Accidents and Purpose

Almost everyone I know has at least one moment in their lives, usually seen only in retrospect, where things could have turned very bad very quickly. 

A few years back, my father tumbled down the stairs at his house, his body finally halting on the cold concrete floor of the basement, and had he landed just an inch one way or another, he would have died at the base of those wooden steps. A few years after that, my grandmother had a vessel in her leg burst, and had she not called my dad -- which she initially wasn't going to do, because she didn't "want to be a bother" -- she would have bled out in her own house that she had lived in all her life. My friend had his car stall out on the train tracks while an approaching train blew out a warning, and had he not got it rolling again in time, I'd likely be speaking of him in the past tense.

This year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I slid at a decent rate of speed on slushy roads into oncoming traffic on US-31, and had I not negotiated a slide into the middle turning lane in between a red pickup truck and a dirty white van, I would have been t-boned by the flow of unsuspecting traffic. When I was just out of my teens, I stepped down into a flooded basement, and had a wall outlet been at the level of the water, I would have been electrocuted on the spot. And just a few months before my 18th birthday, I took a rain-soaked curve too fast in my father's car and plowed it into a tree. My thought just before impact was that my dad was going to kill me, but neither the car nor my father managed to take me out that day.

My wife’s nephew – and therefore my nephew, my only nephew so far – is named Hudson, and like me, he was the first-born grandchild, as well as the first male grandchild (if that means anything outside of a medieval fiefdom). As a kid, Hudson was smaller than average, but his personality and energy more than made up for it. When he found out that I taught his mom and dad when they were younger -- that his Almighty Parents were also, at one point, actual people like him -- he wanted as many stories as I could tell. He loved the basketball player Russell Westbrook, and he taught himself to play the piano instead of waiting for a teacher to show him the way. 

And it wasn't just us that liked him; his TikTok account – officialhudsonkane -- has 133.5K followers and 2.9M likes. He was liked and he was loved and like me, at the age of 17 and change, he was driving too fast and had a car accident. But unlike me, as life sometimes is the shittiest game of inches, Hudson's accident was severe and unforgiving, and while he survived, no one knows when or if the Hudson we know and love will ever return. So we wait and reflect and hope for hope, and we think about better moments.

I see Hudson smiling and joking and shooting baskets and throwing baseballs. I see Hudson in the driveway of our new home, giving me a hug goodbye as he and his family piled back into the car after the quickest of COVID visits. I see Hudson, quiet and still, sleeping with our dog Wyatt on the couch of our old house in Gaylord. I see Hudson on the soccer field, aggressive and frustrated and joyful, and just a bit faster than the other kids expected him to be.

I can feel him in my heart, then and now and forever, and I wish that he would have made it through his moments unharmed, on his way to being the person that everyone knew he could be. Knowing Hudson, the singular miracle that he is, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he woke up, with manners intact, to apologize to everyone for making them worry. But until that moment comes, I'll have to sit with my moments with Hudson to pass the time, always wishing for more, but thankful for what I have.