Opinion A death on the highway

On the highway, sunlight bounced off the pavement. Rugged, massive mountains loomed not far away, draped with a delicate white shawl of cloud. It was a nearly perfect Central Oregon day, hot but not unpleasant, except for the police cars and ambulance, their lights flashing.

Faces of people walking away from the accident warned that a tragedy had occurred. When no one is hurt you can see relief in the faces of men and women at the scene.

There was no relief on these faces.

On the pavement, under a soft, light blue sheet, lay the body of a young woman, who just a little while before had run across the highway to take pictures of the mountains.

We don't know why she didn't stop for the pickup truck when she ran back across the highway toward her car. The truck hit her with the center of its grill. She died instantly.

Even more frightening than the fact of death is the realization of how transitory, how delicate and how uncertain is life itself.

We forget that.

Perhaps we need to forget it, or hide from it, to push it aside or down or away, where it may stay until we confront the death of a young woman from Ireland, where the cars come at you from the other side of the road, a young woman who died on a highway in Oregon because she wanted to take a picture of mountains so beautiful in the afternoon sun.

"Got your camera?" asks the first cop as you approach the accident. You mumble something about the reporter up ahead and later wonder if the cop was implying that somehow you enjoy this part of the job. But maybe he was just trying to find for himself some relief from the pain.

In about a half hour or an hour maybe, a phone will ring in the kitchen or bedroom or front room of a home or flat somewhere in Ireland. It will be night time and perhaps the parents of the young girl lying dead on the highway halfway around the world in Oregon will be awakened from a sleep to learn their world has just broken and will never be the same.

I have heard fathers crying that a parent should never have to bury a child. I wonder if women live nearer to the truth, if they sense more closely how thin is the thread that keeps all of us attached to Creation.

On the gray pavement in the middle of the highway lies the front cover of a camera, pink and with stars, probably the camera of a 21-year-old young woman, the camera that may have held the photo she ran across the fast highway to take of the mountains with their soft mantle of clouds.

The rest of the camera, and the film, the image for which she died, are nowhere to be seen.

This young woman, so full of life, so full of appreciation for the beauty of the mountains, dashed across the highway to take their picture. But why did she die?

Because she failed to look both ways? Because it was God's will? Because in Ireland they drive on the other side of the road and for just one fatal instant she thought the truck aimed right at her was headed away? Haven't we all had such a moment?

We seek meaning in death to affirm meaning in life. It is frightening to think that a death had no reason, no lesson, no meaning, because that takes us to the edge of wondering if life itself has reason beyond the living.

We are so temporary that a truck driven by another victim of this bright afternoon can strike us down between heartbeats. What we were ceases instantly to be.

Perhaps we are so redundant that accidents just happen, are even necessary, the individual is simply a conveyance of possibilities. It is hard sometimes to believe we have any significance beyond that attached to our laughter and tears by those who give us their love.

But it is nearly impossible to find peace in that role. In a parent's pain, we have a glimpse of the eternal.

Perhaps death is not the loss of life. Perhaps the vibrations of what we have done and felt in life, the echo that lasts past the moment of our death, perhaps these are what we were, and what we will be. The echo is set free, returned to God, growing smaller but spreading farther, a whisper now out among the breeze drifting the light clouds down from the mountains.

But the thought that it could be one of my daughters lying on the pavement beneath that soft blue cloth makes my mind recoil, my heart stutter, it makes muscles involuntarily contract. The horror of even the thought of the loss makes my head drop and shoulders rise as if to protect from a blow from above.

I take no comfort in knowing my children are safe at home because life is so predictable yet so uncertain, death is so unpredictable but is so certain. I want to call and be sure they are safe, I need to know.

The cops and the medics head back to their cars, back to the ambulance. There is nothing left to be done, there is nothing left to say. A life has ended on a highway in Central Oregon.

Eric Dolson is the publisher of The Nugget Newspaper.