And Then Your Children Know...and You Wish They Did Not

When you have teenagers life is a precarious balance. You want them to have fun, to be active, and yet especially as they get to the ages of 16 and 17 and start driving every time they leave the house you hold your breath.

Part of you wants to keep them home all the time. You would like to send them to their room, play board games with the family, and have that be enough. It never is. In truth you would not want it to be. You want them to have friends, you want them to have a social life and if you know their friends and trust them you give as much freedom as you can.

Yet no matter what you hold your breath. I think I am pretty strict. My son tells me I am. I set a curfew and woe to the son who does not follow it. Fortunately mine does. It has not been perfect. There was an incident at Bangor High last winter, most know about it. You do not want that call. Dad please come claim me from the police. Even in the moment however I was aware of how much worse that call could have been.

So you don't sleep. You worry. If your someone like me it is complicated more because I well remember what teenagers do. I feel like I was one yesterday. I have never talked or glamorized the things I did that involved alcohol and the temptations of youth. I just try to let my son know that the one thing we never know is that we never know.

When you tell your kids to be careful they say of course. When you tell them to not text and drive they listen and you hope they hear. When you remind them of all the accidents that have been in the news the last six months involving teenagers and young people you know they feel invincible. And you know why. Because you cannot be a teenager and feel the dangers of life.

So you wish you could make them understand the dangers that are involved in life everyday. It is a hopeless exercise.

And then. Your son comes home from work on a Saturday and says " Did you hear the news?". You have not, it is a Saturday, you have been doing things around the house and your heart skips. He tells you that a young man who was a couple years ahead of him in school died in a car accident last night. He was a passenger in a car and he was the only one killed, three others were hurt but not in a life threatening way.

He asks you how that can happen? How can one person die and the others be ok? How can someone be alive one minute, on Facebook posting, and then do whatever it is young men do on a Friday night and then....be gone.

You see him struggling with it. And you hurt. You remember the young man. You did not know him. You remember his Senior Night in Basketball. You remember him greeting his Dad as he came across the floor not with a hug and a handshake like most of the boys but by patting his chest and he and his Father bumping chests. You saw the energy. You admired the way he played basketball. All energy, garbage buckets all over the place. The kinds of baskets that come with bruises and ice packs after the game and you can just tell there were no complaints about any of it from him.

So you take your son for Pizza. He is hungry. Pizza makes us all feel better. While he is in picking it up you look up the clear blue sky. You think about the fact that your son is going to college in sixteen months. You think about what this fine young man's parents are going through right now, how the same blue sky is shining over them right now but it is not a sunny day at their house.

Your son comes out with the pizza. He gets in the car. You know that he will be getting in cars with his friends just like this young man did. No matter if he goes to college in Michigan, Pennsylvania, U Maine or Husson in sixteen months he will be on his own. He will make choices in the most innocent way. " Hey, we are going to get Pizza in town" some boys will say at ten on a Friday night." Do you want to go " they will ask. He will go.

If God is not looking the other way he will come back to the dorm, go to bed, and this will be one of a million adventures in his life that I will never know about.

We do not know what those boys were doing but there is no reason to think they were doing anything less innocent than that. Any thoughts or speculation of what happened is not the right of those of us who did not know them personally. In the end a fine young man is dead, a family is ripped apart and it was all an accident.

The same knowledge that you wanted your child to understand that accidents are called accidents for a reason is now firmly implanted in your son's brain. You look at him holding the pizza, you see the thoughts he cannot speak, the questions you cannot answer, and you wish that you could go back to that morning when he went to work and as he left you told him to be careful and he said " C'mon Dad I am always safe, " like you are the biggest worrier in the world.

You wish that he could still be innocent enough of death to feel that way again.