Heavy Heart

It's not just the loss of Spring that has weighed me down the past few days. Life, like Nature, can give some bad shocks of her own.

Last week the fiance of a former daughter-in-law was hit broadside as he was driving through an intersection in our county. The driver who hit him was drugged up and he took off, leaving the scene and. Jim lying in the road.

Fortunately there were witnesses and one of them chased after the other driver while others helped Jim and called 911. The driver's car broke down within a short distance and he took off running across the fields. The police hunted him down with dogs--like the dog he is. Jim was very badly injured and after days of fighting for his life, he succumbed yesterday morning.

I did not know Jim well. He went to school with my sons, a year or two ahead of them, I believe. Whenever I ran into him he was kind and polite, and he had a reputation as a good man and a hard worker.

It is hard to see the pain caused by the man who killed Jim, to see a good man lost to someone else's bad life choices. He, of course, is still walking--in jail, but alive. There is no fairness here, no reason. I cannot feel compassion for his plight yet, and I don't know if I ever will. Wrong is just wrong, no excuses. There are some things that really are black and white to me, and this is one of them. I don't know or care what his upbringing was, how or why he became someone who has been in trouble with the law numerous times, or why he began using drugs. Others have had bad beginnings and chose to make their lives better. He didn't.

Jim with our great-grandson

We all make choices. This man made the wrong ones and now Jim has paid the ultimate price for it, and others will be grieving for the rest of their lives. There's really no such thing as closure--that I have learned. There is learning to live with loss, finding strength to go on and eventually to find joy again, but the grief is always there, ready to well up unexpectedly at any time. That's the legacy this careless, drugged-up driver gave to a whole family who lost one they loved so well. Fortunately they also have the legacy of a kind and loving man and the memories of his life to hold them in the light.

I look out this morning at a frozen, gray world, and I kind of feel like that inside too. I didn't know Jim closely, but I am sad for my granddaughter and her mother, for Jim's children and grandchildren and all of his extended family.  This did not need to happen.



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