for myself.
Suddenly it started raining. And hailing.
I would have waited for the downpour to end except I remembered that I needed to check the backyard drain to make sure it was not clogged.
I braved the barely visible conditions and made it home in time to clear debris and prevent a possible flooding in our basement.
Unbeknownst to me, at that very moment-- a deadly flooding was happening two miles from my home.
A woman my age and her two daughters, close to the same ages as my two daughters-- were on their way home from lunching with their dad who works at the hospital behind my house. Yes, the same hospital where Steve works.
On their drive home they were caught in a flash flood that killed them.
I felt emotionally crippled when I learned about it.
As I read more about the woman, I found myself gripped with even more debilitating sadness.
That they described the woman as someone that would go sledding with her children, and that they had a trampoline in their backyard told me that they were an active family that quite possibly had known how to swim.
They must have been physically trapped in their car or perhaps panicked beyond inertia.
I shuddered at the thought that perhaps they did not all die at exactly the same moment.
A child seeing their mom drown would be such a horrible last moment but a mother seeing her child die would be, in my mind, a reason to not want to take a next breath.
That Friday afternoon, I decided to leave the covered parking lot of Target in order to clear our drain from muck while another family was going through an unspeakable sorrow.
Muck is nothing.
Perspective is everything.
X
