought an emptiness to my class, but I can’t say that we were friends so the pain was a dull, though lingering one. Finally, there was the time when one of the members of my old Young Adult group died in a scooter accident in Key West. She was someone I had spent a lot of time with and had actually gone on a few trips with in a group. But, again, it had been years since I’d seen her, which definitely eased the pain of her loss.

This particular death has affected me in a way that these other ones haven’t, even though I barely knew the guy. For a 16 year old and an 18 year old you grieve who they could have been and you realize that they will never reach their potential. My aunt and father in law, had both lived full lives, though they could have had many more years. But they got too see their kids grow up and they got to meet a good number of their grandkids, and even if for a brief part of their lives were able to enjoy that aspect of their lives. My friend from the Young Adult group was just above 40, and she had a whole future still ahead of her, and not to minimize her situation, but she left no husband or kids behind. It was a great loss to her parents and her sister and her family, but the loss to some degree was minimized. This guy who died was in many ways like me. We may not be alike at all, were very similar. We are both married. We both have small kids. We coach them. We love them, we raise them. They count on us for EVERYTHING. And now he’s gone. As I said that could have been me, and that scares me a bit, and it also brings me grief to think of what his wife and kids must be feeling right now. It must be a sense of total helplessness. In my life there has been no feeling I have dreaded more than that one, but I can only imagine that that’s what they are feeling, and that brings me great sadness.

Fortunately for the family, they have a lot of great support and many great friends. They will persevere and life will go on, and they will feel an enormous amount of love. But from now on there will always be that hole, that missing piece that is no longer there, a puzzle that was completed save for that one piece no longer there that makes the picture seem incomplete. It can be replaced, but it’s not the same. It will never be the same.

Inevitably now someone is going to throw out the line, “Maybe God was calling him. God wanted him to be with him now.” Now, I am a faithful man, but I don’t believe this is the case. I don’t think that God would call someone like that without a little preparation. I would never pull the rug from under a loved ones feet as this family just had done to them. Fate has played an ugly trick on them. He’s not here because there is an irresponsible person out there whose recklessness has taken a life. If what I understand of the story is correct, someone with no regard for life showed that much by taking this man’s life, whether it was done purposely or not. If he would have had regard for life, he would have stopped to at least try and help the man he had just severely wronged. God had no part in his death. Having said that, what I do believe is that upon his death our Lord awaited him with open arms. He was there to offer rest to someone who had just been cheated the rest of his life. Yes, death is a mystery that we shall never fully understand while in this state of humanity, but I refuse to believe that God will be involved in something that can cause so much pain so fast.

If we perceive it like this though, I think it becomes easier to turn to God after such a difficult event. He understands the pain we are feeling. He Himself suffered and He also saw one of his closest friends died, and he grieved. Sure, we may argue that He took advantage and brought him back from the dead, where we don’t have that choice. But it is in that very instant that we know that Jesus will bring His friend back to life to join Him in happiness after this gravely painful moment. This man is resting in peace, and if we turn to Christ, then he will bring peace to us by letting us know that he will be taking care of and protecting Him until his loved ones are either sent or called to heaven.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that many are called by the Lord. My grandmother, in my belief was called. She lived her life, gave love and wisdom to those around her and reached a point where she had no more to provide in this world. And I believe that it was then that she was called. But whether we are called, or we are sent to our deaths before our time, we should all know that God will be waiting for us with open arms.

For me, this last statement takes the edge off of what happened a bit, but for the immediate future I’m sure that this is no solace to the family of this victim. In particular, the kids will have a tough time understanding why daddy is gone. And telling them that God called them could cause great resentment. I pray that over time the children will realize that in this imperfect world bad things happen, and many times in the hands of irresponsible people (I refuse to say bad people, because most of the time the culprits are not bad… just irresponsible, and I pray that this is the case here. A man made a poor decision and let fear take over). God will be there to comfort, but it is not His job to stop the world from being what it is: an imperfect place, with imperfect inhabitants, on a trek to perfection, which none of us knows when we will arrive nor under what conditions.

