Yesterday morning, a kid I used to babysit was hit by a bus. He was 18 and coming from a dry grad event. I keep crying today, even though I haven't seen that kid, or his family, since 1997.
He had a twin sister, Jaime, and his family was really close. He and his twin were my neighbours when I was 14. His little sister used to come knock on my door every day to ask if I wanted to play basketball; I never once said yes.
Every morning, when their father would drive to work, he would wave out the window of his white Golf convertible, and the kids would wave back from the bay window of their house. They were a really, really close family.
And now he's dead. All day, it has been sunny, and that family has felt like their hearts stopped beating. I feel like I'm in mourning with them, which I guess I am, given that I keep crying, but I'm surprised by how much this death has hit me. It's tragic. But so are all the other deaths in the world. It's just so striking when death hits someone you know (or, in this case, someone I used to know).
He was a really nice kid, I remember. I babysat a lot of kids, but he was gentle, I remember. And apparently, he grew up to be a great basketball player. I keep thinking that today was the worst day of his family's life. And tomorrow will be the same. And the day after...
And 8 years later, when that family's lives are far removed from this day, and they've come to know life without their son and brother, they'll hear of some long forgotten kid they used to babysit who was killed the night before...and they'll once again be reminded that their own experience of grieving is not so far from the surface, after all.
