For Whom the Bell Tolls

Off Newfoundland

An RCMP spokesperson said it would take investigators a long time to determine the cause of the crash that killed fifteen and injured the other fourteen on a bus near Tisdale. I’m not an investigator of accidents and shouldn’t even be speculating, but it’s one of the things we do when such horrible tragedies happen. That, along with the “our hearts and prayers are with you” condolences that seem so utterly inadequate, donations of money for victims’ families and reams of social and official news chatter that hovers somewhere between tearful and heartfelt empathy and crass “accident voyeurism.”

These are some of the ways we humans collectively mourn events as tragic to others as was the recent crash; nothing adequate—or even appropriate to the situation—presents itself. We do what we can and it never feels like enough. How shall we address this overwhelming sadness that comes over us and for which no relief but time is offered?

Even though we may not know any of the victims, it’s clear that where we feel ourselves to share community, we suffer. John Donne tried rather awkwardly to put this into words in No Man is an Island: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

There are those for whom the agony will feel almost unbearable, seem almost unending. They are those who will see in the chain of circumstances leading up to the disaster some action they might have taken that could have prevented it. It’s the “if only I had,” or “if only I hadn’t” guilty regret. I imagine the surviving semi driver in this light, or the parents who will always look back and ask themselves, “Why did we,” or “why didn’t we?” If we can’t share this burden with them, we can only hope that someone will.

Maybe the donations, the condolences, the prayers are mostly for us who hear the distant bell toll, who need to “do what we can” in the face of someone else’s unimaginable tragedy. I’ve been through the loss of a child tragically; what buoyed me most in the weeks after was the love of my personal, church and work families, and a colleague who would stop me in the hallway just to ask me how I was doing,

How can something that seems so little, be so everything?