There’s a woman standing at the roadside next to a car with a pretty impressive dent in the front of it. She’s been in a crash, obviously, and she’s distraught about it — the hanging head, the quivering jaw, the eyes welling with tears.
I empathize, of course — but it could have been worse. A few inches to the left or a few miles per hour more and it could have been unimaginable.
I’m reminded of the crash scene a few years ago where the man painting traffic lines on Lewiston streets was run over and killed. At 9:05 p.m., he had been working alongside his kid, a father-son team slapping bright yellow lines up and down Sabattus Street.
By 9:06 p.m., he was dead.
His son was there in the aftermath, screaming with rage, pain and something akin to disbelief. How could his father have been there one minute and gone the next? How could the difference between 9:05 and 9:06 be so horrific and life-changing?
Witnessing the pain and shock and horror of the son was the worst part for me. Forget the wreckage in the roadway — the real nastiness comes in the form of mangled human emotion.
A year or two before that, it was the young woman cradling her boyfriend’s head on a dead-end street in the outskirts. He was gone — only minutes after he had been popping wheelies on his motorcycle, hanging with his buds and celebrating the many joys that is young life.
There one second, gone the next — and as she sprawled in the roadway with her dead beloved in her arms, the young woman felt the full impact of life’s cruel capriciousness. Heartbroken, enraged and indignant, she howled at the world in utter defeat, and the enormity of her pain made my skin feel cold for days.
On Lisbon Street, one summer later, a man drove up to the scene of a wreck that had claimed the life of his teenage son and you could actually see the moment when the grim calculation was made: His boy was at the dinner table just an hour ago and now he was dead.
Just like that, a life had gone out like a candle in a puff of wind.
The dad’s response to the whimsical hand of mortality is one I’ll always remember. Anger, sorrow, regret, despair and second-guessing, all mashed together in a poisonous stew of human turmoil: an on-the-spot eulogy, full of honest pain and horror, without pretense or ceremony.
He howled, he paced, he fumed while the living world buzzed on around him, seemingly indifferent.
Human grief is both hideously ugly and uniquely beautiful. After millions of years of existence, we are still thunderstruck when a loved one succumbs to the unknown darkness. We still rage against the non-negotiable finality of the end.
As far as I know, the lady with the dented car made it out of her predicament. She may have been late for dinner and there was the hassle of insurance forms to consider, but I suspect she’s alive and well and going about her life. I kind of wonder if her husband (and son and sister and mother) understand how narrow was their escape from the out-of-nowhere blow to the heart that is a traffic fatality.
Death took another swipe out there on Lisbon Street — but this time, it missed by inches.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at [email protected].
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