Coping with loss
Monday, January 14th, 2008The weekend tragedy of Bathurst, N.B. was a national story, and here in the Maritimes, a local nightmare.
By now it is well reported that eight died — seven teenage members of the Bathurst High basketball team and an elementary school teacher (the wife of the driver) — when their 15-seat van skidded out of its lane and collided with a tractor-trailer head-on, just minutes from their turn-off.
The driver, the husband and the coach, survived (if that is the word).
Among the tangled claws of vehicular wreckage twisted and torn on that cold night lie the shredded lives of so many others — so many who were not on the road that dark, winter evening, but who travel the road now, haunted.
Others in New Brunswick travel the road every day. And each time they do “the accident” will stop their thoughts.
In time, the pain will fade. But, for some, it will intensify: the distance of time magnifying the effect of what might have been: the young lives so full of that long road of promise ahead of them, one that that they will no longer travel; the days and hours as they walk now frozen time; the shadows of sunsets never to be seen.
Timothy Findley ended his glorious novel The Wars, of the First World War and remembrance, and of life’s frailty and fleetingness, with the image of a smiling breath in winter — where breath is frozen in the cold. It is seen and it disappears.
And every time people drive by they will think of “the accident” and the horror of happenstance.
We will remember their breaths.
And it started out like any other day.