(This is the darker of the two posts for today…)

There are things in the world that are simply terrible, but whose terrible-ness is amplified when you’re a parent. This week was a prime example of this. On Tuesday night, a 17 year old boy from the neighborhood was out with his friends. For whatever reason, they decided to run across a local road to get to a store. The driver never had a chance, he struck one of the boys and killed him. Another boy felt the car’s mirror brush his shorts.

Never a good story, but this one hit too close to home. The boy who was killed was the close friend of our next door neighbor’s oldest son. But for having school the next morning, the neighbor’s son would have been with them (and had only come home from being with them a few hours before). I’ve met this boy, watched him play with my kids or seen them roaming up the street, looking for all the world like they were always off to have fun and maybe a little mischief.

Coming home from C’s soccer game today we passed by the spot where he was killed. His friends have started a shrine to him, flowers, pictures, etc. It gave me the worst case of the chills. Later this afternoon, C stepped out into the road in front of our house to get a ball and didn’t look before stepping off the curb. I freaked, more than usual. I’m always reminding them to look both ways, even when they’re with us, but with the accident still haunting my thoughts, I yelled like a mad man. C was perplexed, he had only put one foot in the gutter and was right in front of our parked car, so in his mind he was perfectly safe. In my mind was every dark thought a father can imagine.

I cooled down and the boys went on playing, but each giving me a perplexed look over their shoulder. I sat on the front steps and was overwhelmed by what must be going through this boy’s father’s head the last few days. Tomorrow is Father’s Day and will probably be the fifth worst day of his life. The family has an older daughter in college, but the son’s absence, the nagging what-if’s, the sheer brutal pain they must be feeling were more than I could deal with.

So tomorrow, I will relax and enjoy my day. I will hug my kids more than usual (no doubt to their extreme annoyance) and I will count my blessings. I will have these terrible fears in my head, I will sympathize the best I can for this boy’s father and I will probably scare myself silly with the what-if’s.

But, mostly, I will hug my kids.