Invincible

So how ironic that the day after I post my first entry in months, I wake up with my stomach doing somersaults again! Clearly God knew me better than I know myself! I am pretty sure he nudged me into making that post, knowing that once I did, I would find it hard to blow off my next workout, simply because I felt bad. I am positive if I had not made that commitment, I would have skipped a trip to the gym, and opted for laying in bed. Instead I dragged myself there, hit the treadmill for 45 minutes and followed with some sit-ups. It wasn’t a full work-out, and my body was still not cooperating with me when I finished, but I felt as if I had won a hard fought race simply by sticking it out.  As it turned out, it was just the start I needed to prepare myself for a day that ended in sadness and surprise.  

Late in the afternoon on the 4^th, my youngest daughter learned that one of her friends and been killed in an accident. The young man and two friends decided to take an ATV out in the very early hours of the morning after a night of Pre-Fourth of July celebrations. They hit a pothole in the dark and the boy was thrown from the vehicle ultimately resulting in his death a few hours later. My daughter and her friends have spent most of the time sense struggling to make sense of the insensible. Twenty year olds aren’t supposed to die. Twenty year olds are supposed to be invincible, and because they believe they are, they do those things that most of their parents have learned not to do. By the time you are our age, you know that no one is invincible; at their age, however, you still believe you are untouchable until you see the name of your friend scrolling down a twitter feed preceded by three words, "Rest in Peace".

As I paced myself on the treadmill yesterday, I vacillated between sadness for the family, relief that my daughter had stayed home and not attended the party where the accident occurred, and a sense of guilt for being selfish enough to have thought of that in the face of such a horrific tragedy.  I couldn’t stop thinking about the other parent’s loss, and yet I couldn’t stop feeling relieved that it wasn’t my loss. I thought of the friends who were left behind: the ones who were with him that morning and now had to live with the “What ifs.” I thought of the friends who were not with him that morning and wondered if they might have changed the outcome if they had been there.  I pondered if this would make any of them pause in the future or would their pain send them down a more dangerous path. I worried, “Would we lose any others too soon?” and even as the thought crossed my mind, I already knew the answer was likely "Yes!" These tragedies happened daily across the country…. good kids, making a careless decision that cost them their life.  

The truth is that when you are twenty, it doesn’t take long for that sense of vulnerability to wear off and the seduction of invincibility to set back in. I could only pray and hope that the events of this week would make a strong enough impression on my own child  and those close to her to protect them from some future tragedy and another senseless loss.