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when the crickets were chirping and the windows were wide open and all was right with the world...
I was browsing the news and came across an article about the crash of a small airplane at a fair in Ohio. Six people were killed: the pilot (a retired local politician), an older man and daughter, a young man alone, and what looked like a young father and his four-year-old daughter.
For some reason I was especially haunted by the last two deaths. They went to the fair, and she probably had cotton candy and rode the kiddy rides and a pony, and then he thought it would be fun to take her up in an airplane. So I googled them, and discovered that because of a misspelling in the initial report, it wasn't a young man at all, but a young woman and her daughter. The parents owned and ran a local pizza place, and their whole family lived in the town. The little girl had, just a few months before, been caught by a local photographer drinking a mug of cocoa for some feature on a comunity event in the local newspaper. There she was, in all the happy, unselfconscious obliviousness of childhood.
It got worse. The little girl loved airplanes, and this was to be her very first airplane ride ever, and it was a surprise. Her mother went with her, and she was so excited. On the ground were her father, her ten-year-old brother, and her grandparents--her mother's parents.
The plane lifted off the ground, but then it crashed some distance away, still in view. Everyone knew something was terribly, catastrophically wrong. It was burning.
It was the day after the crash, and I suddenly had a vision that forced all the breath out of my body, it was so sharp and painfully real: the husband and the little boy coming home to a darkened house, the female half of the family--mother, sweet little girl--ripped away from them. The first night--and then the first day--of a horrible new life. Somewhere, right that moment, people were suffering unbearable sorrow that they'd never get over. As I type this, I think that they must still be deep in grief. School has started, and there's no mother to make breakfast and pack her son off to school. Halloween is coming, and no little girl dressed as a princess or a witch will go trick-or-treating with her brother. And then there will be unendurable Christmas. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.
Somewhere, someone's world as they know it is ending right this minute. It's happening for all kinds of people. It's just happened. It's just about to happen. It will happen in five minutes. And I've never felt it so acutely before or since.
