It's been a long week over in the neighborhood where I grew up and where my parents lived for most of my life. A childhood friend called me on my birthday Saturday to deliver devastating news. He knows I don't have a television and figured I hadn't been online that morning to read the local newspaper headlines, either.
After informing me that I'd lived a whopping 16, 425 days -- not including leap years -- he said he had some bad news.
"You mean the fact that I've lived 16 thousand some-odd days isn't the bad news?" I asked, jokingly.
The silence on the other end of the line shut me up before I could say anything else.
"The LaCroixs' house exploded last night," he said.
Betty and Collins LaCroix had lived in our old neighborhood since before I was born. I grew up knowing their youngest daughter and they never failed to buy Girl Scout cookies from me all the years I was a Brownie and then a Junior Girl Scout. They were nice people, pleasant, tidy. They had five children and many years later they lost a young grandson in a handgun tragedy.
These past several years, the now-elderly couple had been watched over faithfully by the folks I like to call my second family -- a couple whose last name is the same as my maiden name and whose children and I grew up together. They still call me their "middle child" because I was always down at their house to play, eat, sleep over, and even travel with them. Their four kids were the brothers and sisters I never had, and I still love and keep up with them all. My childhood memories of time spent with Jim and Sandra Evans are some of my sweetest, so it was with dread that I asked my friend if his own parents were okay.
He said they were, but their house sustained pretty severe damage from the blast next door. One of his sisters, who lives on the other side of the exploded house with her husband and two children, also had damage to her house but it is not nearly as bad.
The worst part, he said, was that Mrs. LaCroix was killed in the fire. Her husband was taken to the hospital with burns over much of his body. No one yet knows the cause of the explosion.
I talked with both of my friend's sisters over the next 48 hours, trying to understand what had happened, trying to make sense of such a sudden and tragic loss, and pondering the mystery of why my second family was spared.
Arms of fire reached in to Jim and Sandra's house, but were sucked back out again. Sandra was sitting on her living room sofa when she heard the explosion and looked up to see fire coming towards her. She says it sounded like the end of the world.
In hindsight, I think the end of the world -- at least a big part of my world -- would have come if Jim and Sandra Evans and their daughter and her family had also been taken out by the blast. Firefighters say it's a wonder they all survived.
It will take several months for Jim and Sandra's home to be restored to a livable condition. I have no way to know how long it will take their hearts to heal. They have stared down their own mortality and, in the process, they have lost a friend.
Meanwhile, if you read this, say a brief prayer of peace for the family of Betty and Collins LaCroix. Trust me when I say they are well-deserving of your time.
To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the LORD has planted for his own glory. (Isaiah 61:3, NLT)
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