Two Die In Bizarre, Fiery Accident - Choices Equal Results

"Two die in bizarre, fiery accident."  That is what the headline said.

On Tuesday of this week, our community was rocked by news of a horrific single car crash involving three high school seniors.  Two of the boys perished in the accident.  The driver was pulled from the wreckage and is hospitalized with life threatening injuries.  His prognosis is hit or miss.  That young man is the youngest son of a family that has lived next door to me for six years.

I am thunderstruck and have been all but paralyzed this week with the hopelessness of a simple question, “What can I do?”  The answer thus far has been to pray.  That is all that can be done at this point.  I will go visit the family at the hospital today and provide some meals for them so they don’t have to think about what they are going to eat.  Such gestures though, seem so small and insignificant in the face of such a life changing calamity.

Over the past 48 hours there has been a great deal of conjecture in this tight-knit community, and on the web, about what happened.  Was alcohol involved?  (The police have yet to make a judgment on that.)  Why were they going so fast?  (Police have specified, based upon skid marks and other factors that excessive speed was a factor.)  How could this happen?  How can we honor their memory in any meaningful way?

Impromptu vigils have popped up and memorial Facebook pages have been created by well-meaning friends. 

For the families of these three young men, recovery from this will be long and hard fought.  Two of those families have lost a son.  The other’s life hangs in the balance and if he recovers he will then have to deal with the emotional trauma of having been the one at the wheel when it happened.  None of these lives will ever be the same.

At Tuesday evening’s vigil one mourner said, "It's hard, thinking ‘that could have been me.’  I know teens do crazy things. It's an eye-opener for everyone."   I certainly hope so.

As I mention in Road Signs on the High Road of Life, choices equal results.  While it will take weeks for the authorities to sort out exactly what happened, each of these boys made a choice.  There will be intense investigation of, repercussions for and potential criminal charges resulting from the driver’s choices – and yet both of the passengers made choices as well.  They made a choice to get into the car and a choice to stay in the car and not call the driver out on his excessive speed. 

Each of us has the opportunity to, and the responsibility for, making good choices in our lives. We have to reap the results of the choices that we make.  One of the truly tragic factors in this whole situation is the butterfly effect (that is the chaos theory that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a ripple in the air sufficient to create a tsunami on the other side of the globe).  The choices made by these three boys early Tuesday morning have the potential to destroy three families and will affect much of the community for years to come. 

I can only hope that it IS an eye opener, as that one mourner said – and perhaps there can be a rare positive result from poor choices.  I hope the 150 some odd youth that gathered for the vigil and others who were not there will remember this for a very long time and utilize that memory to make good choices in the future.   

That is the very best way to honor their memory.