A place we'd never been before

My oldest son and I went to a visitation last Friday night. Bart (my son) and this kid just graduated last May. I don't remember how long it took for one of my classmates to pass, but it was certainly longer than nine months. It seems this skinny spitfire had a heart condition no one knew about. His dad told me his heart was enlarged. That's all it took to bring down a nineteen-year-old boy.

I have been at a few funerals for young people and many for old. My first "young person funeral" that I can really remember was that of my twenty-year-old cousin, and amazingly the circumstances were similar. Billy's heart wasn't enlarged; he was just too big to be playing church basketball--but who knew? He played basketball whenever the urge hit and that was often. But on December 1, 1979, that didn't matter anymore because that was the night his urge took him away and left all of us wondering what might have been. He was seeing a girl. Would they have married, as he seemed to be hoping? How many kids would he have had? How would he and his four-year-old brother that he'd waited so long for (he had three sisters, poor guy) have gotten along? Then later--much later--would his sister have fought anorexia if he had lived? Would his parents have divorced after nearly forty years of marriage? It's odd how we expect one person to make such a difference in things like that.

And here I am, wondering about such things with Billy and, to a much lesser extent, Anthony (I saw him every day, but I didn't know him) as I remember that three weeks ago, a railroad engineer found another one of my former students--a twenty-two-year-old young man who was planning his wedding--hanging from a railroad bridge. He'd made some bad choices, but nothing that was worth his life, but he decided to end it right there on a railroad bridge where, but for the grace of God, he could have hung until spring without his family or his fiance having a clue about where to find him. Seems really unfair and stupid and--you fill in the blank--that so many young people want to live and just die from heart attacks or strange maladies or car accidents or horse accidents and then someone so healthy with so many hopes just decides that it's time to check out and leave a widowed mother and two sisters and a fiance--all who adore him and depend on him--behind. Forgive my judgmental attitude, but I have a lot of trouble with that.