Commanders Post at The Warpath - "Sean's Gone"

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"Sean's Gone" - Echo '08

[I][CENTER]This was written the day Sean Taylor died.
For the past few days I have searched for the
right words to say one year later ... and found none.

The raw immediacy may have passed,
but the emotional echoes remain.

Rather than grasping for new words, then,
removed as they must be from the truth of the moment,
I humbly offer here the words that poured out,
almost unbidden, on that cold, rainy day.

We have not forgotten.

***[/CENTER]
[/I]

[B]"Sean's Gone"[/B]
[I]11/27/07[/I]

It’s not a long drive to my son’s high school, maybe 15 minutes.

Most mornings, we share sleepy wise cracks—which of us looks worse, whose day projects out the bigger pain, the lameness of a certain radio commercial.

Sometimes we talk daily routine—remembering to turn in an order form, calling if he needs to be picked up, the logistics of an upcoming outing with friends.

Sometimes we talk a little sports—Redskins, mostly.

Once in a while, as events dictate, we talk real life—there will be other girls, they just discovered an Earth-like planet 20 light-years away, it’s junior year partner, these grades count.

Tuesday morning, we rode in silence.

He’d had a strange look on his face as he came down the hall from the living room, where the morning news was playing, when we readied to leave the house. His voice had a flatness to it when he spoke.

“Sean’s gone.”

I wasn’t fully awake—I didn’t understand. Then I saw the look in his eyes, the awful news story I had fallen asleep thinking about came flooding back and I understood only too well. I don’t remember now if it was raining as we headed out into the dark, but it always will be in my memory.

As we were pulling out into the road a minute later, a voice on the car radio confirmed the reality.

“Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor died this morning from a gunshot wound suffered in his home …”

We drove in silence, staring straight ahead.

I don’t really know if the time it took to get to the school took forever, or if it flashed by in an instant. Time has a strange quality to it in times of stress. What I do recall is the unsettling jumble of disjointed thoughts, feelings and impressions.

I remember thinking I should “say something.” My boy’s favorite athlete—in his eyes one of those larger-than-life figures we all hold up to the light that help form our young selves—had just been senselessly shot down in the prime of his life. I should be a rock. Paternal. Wise.

I thought I shouldn’t let him see me cry. A father teaches his son that men are steady in a storm. And then I thought I absolutely should let him see me cry. A father should teach his son there is not shame, but honor, in sharing his humanity.

I felt the onset of fury, the urge to say something—do something—about this insanity. About yet another needless violent death, about yet another fatherless child.

I felt the wearying, familiar heaviness in my chest, as just the latest in an endless parade of man’s-inhumanity-to-man headlines unfolded around me. They say one grows colder, harder inside as one gets older. That has not been my experience.

I thought about the burgundy “21” jersey hanging in my son’s closet … and how when we watch the games together, we always exchange—exchanged—knowing grins when a Redskin flashed into the screen to blow up an opposing runner, or an opposing receiver inexplicably short-armed a promising ball.

“Taylor.”

I tried to push away thoughts about the on-field impact this would have on my favorite football team, and wished I was the kind of man who didn’t have to remind himself there will be a time for that, and this was not it ...

[I][URL="http://www.theomfield.com/2008/11/seans-gone-echo-08.html"][B]CLICK HERE[/B][/URL] to read more[/I]

[CENTER][IMG]http://www.thenoosphere.com/Om/21.jpg[/IMG][/CENTER]