HE SAYS THAT ALL HIS MOM DOES is cry and that his parents won’t look at him.
This breaks my heart. I have compassion and sympathy for the kid who lent his parents’ van to an improperly licensed driver after a party at his home. The driver, possibly under the influence of weed, if his Twitter account is to be believed, crashed a van into a tree then fled on foot leaving three seriously injured passengers behind, if newspaper reports are to be believed.
These are teenagers that I personally know, whose parents I have spent hours and hours with at local hockey rinks over the years; these are friends with whom we travelled in Europe with on a hockey tour. These kids are current and former hockey teammates of my son’s, and as anyone who plays rep hockey knows, as dysfunctional as it is at times, a hockey team is family. We spend more time with these folks from August through April than we spend with blood relatives in an entire calendar year.
I spent Labour Day weekend meditating—some might call praying—for the returned health of those most seriously injured. My thoughts rarely strayed, and when they did, I wondered how the driver was muddling through the crisis.
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This essay was published at www.motherink.org, August 2012.