Teen's death senseless

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Grief counselors came to Kerri Sullivan's school this week. Nearly a dozen adults, trained to listen, comfort and affirm, appeared at West Bridgewater Middle-Senior High School to help kids just beginning to live their lives deal with the sudden death of one of their own.

Kerri, 13, died Monday morning on her way home from basketball practice. She was a passenger in a mini-van driven by her best friend's mother. The van skidded in snow and hit a tree. Kerri, who had unbuckled her seat belt seconds before to let another girl out of the van, was hurled forward and killed. "She had her seat belt on the whole time. When they dropped the girl off, she went to switch seats. It was that split second," her aunt, Shirley Sullivan, said.

The snow, according to Lt. Raymond Rogers, was a freak squall: "It snowed on one side of town fast and furious for about 20 minutes."

What words did the grief counselors use to explain this "split second" and this "freak squall?" What words are there to explain the inexplicable?

Thirteen-year-old girls aren't supposed to die on their way home. Certainly not when they're in a mini-van, with an adult driver on a familiar street.

A grief counselor's job is to assure mourners that grief is natural, that sadness and numbness and a feeling of unreality are all part of the grieving process. And that anger and guilt are, too, and the need to talk and tell the same story again and again.

And the need to not talk, to just sit and cry.

Wes Newton, an older man who volunteers at New England Sinai Hospital in Stoughton, who deals with tragic circumstances every day and who knows firsthand how it feels to bury a child, was fighting tears as he talked about Kerri Sullivan Tuesday.

"She went to my church. She was a great girl. A good, happy, beautiful girl from a good, happy, beautiful family."

Inexplicable to him, too, the death of this child.

Kerri's death is one more in a too-long line of recent tragedies. In Rockland, a florist was backing her van out of her driveway when an alleged drunk driver rammed into her. She's fighting for her life. In Randolph, a man was run down and killed while crossing the street. In Revere, a man was struck and killed while walking to his girlfriend's house.

Their friends are stunned, too. Their relatives grieve. Everyone's pain is personal and raw, and there's more than enough of it in this world.

But there is joy, too. So much that you get accustomed to it. A day dawning, the shower turning on, footsteps, "Where's my . . .?" the scramble for breakfast, books, goodbye, then out the door, everyone going somewhere - to work, to school. Parents and kids, living their lives, laughing, arguing and often thanking God, hoping it won't end. And then it does suddenly, irrevocably, on a Monday morning on an icy road.

Kerri played the flute, and hockey, soccer, basketball and softball. She was a straight-A student. She was the youngest of three. And she was beautiful. "For lack of a better word, she was perfect," a classmate told a reporter.

Kerri was an acolyte at Trinity Episcopal Church in Stoughton. She heard as we've all heard, that we are children of God, not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a HUMANexperience.

Still, it is impossible to understand the death of a good and blameless child, taken too soon.