Hear the Bell?

One day early this week when I was on my way to work, I encountered an unexpected obstacle to my normally easy commute.  My regular exit off US Highway 65 in Springfield was backed up, making getting onto Chestnut Expressway from the south slow and difficult.  I decide to take a side road south to Cherry Street, where I found the reason for the traffic snarl. A train was stopped on the tracks at the Cherry Street crossing, meaning that it was also blocking traffic flow on Chestnut.

I was of course annoyed by this unexpected hindrance, and my immediate concern was how it affected me.  I had to find a way to work.   I tuned into the local traffic report and heard that a pedestrian had been hit by the train and killed at the crossing on Pythian Street north of Chestnut. This disturbing news immediately raised lots of questions. Who was the victim? What was that person doing on the track?  Was it an accident, or maybe suicide by train?

Hearing that news made me feel a little ashamed that my first concern had been how the snarl-up impacted me.  I hadn't really considered that someone might be injured or even dead.  Now I was struck by the thought that some unidentified fellow human had met with a violent death, and as a result hundreds of my fellow commuters and I were having a different kind of morning drive than we had expected.

Later at work, everyone was talking about the traffic issues and the news that someone had been killed by a train.  One person said that the victim should have been able to hear the train and get out of the way if they wanted to.  That reminded me of  a story about my great-grandfather, who was also killed by a train.

A couple of years ago, I met my second cousin Paula Baird from Texas. Paula is a genealogist, and her mother Shirley and my mother are first cousins. Paula and her mom came to visit us at Mom's house in Oklahoma. Paula and I share a set of great-grandparents, James and Martha Lake, who were the grandparents of our mothers. As we were visiting, we discovered that we both knew the same story of how Jim Lake died.  Great-grandpa Lake had a habit of walking home from town on the railroad tracks.  Since he was deaf, this proved to be a very bad habit, because in 1927, when he was 70 years old, he was struck and killed by a train he did not hear as he was walking on the tracks.  When I learned that Paula also knew this story, that it was also part of her family culture, that she had heard it from her parents and grandparents the same as I had, I felt a connection with her that I might not have otherwise felt.  It became clear to me that besides being cousins, we were connected in ways that might not be immediately apparent.

In a previous blog, I wrote about how my grandsons are connected in unexpected ways to my dad, whom they never knew.  When I learned about the fatality on the tracks in Springfield this week, I again felt a strange sense of being connected with other people in mysterious ways. What was the victim's story?  How did he come to die this way?  Might I someday face a similar death? Because someone we did not know died in a horrible way, my fellow commuters and I were faced with not only traffic challenges, but yet another reminder that, although the details of our lives may be very different from others' experiences, ultimately we all share our humanity and we all share our mortality.

In his John Donne's famous "No Man is an Island,"  the poet expresses this bond we share in life and the idea that when one of us dies, all of humanity is reduced.  When the funeral bell rings, it rings for all of us.