“I hate that we’re getting used to losing young people again.”
My head whipped around to stare at the speaker. It was Maggie, a usually cheerful octogenarian who does a daily three mile circuit around town pushing her walker with the fuzzy dice hanging from it. I could understand why her usual sunny, sweet smile was missing; we were standing outside of the funeral home while half the town, no exaggeration, was inside or waiting tearfully in line for their turn to enter, watch a brief video, and gaze at the pictures before filing past the open casket.
Jacob’s casket. His usual mop of curly dark hair was tamed and his coffee colored skin was a little too shiny. His casket had a picture of a John Deer Tractor on the lid. The pillow under his head was festooned with fishing lures and a rosary. A bag of beef jerky rested at his side. His Hollister T-Shirt had been his favorite. He was 18, a senior. He worked a job at an excavating company as part of a Co-Op program and loved the big machines. He died on Monday, crashing and rolling his car on the way to work after a big weekend celebrating the start of Homecoming Week.
I watched his mom, who had adopted Jacob and his sister, Alex, from Paraguay when they were babies, embrace and cry with every single high school boy that stood awkwardly in front of her, stared at the floor, and shuffled feet in over sized boots or sneakers. She rocked in her arms every high school girl who clutched each other and sobbed as they reached out tentative fingers to touch Jacob’s sleeve.
I watched his sister, one year younger, athletic and vibrant, shake from the strain of standing next to her mom and receive condolences from people she yelled at and laughed with in the halls of the school. I watched as she looked at them as if they were strangers.
“Maggie,” I replied in a low voice. “How can you say we’re getting used to this? When were we ever used to this?” She looked at me, startled for a moment, then she smiled sadly.
“Pastor, when I had kids, I knew it was likely that I’d lose one before they grew up. When my parents had us kids, they had nine, because they KNEW they’d lose at least one. My littlest brother caught polio and died. Two of my cousins died when they were playing with matches and the barn and it caught fire. My next door neighbors lost a child when a horse kicked him in the head. I had two sisters I never knew-they died as babies; I can’t remember from what. One of my brothers died in the Pacific when he was nineteen. Every year I can remember, we had to bury a young person. And during the wars, we were burying them every month. My second boy died in Vietnam. And my youngest daughter died when she was almost one. Crib death. That means they don’t know what killed her. Yes....we were used to our children dying.”
I looked at the milling crowd of healthy young people around us, wearing uncomfortable mourning faces, occasionally laughing, then looking around quickly to see if anyone noticed. My daughter, a high school senior, was inside, in the crowd. Could they see themselves, when they looked at Jacob? Did they see the mortality that they all wear so loosely, the blind chance or perfect storm of circumstances that throws the dice over us whenever we get behind the wheel, cross a street, catch a ball, jump off a curb, drop a book? Could they see how tenuously we hold on to life, like Maggie saw so clearly? Will they come away from Jacob’s funeral realizing that they aren’t, truly, invulnerable?
“We’re sending children off to war again now, Pastor,” Maggie continued. “We’re giving them the keys to the car, hiring them to work jobs when they should be in school. We’re giving them freedom to run around and expensive toys to play with. We can give them so much more than we could when I was a child, or when I had children of my own. But we can’t keep them from dying. And we’re not teaching them to treasure life. We’re surely not.”
I thought back to last year and the eighth grade girl who committed suicide because of bullying. And about how there was such an uproar and an outcry, sermons preached all over town, awareness campaigns all through the schools, a scholarship fund made in her name. And nothing changed. Kids still bullied, people still committed suicide. Three weeks ago, a man in his twenties hung himself from the deck of his apartment, right across the creek from the High School. A bunch of Sophomores witnessed it and called the police. Six weeks ago, a young man from our town, serving in the Marines, returned home on leave and shot himself in the head.
My daughter came out of the funeral home with tears streaming down her face. She threw herself in my arms and choked out: “He had Trent’s bracelet on.”
Trent died in a car accident in June. He was eighteen, would have been a Senior. He worked in the same grocery store as my daughter and played bass in a local band. Yeah, he’d been pretty drunk when he drove his car into a tree at forty miles an hour. His classmates wore bracelets with his name and the date of his death-to remember. I guess, to remind themselves of their own mortality. They set up a memorial and tagged the state highway where it happened.
It didn’t work for Jacob. I hugged her and looked at Maggie. Maggie met my eyes and said: “We’re getting used to it again, Pastor.” I looked around at the young people, measuring them each for a casket, picturing the shocked, horror filled faces of their families and stroked my daughter’s hair with trembling fingers, cursing Maggie to myself as a baleful old death crow.
“Pastor, if God made deals, I’d go in place of any of them,” she informed me. I saw that she had one of Trent’s bracelets too, and as my mind tumbled over the complicated and complex intermingling of families in our small town, I remembered...she was Trent’s great grandmother. And when I saw the moisture at the corner of her eye, I knew that she begrudged every moment that Trent, and Jacob, and young Cassie, and the Marine, and the young man hanging from his deck wouldn’t have. Because she treasures life and knows how fragile a gift it is. And she knows that we can become so used to the gift that we become too used to the loss.
I’m afraid she’s right, Maggie is. We’re getting used to it. A mixed blessing, at best.
My daughter went off with two friends for band practice. “Drive carefully,” I called after her. She waved back in my general direction. My fingers twitched, wanting to snatch the keys from her hands. Maggie put her hand on my shoulder and we stood there a moment, watching tail lights go off in all directions. We can’t keep them from living; we can’t stop them from dying. I’d better get used to it.