Sorrow and Lamentation

Just as well we proceed into the future innocent of what life - or fate - has in store for us. Some may be fascinated with the potential for precognition, and seek the advice of those who claim as clairvoyants that they can read the future in palm lines or tea cups. Better, far better not to know.

And then dream and aspire and hope that what you wish for may be fulfilled. Work toward that fulfillment to the best of your abilities.

If people were able to imagine the very worst scenarios that could befall them they would live their lives in anticipation of grief and anguish yet to come, and many would submit to hopeless despair, ending with suicide.

A truly sad story has emerged of a family living in Montreal. Immigrants from Colombia. While living in Colombia the mother, whose husband was a good provider as a local businessman, was killed during a robbery.

The mother assumed responsibility for pursuing a livelihood for herself and her two young children, a boy and a girl, two and six respectively. Leaving her children temporarily with the parents of her dead husband while she went off on a brief business trip, she returned to discover that her six-year-old daughter had drowned in the family swimming pool.

The woman eventually left Colombia with her then five-year-old, thinking she would seek a new future elsewhere, far from where tragedy twice struck her. Her fresh start in life was her decision to emigrate to Canada, to work for the same high-tech company that employed her in Colombia.

In Montreal, attending an English-as-second-language class, she met another immigrant, from Kosovo. They married, and had a child together, a little girl. The son, by the time this story was told in the papers, was seventeen, and he would look after his 7-year-old sister, picking her up from elementary school after his school-day was over, until the appearance of his working parents.

And then, last week, the young man was crushed to death, under a municipal bus.

His step-father explained that when he met his future wife at language classes, "William was five years old. She told me then, and she told me every day, that William is the only reason she is alive." " Everyone loved him, he was my adored son and I came to Canada for him", said the grief-stricken mother. "It will be very difficult to continue."

William Quintero was a skateboarder. His mother believes her son held the skateboard under his arm, at the time he was hit by the bus. His step-father, mourning the death of his wife's son, his step-son whom he helped raise for the past dozen years, cannot believe that no one from the transit authority has contacted them.

"No one has called to say they are sorry or do you need any help. Someone should say they're sorry, we're human beings", he said. Everyone is sorry when something so utterly devastating like this occurs. The very heavens weep in sorrow and frustration.

What was lacking here was the dire need of one human being to reach out to another, to impress on those whose anguish is unassailable that others think of their living misery with compassion and sincere regret.