Years ago, when I was still a teenager and before cell phones were ubiquitous, a couple friends of mine missed curfew. I was in bed asleep when our home phone rang. My parents woke me up and asked me if I knew where my friends were. After assuring them I did not, they told me to get dressed so we could go help look for them. Before we went too far, we got word that they turned up. We went to one of their homes, where they were both supposed to be staying. I was tired, cold, and mostly annoyed, but also relieved. They were safe, but one of their dads was still out looking for them. We went to look for him.
He was outside of town, near a bridge where his older brother had died in a car wreck years earlier, not much older than my friends and I. In that moment, some invincible piece of my ego shattered when I saw my friend's father on the side of the highway in the middle of the night, mourning for the life his brother lost and hoping for the life his daughter had yet to live.
That's the image that keeps running through my head tonight, as I try to reconcile that now, years later and under much different circumstances, my friend's father has lost his precious daughter.
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