A Life lesson
A true story
On a sultry October night, before the last term of their Year 12 schooling, four boys went for a drive on waste ground. The surface was bumpy and the ute, as bad fortune would have it, was a model prone to tip and roll. Everyone had had a turn sitting in the tray or driving except one. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t speeding. He simply drove into a pothole deeper than the vehicle’s centre of gravity could withstand. It rolled so slowly, in fact, one of the boys had time to jump clear. One hung on. That night a seventeen-year-old killed his best mate.
We didn’t really know the victim but we knew the driver and his parents. Our son had played with him in a sporting team, coached by his dad. They were an ordinary, decent family. The boy had played his game hard and fair for five years. There wasn’t a reckless bone in his body. He was just like our lad, yours too, perhaps.
The news spread. Shock, tears, disbelief. The school stepped up and stepped in, a voice of calm and reassurance. I’m guessing we, the families, all wept for a senseless loss. I know I did, desperately trying to remember the face of a young man who had never been a close friend of our family, scouring year books to find an image upon which to focus my sorrow. Imagining the anguish in two homes and how they would continue to live their lives.
But in amongst the sorrow there were moments when I cried differently. Lurching, gulping sobs for decency, love and compassion. The school cohort were distraught about their friend’s death, but their grief was tinged with a kernel of guilty reprieve. They’d all done stupid things, and they all knew it. I don’t remember now but, that night, our son was most probably out too, making mischief, hoping we wouldn’t find out, getting away with it. The truism of mortality felled them with a punch as brutal as any boxer could inflict. You could almost hear the words floating above the anguished chatter. ‘It could have been me. It could have been you.’ But they meant it for both boys – the victim and the driver. That heartbroken, living, boy was encircled by his friends, in equal measure, with the family who had lost their child.
As well as our own card of condolence, we reached out to the drivers family. Unsure of the right approach, we sent them a card too, expressing our support. The father rang to thank us, grateful for the opportunity to share his pain and bewilderment. We listened imagining, of course, how we would have felt receiving that phone call for help; the magnitude of the fatal scene; the attitude of the police, initially judgemental and harsh. His boy was broken, he said, they were all broken. Except …..
The hardest thing for this father had been contacting the dead boy’s family. They had all been friends, the two boys considered as brothers in both households. One was Australian, Christian. One was Indian and Hindu. The Indian father’s first words were, ‘I’ve been waiting for your call. Please come over and bring your son.’
It is many years now since that tragic night but what followed never fails to move me. The driver, the person responsible for their son’s death, was forgiven by the Indian family. And, perhaps, even the act of forgiveness was redundant for them and offered only because they knew of its necessity to heal. Hindus believe death is not a calamity, not even an ending, but part of a divine process of reincarnation. The soul of their son would recuperate, gather its resources and prepare for a new and higher path on its return to the earth. There was no need for grief, they said: their boy had the opportunity now for a new journey through life.
A question rebounds whenever I have cause to remember that time. Could I forgive? In a moment of unthinkable agony, would I have absolved that young man? If I could, then it’s only because of the remarkable example set by the Hindu Indian family. We were all elevated by their equanimity. As a consequence, the broken boy had a future, and a group of students experienced the lessons of a lifetime, not just in terms of the dangers of risk-taking, but the power of compassion and forgiveness.