beautiful/deadly

There was a pretty treacherous ice storm here this past weekend, and as a result of the icy conditions a former student of mine was killed in an automobile accident. He sat in my classroom for a full year as a freshman, doing very little other than smiling and reassuring me that one of these days he'd get his act together and pass a class. I didn't keep track of him after he left my room, but he had apparently made good on his promise. He left the traditional high school and was making strides in the alternative school, earning credit and preparing to get his diploma in the spring. Perhaps he wasn't going to be a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor, but he was kind and good and was going to be something. Instead, his funeral was today and I suppose I should have attended but I'm sorry, I just can't bring myself to see an seventeen-year-old kid - someone who may not have been a very good student but who was more than his report card or his discipline record, and who certainly deserved a hell of a lot more than to be plowed down in the middle of a dark, ice-coated country road while he was on the way to comfort a friend - now lying dead in a suit he probably would have never worn otherwise.

I thought about these things as I was driving home today, and as I passed the same roads he traveled - trees and signs and houses still encased in a thick layer of ice - the sun began to peak through. It illuminated the frozen landscape and made the entire scene explode with the purest, most beautiful, crystalline light. It struck me how something so absurdly beautiful could also be so deadly, having ended one life and ruined another. But there can still be beauty I suppose, even in the most treacherous things.