Father and Son

He was holding the body in his arms when I pulled up, cradling the boy as if he were an infant and not a strapping fifteen-year-old. He was a big, rough-looking man, dressed in a worn Carhartt jacket and faded jeans. After all, this was farm country, his heavy work boots clogged with mud. They sat together in the middle of the roadway, the boy’s ruined ATV upside down nearby amid the scattered debris. The car that had hit him as he rode across the span of the road dividing the two cornfields was pulled over just up the road, its windshield smashed and indented from the impact. The driver, a teenaged boy himself, sat on the shoulder of the road, his head down, motionless. I watched as the man sobbed, holding his son’s head in one calloused hand while the other, clenched in a fist, beat the asphalt, the pounding sounding like a muted drum. Two of my officers, both parents, stood a few feet away, openly weeping. Neighbors looked on in silent agony as a local TV news crew, seemingly indifferent to the suffering playing out before them, hurriedly set up and began recording. 

Gathering all of the self-control I could muster, I hurried over to the reporters and asked them to move back and out of the debris field, painfully aware that they were entitled to continue recording, if only from a safer distance. I frequently encountered resistance from the media at scenes such as these, and their presence often felt like an additional burden under already challenging circumstances. After some initial resistance, they relented and moved back past my patrol car and the two others that had arrived. I asked the officers to secure the accident scene with the yellow crime scene tape found in the trunk of every patrol car and then steeled myself to the difficult task of separating a father from the body of his newly dead son.

I approached him with some caution, aware as always of how volatile people under stress can become, particularly when the death of a child is involved. I knelt beside the man on the street, eventually making eye contact with him. “I need for you to come with me,” I said, as gently as I could, my hand lightly resting on his shoulder. He stared at me for a long moment, then slowly lowered his son’s body to the blacktop, his hand resting for briefly on the boy’s forehead, before rising to his feet. We walked together to my patrol car outside of the newly hung yellow tape, where I sat with the man as he continued to weep for his dead son. He told me tearfully how he’d heard of the accident from a neighbor, then rushed to the scene, just down the road from their farmhouse. Minutes later, he had arrived, where he’d been confronted with every parent’s worst nightmare. Moving my car further away from the accident, I asked my officers to cover the body with one of the shock blankets we carried, which often served double duty for this sad purpose. 

Knowing that it would be hours before the scene was cleared and the boy’s body removed, I offered to take the man back to his house, assuring him that his son would not lie in the street longer than absolutely necessary and that he would have a chance to see him again. He agreed, and we began the short drive back to the man’s house. As we pulled up to the long driveway, he begged me to break the terrible news to the boy’s mother, who stood with a small group of family members huddled by the front porch. I assured him that I would, but I realized it would not be necessary as we exited the car. Upon seeing her husband’s face as we walked towards her, she fell to her knees and began to weep, the awful news etched plainly for her to see on both of our faces. She pleaded to go see her son, and his father looked at me beseechingly, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Taking her hands, I told her that she would have time to be with him later after the medical examiner had released her son’s body. She turned away and fell into the arms of her husband, inconsolable. 

 I stayed with them there for a few more minutes, answering the myriad of questions parents and loved ones inevitably have when confronted with such a sudden loss. I thought of the drive they would take to the medical examiner’s office, where they would formally identify the body of their firstborn child, not yet a man, now forever a boy. I thought about the many trips they would take from then on, to the funeral home, the cemetery, and the countless drives after that up and down this road where their son lost his life, just steps from their own front door. I wondered, as I often did after working awful scenes such as this one, just how anyone can possibly go one living in the face of such incomprehensible tragedy. Yet people do. Over and over, people persevere despite unutterably heavy burdens. 

When this accident occurred, I was not yet a father and could only speculate on the enormity of the loss of a child. My own son is 15 now, and when I look at him, I see the boundless energy and limitless potential of youth. He almost seems immortal to me at times, and I know that he feels this way, as nearly all young men seem to do. But I know the truth. Tomorrow is promised to no one, and youth is no guarantee of continuing life. Each day I rejoice in his energy, and I remind myself as often as I can that my time with him is a gift, as it is with all of those that I love.