No Words

Three of our daughters are gone. Three Ashland area families are walking through the darkest of valleys, marked by their bleak signposts: the shrill of a phone call, the chill of the sterile corridors of the ICU, and the array of casket samples that will forever define August 2014. Two fatal automobile crashes in Ashland County have left families in mourning, drivers stunned, and first responders shaken to the core.

We knew these girls. They walked the halls of the high school with our children. They posted silly pictures on Facebook. They stood on the brink of adulthood, full of hope.

We’ve chatted with their grandparents, we’ve worked with their aunts and uncles, and we’ve strolled past each other at the county fair. These are our children, not an actor whose movies we admire, or an eighteen-year-old boy in Ferguson, Missouri. They belong to us, and in this loss, a community grieves alongside their bereft families.

We know it could have been us. We drive Route 30 and Route 42 every day. Our kids jump in the car with friends they’ve known forever or are just getting to know, without a wave good-bye. We trust them to click their seatbelt and to use good judgment, but the day comes when we have to let them pull out of the driveway without us.

And then the unthinkable happens, and life is forever changed. These invincible teens, with stars in their eyes and laughter on their lips, are gone in an instant, or slip away after an excruciating stay in the ICU, where time itself stands still.

Family members and high school classmates are in shock. How can this be? We were just together. I just received a text from her. We planned to see each other today. Nothing can prepare us for this sudden loss, this horrific intrusion into the rhythm of life in small town Ohio.

At first, the questions are specific. What happened? When? Where? Who else was involved? After a while, the finality of the answers sinks in. No, we’re not dreaming. We see the mangled car and we weep.

As a community, we ask the broader questions. How can we keep our children safe? Could we have done anything to prevent these tragedies? How could this happen here?

And as we read the Facebook posts and gaze solemnly at the young faces who stare at us from the obituary page, we ask the ultimate question: Why? Suggestions that God needed another flower for his garden or another voice in the angel choir are hollow. I, for one, have found no satisfactory answer for that question. All I know to say is that God is with us in our loss. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

Yet, still, we do our best. Pastors reach deep within their own experience of faith to prepare words of comfort. Counselors, armed with boxes of Kleenex, stand ready on the first day of school to greet students with grief support in lieu of words of welcome. We sit together in silence, we light a candle, and we pray.

And still, we know that life will go on. Those who dearly loved these young women will somehow stumble their way through the maze of loss and grief, forever changed. I turn again to the words of Anne Lamott to describe the experience: “You lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

For the rest of us, we’ll whisper a prayer of comfort for the families, and then resume our daily tasks. But we won’t forget, for when we drive past the crosses on the highway, we’ll pause to remember Brooke, Christianna, and Cheyenne, and the harsh August days when unspeakable tragedy struck our community.