One thing is for certain...death will always catch up with you. Be prepared and ready.
A tough lesson: Death touches the young too
Torrie was buried on a Friday.
The day was cold and clear, and there must have been
a couple hundred people
packed into the church. Most of the mourners were
unbearably young -- in
their teens and 20s, I would guess.
One was a woman who had to wait out her tears while
delivering a eulogy.
Another was a pallbearer who dissolved into a
shuddering heap.
And then
there was a man who came hesitantly down the aisle,
stopping short of the
casket and turning away. A moment later he was back,
willing himself
forward. He leaned over the body and cried out the
dead man's name.
Torrie was 20. And let me tell you, burying a
20-year-old is a special kind
of awful.
Not just because it seems an obscene inversion of
the natural order --
parents burying a child. Not just because it reeks
of untapped potential, an
end too close to a beginning.
But also because of
what it does to the young
people left behind, the brutal, unsentimental way it
strips away their
illusions of invincibility and immortality.
A DEFINING CONCEIT
It is one of the defining conceits of youth, this
conviction that time
doesn't touch you, that 16 is endless and 20
forever. Yes, the conceit
always ends, but you hate to see it end so abruptly.
I should mention that Torrie did not die as too many
young people do. There
was no gang fight, no random shooting, no beef in a
crowded nightclub. He
had an asthma attack. It led to heart failure.
In a way, that makes his death harder to grasp. We
have grown sadly used to
seeing young people die through senseless acts. To
have one snatched away by
sudden illness feels like a betrayal, the universe
behaving with
unfathomable meanness. It feels like God is
cheating.
Torrie practically grew up in my house, just as my
youngest sons practically
grew up in his. If you've ever had teenagers, you
know what I'm talking
about: that migrating flock of kids that seems to
live nowhere in
particular, stopping at each other's houses for days
at a time to empty the
fridge and commandeer the television before moving
on.
So it was not at all uncommon for me to come
downstairs on a summer morning
and find Torrie sacked out on the floor in the den,
maybe with my boys
snoring in the chairs where they had fallen asleep
playing video games or
watching movies deep into the night. Sometimes, my
wife had to order Torrie
and his cousin to go home if only to shower and
change clothes.
NO LONGER A KID
It had been two years since I saw him and I almost
didn't recognize him in
the casket. He was a young man with a beard and a
head full of braids, no
longer the kid I remembered -- pudgy, fresh-faced
and with a big, cheesy
grin.
My sons had a hard time at the funeral. Everybody
did, I guess, but it was
my boys and their peers who broke my heart.
Young people -- African-American men in particular
-- often meet the world
with faces that give nothing away. Armored faces, I
call them. They guard
their feelings jealously, project an air of studied
indifference as if to
make us believe they are beyond the ability to be
hurt. It's all a fraud, of
course, a form of self-defense, a way of projecting
an invulnerability one
does not always feel.
You know this if you are an adult. And if the
knowing sometimes leaves you
exasperated over the conceits of kids, there is also
a wistfulness that
comes from realizing something they often do not: No
one is beyond hurt, and
nothing is forever.
Usually it's an incremental lesson, a wisdom you
pick up with the years. But
sometimes life is a merciless teacher. That was
certainly the case on the
Friday Torrie was buried. So it hurt to sit in that
church as armored faces
broke and tears came streaming out.
My sons came away with a renewed understanding that
every day is a gift.
It's an important lesson.
The Will of God will never take you to where the Grace of God will not protect you.
Don't miss out on your BLESSING just because it's not in the package you was expecting...
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Reviewed by Judy Lloyd
4/9/2005
At the first part of the year I read in Richmond about a young man Torrie's age who died of asthma and this reminds me of him. Yes it is always sad when anyone dies that young. And from a disease like asthma yes it is heartbreaking to lose someone like this. I had asthma growing up and it flairs every now and then.
Death DOES touch the young; it is no descriminator of age or person. If it's that person's time to go, then they go, no questions asked! It is always sad when a young person or a child or baby dies; it goes against all the physics of human nature, but death is a part of life as is life itself. Good article, Nina; well done!
(((HUGS))) and much love, your friend in Tx., Karen Lynn. :( >tears <
My mom was young when she died: she was not quite sixty when she died. She would have been sixty in May, she died in March. That was fifteen years ago; I still miss her now! :(
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