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15. One of the most repeated messages about life’s journey has to do with young people believing they are immortal. Maybe it is repeated so often because there is so much truth to it. I was living from one event to the next. My friends and I rarely spoke of death and, though I am sure it crossed many of our minds, it was not something that occupied much of our thinking—at least not mine. The deaths of Don Jr. and my grandfather had confronted me with this reality and created some wonder and sorrow, but somehow I managed not to take their deaths personally. They were the ones who had died; their lives were the ones that had ended, not mine. I still managed to keep death at a distance and to see it as other people ’s fate, not mine. This was about to change. One weekend, shortly after the Brazilian land scheme was abandoned, James and some of his friends planned a camping trip. He asked if I wanted to go, but I had already made other Saturday plans. In any case, camping trips were an ordinary weekend event. I could go another time. This trip, however, proved to be far from ordinary. On Sunday night the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear a voice saying, “James has been killed.” I wasn’t sure I heard it right. Surely there was some mistake. That simply could not happen. I had just spoken with him before the weekend. “What?” I asked. “What did you say?” To this day I cannot recall whose voice it was, but the caller repeated the message, “James has been killed in a car wreck.” It was as if I had been removed to another planet, and the words did not convey reality. They didn’t fit my world. None of this was possible. 245 I ran out the door and drove to James’s house on the most difficult trip I could remember. He was an only child. His mother had died years ago, and he had been raised by his father. He was his father’s life. All of James’s achievements, social and athletic, were chronicled in that little house with trophies and pictures. I’m sure I had never seen a sadder man. He ushered me into his small, dark living room where I stood silently and awkwardly with some others who were groping for what to say. He sat and sobbed, his body lifeless, weighted with a grief as old as the ages and deeper than words could reach. I, too, was in such shock that I don’t even remember what I said or how long I stayed. Someone, standing in a small group, was chronicling the tragedy in whispered tones. He said James had been sitting in the middle of the back seat, asleep, as the camping entourage returned to Fort Worth. On old Highway 377, near Benbrook, the driver swerved, hit an oncoming car, and James was catapulted out of the back seat. He landed on pavement almost a hundred feet from the accident and was killed instantly. The other occupants of the car had been spared serious injury and were baffled at why James, in the middle of the back seat, had been thrown from the car. So was I. I could not rest until I went to the accident site to see for myself. There, smeared into the pavement, skid marks, glass, and dark grease stains marked the horrifying moments before impact and the spot of the disaster. One of James’ fellow campers walked me down the shoulder of the highway and showed me where his body landed. I could not believe the distance. He had to have been fired like a human missile . Cars sped by on the highway. Life went on. But, standing along that roadside, I sensed that mine would never again be quite the same. James’s voice, his laugh, his face, were to be forever frozen in time. The funeral was huge. His classmates and friends came from everywhere. I walked by the casket and had trouble comprehending that he and I were the same age and that his life was already over. “Crazy little mama,” he had sung, laughing his way through most of b e f o r e t e x a s c h a n g e d 246 [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 14...

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