Yesterday morning, a senior at our high school stood in front of an oncoming train and died. He was 18.  I can’t stop thinking about his mother.

When my son was an infant, I used to sit in the rocking chair in his room and hold onto him long after he’d finished those 2am feedings.  I would hold his small small hand and think about how vast the world was, and about all the mean cold nasty things out there that could hurt him.  I used to weep over my baby boy and pray that God would protect him from all the horrible things that could happen to a small person in a big world.

Partly, I was hormonal.  Obviously.  Also partly I felt guilty — I absolutely positively hated beyond words and imagining being pregnant and I could not for the life of me understand how I would ever ever ever turn into someone’s mother.  Besides physically, I mean, and frankly, I had a bit of a hard time with that too. (HOW big is his head?)

I would sit with him and think about all the sad stories I’d ever heard about other people’s children dying young.  When I was pregnant there was a story in the newspaper about a six year old boy who was running for the school bus and fell, Superman style.  He had a small cut on his chin. He died the next day, because of some one-in-five-billion freak thing that can happen to your brain when you fall and hit your chin just right.  Before I ever even thought of having children, I had a colleague whose son had leukemia, which went into remission but returned when he was about 10. I went to the funeral and cried so much that I threw up.

My mother used to tell a story about her aunt who had two sons, or maybe three.  One died of something like a flu outbreak. The other got a job in one of the steel plants that operated in and around Buffalo.  It was the Depression; getting a job anywhere was a miracle.  His father, my mother’s uncle, worked at the plant too and helped him get the job.  He hadn’t been there very long when he was operating some kind of truck or cart that caught on fire; he couldn’t get off and he burned to death. My mother’s uncle was there in the yard when the fire started and watched his son die.  My mother always said that her aunt was never the same after that.

I held my baby and I cried about death by fire and cancer and freak accidents.  I cried about all the things that had hurt me when I was growing up — falling off bikes, burning my hand on the stove, the friends who turned mean for no reason and the boys that never liked me as much as I liked them. I cried about all the things I would do to keep my baby from harm — leap off buildings, run into fires, donate a kidney, starve to death, freeze to death….I cried about all the things that would hurt my son and all the things I could not protect him from.

My son is not a baby any more, and he is no longer small. He drives a car, wears a suit on special occasions and speaks in a deep voice. It isn’t hard to forget that the world is still very big and very cold.

I can’t stop thinking about that boy’s mother.  I think about all the bad things I imagined might happen to my son when I cried over him when he was a baby.  I think about saying, as mothers  everywhere must always say, that I would step in front of a speeding train for my children.  I am positive that the young man who died has a mother who would happily have thrown herself on the tracks to keep her boy safe. (And a father too, of course). But what is there to say if the thing that happens to your baby boy is worse than anything you ever imagined?  What do you throw yourself in front of when he goes and stands in front of the speeding train all by himself?  What is there to cry about then?

For Eamonn Wholley, I pray that God will give his restless soul a final rest. For Eamonn Wholley’s mother, I pray that whatever avenging God who would take her son from her this way will also have the mercy to grant her, and her husband and family, the strength and the grace to continue to live their lives without Eamonn in this cold and awful world.