Jessie Veeder: Tragedy connects us all

I didn't know the three teenage boys who lost their lives in a car accident near Ray, N.D., last month.

I didn't watch them play basketball together or cheer them on in the stands. I didn't wish them luck or shake their hands or meet their parents.

We weren't friends or even neighbors really. I didn't know them.

But when I heard the news - three teenage boys driving in a pickup hit an icy spot on a windswept North Dakota highway and didn't make it home - my hands went to my mouth and I gasped along with all of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents and friends across this state whose hearts sank at the thought.

A second before might have seen them home after all.

But they were a second too late.

Out here on these rural highways that connect us to big towns and small towns and friends who live miles and miles away, we're no strangers to the volatility of this wide-open space and the petrifying and hopeful concept of a child growing up.

The borders of our small towns have held us close and provided us confidence in the safety of the familiar thought that we will take care of one another, but those borders have never spread far enough to keep our children from looking beyond them.

As if we'd ever want them to anyway.

And those boys, those friends, those kids in a pickup on a highway heading home that night, well, I can only imagine the plans they were making.

I was once a kid in a car out here. I've hit the ditch, I've rolled off the interstate and I drove too fast on back roads with an unrealistic sense of invincibility all kids have as we grow up too slow for our own watch, and too fast for our parents.

Kids in cars. We read the news and we remembered the freedom of being a 17-year-old or the gut wrenching worry that comes with raising one.

And that's why we ache so much.

That's why, in moments like these, our community seems to get bigger and smaller at the same time.

And too many of us are transported to our own memories of a friend or a classmate we lost on a highway when we were too young to know such grief. We remember sitting on the bleachers of the high school gym, shoulder to shoulder with a silent crowd, an eerie juxtaposition from the buzz of energy and life that usually lives in a place like this. And we remember the droop in his mother's shoulders that day and wonder what he'd be doing now if he got to see 30, got a chance to fall in love and maybe have children of his own.

But we can only see him as forever 17.

And that's the biggest tragedy of a young life lost, not just the pain felt by the people they've left behind, but that there is so much left undone.

But in a small town, in this community connected by miles of back roads and highways, basketball games and the friendships and teammates made along the way, there's nothing anyone can do to bring those three boys back to this life.

But it seems they know they can bring casseroles. That same small town that couldn't hold on to those boys can hold on to one another.

So they make phone calls and buy T-shirts and pray if they're the praying kind and show up to honor their lives with the hope that their families might find a small comfort in their efforts to help them feel that that while their loss is unfathomable, they are not alone.

Because no, I didn't know those young boys who lost their lives on that icy, windy highway in the middle of a North Dakota winter, but in that ache I feel for their families, in that catching of my breath at the why, in the center of the sadness that grips the loss lies the realization that those boys, those young men right on the edge of their future, were just kids in cars.

Just kids in cars.

Just like us ...

Jessie Veeder is a musician and writer living with her husband on a ranch near Watford City, N.D. Readers can reach her at jessieveeder@gmail.com .