Remembering the three teens

Last Monday evening, my daughter was driving us home to Parkers Chapel when flashing lights and emergency vehicles blocked our path.
“Pull off and stop back from the other cars,” I directed. “I better drive for now. We’ll have to find another way home.”
As we switched places, a couple of teens sadly walked from the accident toward us. My daughter gasped, “I know that guy.”
As he plodded by, we stopped him and asked what had happened.
“Mandy Jones is gone and someone else.”
“She’s in my class, Mom,” disbelief marked her 14 year-old face. “Today she was talking about stuff like any other day.”
By Tuesday afternoon, she knew that Mike Davis was also gone and that John Beebe was badly hurt. She took down the school annual and found their pictures. “Mike Davis was in two of my classes. He was such a sweet guy.” She turned the pages, pointing out the pictures of Mandy and John.
I called my son, a freshman at SAU-Magnolia, to tell him what had happened.
“Mandy was in my drama class,” he said. “We were in FBLA and on the Business executive team. She went to the state science fair the first year I went.”
I mentioned that I understood they were going to town after practice.
“You know,” he reflected, “last year Mandy was always offering to take other kids places.”
As I talked with a friend about Monday night, she said, “John had that old fashioned courtesy. He carried my daughter’s heavy science exhibit in and out of both the regional and state science fairs.”
Tuesday afternoon, at the site of the accident, I noticed a teen-aged boy hunkered down by the side of the road. I thought he was sweeping up bits of glass. As I drew closer, I realized he was spray painting something on the road just outside the white line.
I slowed as I steered my way around him. Messages of love, good-byes and names of friends splashed across the asphalt in a rainbow of colors — graffiti on the road.
Until that afternoon, I had considered similar painted messages as senseless acts of disregard for property. But any event – accident or illness – that kills three people is a senseless act. The spray painted memorials were the students’ protest against that senselessness.
I am old enough to know that no amount of graffiti will change anything. Old enough to know that too often in life there simply is no time to go back and change things. But I will never be old enough to cease wanting to rage and scream against those times.
As the van zipped past “good bye, I’ll miss you” and the wreath standing vigil, the road blurred before me.
These teens were part of this community, students at Parkers Chapel School.
They were friends who will be missed by all who knew them. They touched lives through their too brief years in school, church and community activities. Their loved ones will miss them in a hundred thousand different ways.
Life will not be the same without them.