Losing Mike Hardy

I saw Catherine Hardy in the grocery store yesterday with her 18-month-old grandson.

Eight years ago, my son came home from school and told me that his classmate Mike Hardy had died over the weekend. The Hardy family had gone out of town to a sports event. They had taken two cars. Catherine and her husband were in one car with their 16-year old son Paul. Their 18-year-old, Peter, drove the other car with Mike beside him in the passenger seat. On the way home Peter fell asleep at the wheel. While Catherine and her husband watched helplessly from their car behind Peter’s, he drove down a gully and hit a tree. Mike was killed, despite the fact that he was wearing a seatbelt. He died in Catherine’s arms. He was 13 years old.

I was not friends with the Hardys. We were acquaintances. We saw each other at school events. My daughter was in Paul’s class, my son in Mike’s, at a small country school with only 180 students. My heart went out to the family, but I was not close enough to them to do or say anything to help them through the difficult days and weeks that followed their loss. I sent a card. Whenever I saw Catherine, I stopped to talk to her, asked how she was, asked about her two remaining sons. We never once mentioned Mike’s name. She always asked about my children.

I found it hard to believe that Catherine picked herself up and continued with her everyday life after losing Mike. I thought that if it had been me, if I had lost my son, I would have curled up in bed and not left the house for a year or more. I would not have had the heart to face the world after such a tragedy. It amazed me to see Catherine out and about, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened.

Since Mike’s death, I have experienced the death of several people very close to me, including the death of my mother. I have supported and comforted one of my dearest women friends for the past five years after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack and left her widowed with two teenaged daughters still at home to finish raising. I have a different perspective and I understand how Catherine returned to the world, however difficult it must have been for her.

She had two sons remaining, and the oldest was suffering deep guilt and trauma for causing the accident that killed Mike. She needed to be strong, she needed to be present for those boys and her whole family. She had a ranch to run, with vineyards and livestock, that was the family’s livelihood. She could not afford the luxury of cracking up, wallowing in self-pity, or curling into bed for a year. She had to pick herself up and go back at it, day after day. It must have taken phenomenal courage and strength for her to return to her everyday life and to help her family cross the bridge of their loss. I shudder to think what it must have cost her to ask me about my son when we ran into each other at the store or a school event. My son alive and well, the same age as Mike would have been.

Yesterday, I saw her in the grocery store with her grandson Adam, Peter’s son. Adam sat in the shopping cart seat and stared at me with big blue eyes as Grandma filled me in on the latest news about her boys. I knew that Paul’s wife had a baby girl two years ago so I asked about the granddaughter. Catherine had spent the day looking after both of her grandchildren. She told me about the fun they had on her ranch. Now she and Adam were at the store picking up a few things to make for dinner.

“Can you shake hands?” Catherine asked her baby boy. “Uncle Paul taught him to shake,” she informed me proudly, stroking the downy blonde hair on the top of Adam’s head.

Adam offered me a plump, firm little hand, and we shook.