It's always sad when someone young dies, but even more so when it's of their own volition. He was he grandson of a friend of ours, who ended his life last week by driving into an embankment wall at 80 miles per hour.
The thoughts run in an endless loop through my mind-- what state of mind and how much pain would he have had to be in to do this at seventeen? Going into his senior year of high school, loved by so many of his classmates and members of his community that the church literally couldn't hold another single person?
The receiving line snaked around the outside of the building and far out into the parking lot. His grandmother stands still in shock, eyes glazed over and staring blankly into whatever reality she is reliving inside her mind. His grandfather, stoic and pragmatic even in this moment, leads her by the arm to her seat at the gravesite.
His best friend, calm and composed, speaking words coming sixty years too soon and three days too late.
His acquaintance, who owes his life and continued success to the skills and perseverence of one now beyond such things, and whose emotion was so great he could only utter scant few words before falling to the floor-- an eighteen-year-old football star, the world at his feet, who had never met this boy's guardians, now clinging to them fiercely and thanking them for his short privileged time with his younger mentor, the young man who had helped him make college dreams a reality when he was sure there was no hope, no point.
His silent little sister, looking wide-eyed at the burnished casket blankly. Goodbye, Jeffrey, she whispers, fingers brushing the yellow roses atop his wooden coffin. No tears stream down her face. She already knows loss that most can't begin to comprehend. Mother, father, brother. She simply watches his grave silently as people move past her-- automatons, offering words that fall past her ears like so much water over a fall.
She suddenly looks heavenward, her eyes lighting and a smile breaking across her face like a sunrise. Her eyes return to the grave, into which she drops her gift of bright daisies and whispers, Bye Jeff... see you around...
