One fragile life

It was a very dark and eerie morning on day 21 of lent. The fog was think and I received a deep sense of the changing of the season from Summer to Autumn. The days were getting shorter as we head towards the end of daylight saving. Although the fog was as think as pea soup there was a strange warmth and humidity in the air from the day before.
Last night was a night that some will never forget. There was a car accident on the other side of the ridge less than a kilometre away from where we live. I decided to ride my bike in that direction again this morning to reflect upon the the incident that occurred only 11 hours ago in my neighbourhood. As day began to break the fog continued to swirl around me. I cut a single rose to take with me on the trip.
At about 8pm last night my dad (still a member of the local CFS) was paged and the siren from the station began to blear out across the hills and valleys. As dad left for the station he said it was a car accident they were being called out to. The firetruck came roaring past our place with the siren sounding, up the hill and to the other side where we heard it stop. A couple of hours later dad called home and said he was going to be a while as they were waiting for the coroner and the tow truck to arrive. That didn't sound good.
At around 10:30pm I drove up to see how dad was holding out. On the way up the hill i bumped into a couple of old CFS mates who were blocking the road and re-directing traffic. They let me through to the CFS truck about another 100 metres up on the top of the hill. Dad was sitting up in the drivers seat of the truck manning the radio. I climbed up to the passenger seat to engage the conversation with dad about what was going on and how they were all holding up. A lot of memories came flooding back as I climbed into that truck about the amount of fires and accidents I've been out to as part of that CFS team.
As the story goes, the 18 year old driver of the car (his dad's BMW) had just broken up with his girlfriend and in his grief had run his car at a high speed into a tree at the bottom of the other side of the hill. He died instantly. It took a rescue crew about 3 hours to cut him out of the car which had been compacted to about half it's original length.
The CFS crew had been out there for a while so when food came I helped distribute the ice coffee and raisin bread to dad and the 3 other guys redirecting traffic. These volunteers do it tough sometimes, and the nature of the incident meant they needed to talk, that is, talk about anything that would take their mind off that night.
As I rode my bike up over the ridge this morning and headed down the hill towards the scene of the accident I felt a deep sense of sorrow for all who were involved. A young man, his family, his friends, the CFS crew, the rescue crew, the police, the ambulance officers, the old man in the house next to the tree that stopped the car in it's tracks...so many had been deeply affected. This neighbourhood is like a little country town and an incident like this is not easily forgotten.
How do you begin to imagine the deep sense of pain that would lead someone to take their own life like this? So many in this young man's life will be feeling so helpless right now. Is there something that could have been done to prevent this tragedy? Did they have a chance to tell him how much they really loved him? The questions keep rolling on. Yet in that moment last night sat a young man, alone in his car blinded to anything outside of his immediate reality, the reality of the pain he felt in that moment. Herein lies one of the greatest depths of poverty that exists in our society. Yet what can be done about it? There are no easy answers yet there is plenty to explore as we begin to address the issues of the poverty of helplessness, hopelessness and loneliness in our society.
I don't know the young man who chose to end the pain in this way however, I took the rose I had cut and placed it in the trunk of the tree that was hit to acknowledge this one fragile life.

Shalom
Mark