I was eleven when he died, the blond boy with braces who had a crush on me in the third grade, the only boy fast enough to catch me on the playground. He was twelve that summer, the star pitcher on his Little League team in the middle of playoffs when his mom crashed their Bronco on a country road killing them both on the way to his baseball game.
The mom wasn’t your average mom. She roped cattle with manicured hands, spun men’s heads when she stepped into a room, wrapped bright scarves around her auburn hair, and was so pretty I ached just looking at her. “You’ll grow into your red hair,” she once told me, sharing her lip gloss with me before I was old enough to carry my own. When they died, that mom and her boy, my life altered.
Our families were close enough that as the boy lingered on life support a week after the accident, his dad asked my mom what to do. “If it was Patrick would you keep him on the machine?”
My mom, a nurse and neighbor who’d bandaged this boy’s bumps and bruises along with my brother Patrick’s through the years, said, “No, I’d let him go.”
That day the dad turned off the machine and something turned in me.
A girl grows up fast at funerals.
Today I ache for a thirteen-year-old cousin whose best friend and best friends’ mom died in a boating accident this weekend. I’ve stared at a blank computer screen all morning trying to blog about something else, something meaningful, and all I can think about is how meaningful death is, especially to young people. How this thirteen-year-old will never be who she would have been had death not violated her youth. How thirty years from now she will remember exactly what she was doing when the phone rang. How the smell of flowers in a funeral home is nothing like the smell of flowers in a yard. How a stuffed animal soaks up tears but not pain. And how in the wake of death, adults feed you and feed themselves, food filling a kitchen but nothing filling the desk where your best friend sat at school.
In the grief of this, the sad, senseless grief of this, I open my Bible to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Just what I’ve been studying lately: the Beatitudes. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” Matthew 5:4. 
And I pray this for everyone whose life stopped this weekend when two boats collided on a warm summer evening at Englebright Lake. Because all the earthly help in the world doesn’t help when something like this happens. The only real help comes from the Lord in heaven who keeps His promise to comfort those who mourn.