Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Wednesday by Wednesday, with one Friday thrown in for good measure, my grandsons and I enjoyed 11 long, leisurely summer days, strung together like pearls. Since I wasn’t planning to travel, this was my summer vacation. It needed to be good, and memorable, for them, for me.
We rode bikes, bowled, played multiple rounds of mini-golf, made two trips to Brookfield Zoo (got splashed at the dolphin show), two bike rides at Morton Arboretum, visited dinosaurs at the Field Museum, zipped down my first (probably last) water slides at Coral Cove in Carol Stream, and sandcastled at Lighthouse Beach in Evanston.
Best summer vacation ever.
Except for that one Wednesday …
On July 10, we took the Metra from Wheaton to Oak Park, switched to the Green Line, and ended up at the front steps of the Art Institute — which is closed on Wednesdays! I knew about Tuesday. Never occurred to me they’d be closed Wednesday too.
No matter, we’re resilient. We beamed at The Bean, had face time with the Face Fountain, and mini-golfed in Maggie Daley Park, then headed back on the Green Line and switched to the Metra.
We love the Metra, sitting up top, counting down the towns, station by station. But the trip back was the rush-hour express, Oak Park to Elmhurst uninterrupted. We were gliding along, lickety clip, when we heard something. Not just heard it. Felt it. Like something hit the train — which came to a stop. Bryce, who was following our progress on his smartphone app, Google 360, sounded the alarm for all to hear.
“We are nowhere near a train station!” he said, with dramatic flourish, somewhere between Bellwood and Berkeley. Commuters heading home seemed annoyed by the delay.
Then came the announcement over the speakers.
“We struck a pedestrian.”
A pall descended — except for the conductors and the engineer, who moved furiously back and forth between cars. The engineer (I think) stopped when he saw the boys and asked if they were OK. No one panicked — I told the boys the railroad folks were doing about as well as they could with a difficult situation.
But the boys were not OK. They asked me lots of questions. Did someone fall off a station platform? Was he trying to cross the tracks? Was he on the tracks? Why would he be on the tracks? And why didn’t the train stop in time? Was he hurt? Did he die? Was he thrown by the collision or did the train run him over? What happens now?
I had to make a quick pivot from Papa Ken to Papa Calm. As a journalist, I have experience to fall back on from similar incidents that our newspaper covered in Riverside and Brookfield.
I told them we didn’t know much at this point. The emergency responders, police and paramedics, had to get here so they could sort things out. These things don’t happen often, thankfully, but when they do, they have to be investigated, and they need to talk to the engineer.
“It wasn’t the engineer’s fault, was it?” they asked.
Probably not. These trains move too fast to stop in time. Unfortunately, when there’s a collision, the victim almost never survives. I felt bad for the person who was hit (and for the loved ones), the only consolation being that he probably died instantly and didn’t suffer. At least we hoped so. But I also felt bad for the engineer. That’s not an easy thing to go through.
We were sitting in the first car when it happened. We all heard the sound. The kind of sound that sticks with you. The sound of death suddenly becoming all too real. But wishing it away wasn’t going to work. I knew the boys were losing some innocence on this one, so they deserved the best answers I could muster. I thought back 45 years to my days driving a school bus, when an older driver died of a heart attack during his run. That night I wrote, “There’s not a paper’s thickness separating this side and that side of an ordinary day.” We didn’t just get close to death; we also got closer to life itself. You know it by its seriousness.
We had plenty of time to talk and our discussion inevitably led to deaths of despair. Sometimes people take their own lives and this is one of the ways they do it. It’s very sad, but it happens. If that’s what happened here, the person might have been on drugs or suffered from depression. But we didn’t know any of this for sure, and maybe never would.
Eventually, the substitute engineer arrived with a different train on a different track. We transferred and continued on. As we walked to our car near the Wheaton station, Tyler observed, “What you said made me feel better. It helped.” I told them they handled this difficult situation really well.
At the beginning of the summer, I told them we were going on an adventure.
They had no idea.
Neither did I.