Loss

Two University of Rhode Island students were struck by a vehicle Sunday morning on Boston Neck Road in Narragansett.

URI sophomore, Mary Ellen "Molly" Offer, 19, was transported to South County Hospital and later pronounced dead.

Holly Maganzini, 20, was also struck by the vehicle, and was transported to South County Hospital and then to Rhode Island Hospital for lower extremity injuries.

My oldest knew the two students. I told her that this is how you get old.

I told my other daughter who is about to get her license that this is what parents talk about, that we've lived through this and when we tell you to drive safe it's because we've lived through things like this, and it's only experience that teaches you about these things.

There are friends and family who suddenly woke up to a loss. It's one of a parent's worse nightmare, losing a child....like this...

It's just short of one, having one barely escape something like this, and having the other one die.

It seems a lot of life is hurt and pain, dealing with loss. It's a lucky person who hasn't. Or doesn't, who leads a charmed life.

And it's how you deal with it that makes all the difference, but sometimes the loss is too great. I remember the nuns used to tell us when I was little that God would never give you a burden that you couldn't carry. Bullshit. The nuns were full of bullshit. That was just their way of guilting you for feeling human. For being human. For hurting. They'd admonish us, Jesus died for you on the cross, the least you can do is...(you fill in the blank.) That's all bullshit.

Sometimes the hurt is too deep. And we've yet to develop a medical treatment, a surgery, to repair the damage.

When I was little a friend's little sister was troubled. And when she was a teenager she ran away from home. Not far. In the end we learned it was only a few blocks away, and just up the street from where I lived, they found her frozen to death in the trailer of a moving van where she had sought shelter.

I'll never forget the look that from then on was on the mother's face. A blankness and a numbness and, yes, an emptiness, because something was gone from inside her, something we can't see but it's still there, as tangible as her daughter once was.

Don't tell me time heals all. Don't tell me we're given burdens that we can carry. Sometimes they crush us.

I think that's why I love the book No Country for Old Men so much. Some might say I'm getting older. I don't think so. I think I'm getting smarter. And there are so many times when I want to just sit real quiet and play music.

I've blogged about this on more than one occasion now, how Baxter found me floating face down in the water, miles from shore, and handed me a guitar saying, here, you need this. (What he was doing way out there is still a good question.) I clung to it like the piece of driftwood it was, and floated to shore.

Not knowing the first thing about it, I started picking and strumming, read part of a book (because I have a really, really short attention span and couldn't have gotten through the entire thing on a bet) and two years later it's the one thing I cling to, and I can't explain where my mind goes when I play. Sometimes I wish I did, but mostly I just want to leave sleeping dogs lie, and not worry about where I go because if I find out it might be taken away. It's a secret kept from me for a reason.

I guess I'm saying we all deal with loss in our own way. Sometimes it can be pretty destructive, even self-destructive. Other times we don't deal at all. You kind of hope these people can all get through it in the end. There's no guarantee though.