This morning, a LA police officer was killed near my house. He and his partner were responding to a high priority call when their car was hit by a big rig that experienced brake failure on one of the steep roads in the Hollywood hills. That policeman died at the scene; his partner and the driver of the big rig were taken to the hospital with critical injuries. Both vehicles were in a residential neighborhood where the roads are steep. The probability of that police car being right in the path of an out-of-control 18-wheeler in the middle of a Beverly Hills neighborhood would have to be extremely low, but alas, it was high enough for it to actually happen.
I was sitting in the den of my home with daughter Liz at 8 am when we heard the sirens of the police cars, fire trucks and ambulances that responded to the accident. Ten minutes later, we heard more sirens as five police cars, an ambulance and two motorcycle cops came speeding back down the street in the opposite direction, clearly en route to the nearest hospital, Cedar Sinai. Though we didn’t know what had happened, we knew something had gone terribly wrong.
The deceased police officer was a 14-year veteran of the LAPD, was married and had two young daughters. He surely didn’t wake up this morning knowing that this would be the day of his death. I suspect he got up, did what he did every morning before work, and then headed over to the police station to start his usual shift. His partner, a rookie with less than a year on the force, surely didn’t know either that today would alter her life forever. I imagine she was going about work as usual, with no thought to her mortality. The same with the truck driver. Just a regular day driving the truck just like many other regular days except this day would include something beyond his control – brake failure – and that mechanical failure would produce fatal results.
We all know intellectually that any day of our lives could potentially be our last day. One out-of-control vehicle on the road can bring about our demise or even something much less dramatic, an accidental fall from a ladder, for example, can bring the same result.
We all live in fear of this happening not so much to ourselves (we would be dead, after all), but to someone we love. This often is the worse fate, living through the pain of losing someone who has been prematurely taken from this world. We all hope and pray this will not be something we have to face.
But it does happen, sometimes, all too often. And people, ill prepared as they may be, are forced to deal with terrible pain.
My heart goes out to the officer’s family: his parents, wife and children. The shock makes their loss more difficult since they had no way to steel themselves before receiving the news. The only good thing about losing someone to a terminal illness is that you often have had enough time to say good-bye. With an accident, there is no such opportunity.
So, hug your children, kiss your spouse, say “I love you” to those who are special to you as often as you can, and embrace every second of this life. None of us knows if this will be our last day. You might offer prayers up routinely, too, just for good measure.
May light perpetual shine upon Officer Nicholas Choung Lee, age 40, and may he rest in peace.
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