We visited the site of the accident yesterday. Pulling over onto the road’s soft shoulder, other vehicles flashed by with threatening gushes of hot air. The car’s hazard lights pumped our hearts into a frenzy of drumbeats. We found the path, the toppled branches snapped and raw, the trunks of strong trees missing chunks like a juicy apple that’s been bitten in to by a hungry mouth. The atmosphere hummed with emotion. Rusty blood marks shared clues of a story without a beginning or a definite end. We crouched to sort through the rubble, handling broken remnants with pensive caution. The tragedy is air-borne; it is contagious and stains the soul with sorrow. We are helpless and this feels horrible. Living through vague snatches of a nightmare, we faced sharp reality: the rearview mirror around which loops an ancient wooden rosary missing its cross-beam, a shattered window, shards of reflection, shiny discs of music speckled with life’s elixir spilled, pieces of a life lost, objects that once accompanied a young man through his daily life….We left a slice of our hearts by the side of the road at the scene of a loss.
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