When I was little my father coached Ririe High School's boy's basketball team. There was one team that was pretty special. They won state. The only time Ririe has ever taken State in men's basketball. One member of the team was a boy named Corey Radford. He was killed the same year in a car accident. My father kept his funeral program on a shelf in our house for a long, long time.
The event effected both of my parents a lot.
Corey's father was killed in a snow mobile accident on Saturday.
My mom ran into Lynn and his wife Cindy on Thursday at the grocery store. She showed them pictures of Ivie and her cousin Bodee. They showed her pictures of their 12 grandchildren.
On Saturday some girl that I don't know posted "Prayers for Cindy" on facebook, and my little sister, following the thread saw someone write"WHY?" to which the poster replied, "Lynn died."
Another girl's blog that I read talked about her weekend. I went to high school with her and her husband. She talked about how her husband was called out on Saturday for a search and rescue mission to retrieve a body.
It is weird to me that I knew Lynn. That I know this other man - but that Lynn had no way of knowing this man who would retrieve his body. Something, that seems like it should be a personal thing.
Sometimes it seems we are all so connected. Our lives are full of these messy little threads that cris-cross one another in ways we can never understand and never imagine. Even in the completely artificial environments of isolation we create for ourselves - sitting behind a cubicle or in a single office for 8 hours a day - we really are just one big, messy tribe.
"When I think of all the worry that people seem to find, and how they're in a hurry to complicate their minds by chasing after money and dreams that can't come true, I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do. Let others plan their futures, I'm busy loving you." ~ Live for Today by The Grass Roots
2 comments:
It's just a crazy life. Our 2nd counselor in our bishopric got up on Sunday and talked about his uncle that got killed in a showmachine accident accident on Saturday. He also had no idea that Jared was the one to bring his uncle's body out miles and miles with his snowmachine. We're all connected.
I was most reminded of this by a story I did several years ago during my internship. A woman and four of her children were hit while driving. She and two of the kids died. I later found out that her husband was my brother's high school friend's brother. I knew who the people grieving were, but they would never remember me.
I saw him a few years later at a commission meeting I covered. I felt so strange knowing intimate, tragic details of his life and he had no idea that I was the 20-year-old girl who wrote about the death of half his family.
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