I attended a memorial service on Monday for the son of a woman who I’ve known for over 20 years. She and I both have adult children who played together when they were in pre-school. We have younger children born in second marriages. We worked together in our first teaching jobs. We live in the same part of the valley. Our kids now go to the same school. She coached my son’s soccer team one season. We see one another periodically and exchange friendly greetings. Old friendships in a small community like ours are like one of the braided rivers we see in the Alaskan interior. The channel parts and meanders, rejoining itself and consolidating downstream in a complex weave of islands and sloughs.

I (and everyone else who knows the family) was shocked last week to learn that her 13 year-old son was killed by a drunk driver who fled the scene. The boy was riding his bike along the side of the road. The driver has been apprehended. Tragedy lies in his wake.

Where don’t my thoughts on this take me? It seems pointless to try to write about something so profoundly beyond my ability to say anything meaningful. But my experience has been shadowed by this event that is so close to home. What lessons can I draw from this? Admiration for the courage of people to continue living in the face of unimaginable grief; despair at the ignorance and stupidity of people who indulge their bad habits and then put the lives of innocent people at risk; anger that the driver of the vehicle was served at a bar before he got in his car to drive off; fear that it could have been one of my own children; awe at the apparent indifference of fate to our hopes and wishes; wonder at the preciousness and fragility of each of our lives; sorrow for the loss of a young life and the pain felt by his family and our community.

Some things are too big, too mysterious to understand.

It’s a time for prayer.