Struggling With The "Why"

My wife went to a wake for a 10-year-old boy last night; and though it wasn’t as bad as she expected, it was still the single worst experience of her life.

I am ashamed to admit (yet I admit nonetheless) that I was somewhat relieved I didn’t attend due to a confluence of a) not really knowing the family and b) not really having anyone else available to watch our kids. Death, in and of itself, has never really been an easy thing for me to grasp… but the sudden, accidental death of a 10-year-old boy is utterly inexplicable.

Maybe it’s because I’m a father.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a 10-year-old boy.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m human.

(insert depressingly audible SIGH here)

At any rate, the one thing that popped into my head every time I thought about this horrific tragedy was a paragraph from Stephen King’s “The Body” - a novella far better known by its theatrical moniker: Stand By Me.

There is a scene at the end of the movie when the four friends finally discover the body of Ray Brower, a boy about their age. The image on the screen shows the boy’s sneakers dangling in a bush while The Narrator explains: “The train had knocked him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body.” But then they move on, depriving the audience (as movies-based-on-books so often do) of the seminal passage in the entire book:

That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friend sin the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasn’t going to wake up at two o’clock a.m. on the morning of November 1^st this year, run to the bathroom, and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Halloween candy. The kid wasn’t going to pull a single girl’s braid in home room. The kid wasn’t going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was the side of the battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The wastebasket by the teacher’s desk, which always smells of wood-shavings from the sharpener and dead orange peels from lunch. The haunted house outside town where the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of rats. The kid was dead, mister, ma’am, young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.

In a single paragraph, King impeccably captures the fundamental reality of an untimely death; but more impressively, he does so through the innocent thoughts of a 12-year-old boy who - as if by magic - suddenly understands what death actually is.

Of course understanding the "what" has always been the easy part... its the "why" that I still don't get.