Usually my thoughts are a lot more coherent than they have been for the last couple of days. Usually I start writing and I know where I am eventually going to wind up. I am sorry if what I have written has been very disjoint, and at times repetitive, but strong emotions can stop someone from expressing themselves clearly sometimes. That’s part of the reason that I was able to get myself out the door so easily last night to jog at such a late hour, even with the excuse of seeing the meteor shower. It’s the reason why I suddenly needed that chocolate milk this morning, to relive the little things in life that I find special. Usually around this time of year I am in Sarasota, and I’ve always made it a habit to go out at least one night to look for shooting stars. I always seem to get a glimpse of a few, and after reading what I did about the annual light show provided by the comets I can understand why I’ve always been so lucky to see them. Yesterday my run wasn’t so fruitful. There is a lot of light in the Kendall sky at night, and it was cloudy to boot. And it hurts one’s neck to look up while running. Still when I decided to look away from the sky for a second, I could swear that i caught the tail end of a shooter. It was brief, a tiny flash, and when I no longer expected. Isn’t it just like life? In the grand scheme of things our stay here is brief, and hopefully to those around us we can provide a tiny flash that will always leave a lasting impression. But we must be careful because one by one we’ll be gone when we least expect it…

As for the chocolate milk, I just hope that just as I remember my father to this day for the chocolate milk he woke me up with every morning, that this man’s children can take one small memory of their dad and hold on to it forever, so that whenever they relive that moment, their dad will be there. I’m fortunate enough to still have dad around when I’m not reliving that moment, but one day I won’t, so I’m getting comfortable with the idea that I have something uniquely “HIM” in my life where I could always tap into his energy.

It’s hard to find the good in death. But there definitely is good there. Where is the good here? I have NO idea, and I’m not going to pretend that I can fabricate one. But I have seen good in it, and through this one story, I want to let everyone know that I feel that those that pass on have a way of looking over those they leave behind. In 1992, there was a teacher in Columbus who also happened to be an organist in my parish and the father of a couple of acquaintances of mine. I was taking class at FIU, and I needed a book. He had the book and he lent it to me. I promised I’d give it back to him. I never got the chance. He went in to the hospital to have a heart procedure done. He never woke up (I believe he was called). Shortly after I graduated from FIU not knowing what I was going to do with my life. Something told me to give teaching a shot so one day I showed up there without any papers, transcripts, or even a resume and said I was interested in a job. The principal at the time was my old math teacher. He told me they really didn’t have a job, but that they could use a permanent sub for the year, and that I could teach just a class or two to see if I liked teaching. I took the job. I later found out that I was replacing someone who had done that same job the year before but no longer was doing it. You see that person had replaced the very man who had lent me the book and died during the heart procedure. His death indirectly led to the job I currently have and love. Only years later did I see this connection. If things hadn’t happened as they did, I may not even be teaching right now. And I think that God definitely played a role in this. And yes to this day, I still have that book. I keep it in my classroom.

Good things will come. We just don’t know when or how, and they may not even affect those closest to him. But they will happen. Because he is with God. And God is good. In the meantime though, we must grieve. I grieve a little. Those closer to him will grieve a lot and for good reason. From what I have heard, he was a good man, and will be greatly missed. Today I pray for strength for his family and his friends. I pray that God be with his wife and kids every day through this incredibly tough journey they’ve been thrown upon. I pray for his sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my friends that they can be anchors to his wife and kids and they too find the comfort they need in these very trying times. I pray for myself that I don’t take life for granted and that I treat each day like my last, because one day that last day will come unexpectedly like a thief in the night, be it tomorrow or 65 years from now. And I pray that we all do the same. It’s sad that a tragedy like this is what wakes us up into realizing this.

One of my favorite songs of all time is a quiet song by Sting that I’ve seen him close his concerts with. It is a song called Fragile. Search for the lyrics. Though the song is not about what happened, it is eerie how one could take the words and make it seem like if it was talking about the accident. In the end we just must remember as Sting says, “How fragile we are.”

Tonight my prayers are for you RG. May you rest in peace. And I extend my prayers also to NG and the kids, and to CD, and WD. May God be with all of you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Just thinking.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.