I started a snowflake-fluffy blog entry yesterday, full of mirth and merriment in relation to the upcoming smorgasbord of decadent December desserts.

The deliciously delightful dish was interrupted by a fatal accide collision between a cyclist and truck.

The third pedestrian versus vehicle crash I’ve attended since Nov. 25; the second fatal.

I’ll be honest – I’m furious and frustrated.

I don’t pretend that my job doesn’t include covering emotionally challenging events, whether it’s a memorial service or a fatal collision, house fire or what have you.

Bad news will always be there to balance out the good.

Lately it feels like chaos and grief is the only dish being served up at my newsroom buffet.

I try to find the nugget of beauty in the saddest event but yesterday I just couldn’t.

How do you filter the image of a young girl lying on the road as paramedics attend to her or the bent cane lying askew against the glittery asphalt surface?

Or staring down the hill at a mangled bicycle, the crushed hood of a pick-up truck and a crumpled yellow tarp.

You don’t, not really.

My heart races – it pounds in my ears drowning out my surroundings, yet heightening my senses simultaneously.

Despite my boots, I can feel the slickness of the grass underfoot, the give of soil under my weight as I Billy-goat down the incline to the sidewalk.

Lifting my camera, heavy and solid in my hands, is not enough to stop the slight tremor as I line up the shot. It shields me, briefly, from the horrific reality I am documenting. Moments engraved on my subconscious.

Click, click, click.

Then I’m scrambling up the hill, images in hand.

I don’t need to look, I don’t want to. I know what’s there.

The gawkers lining the grassy knoll crane their necks to see what I desperately wish to avoid.

Yet we journalist will be judged as vultures, preying on the misfortune of others, in an attempt to raise public awareness.

Forced to attend these incidents because it’s our job, not because we are curious.

I leave the scene feeling weighted down at the senseless waste of it all. Unable to fathom how two fatalities occurred on the same road, mere kilometres and days between them.

I consciously observe the patterns of drivers and pedestrians and cyclists around me that afternoon.

I pass a woman standing on the yellow line on Wellington Street, glaring at passing motorists because no one is stopping to let her pass – she’s 20 feet from a lighted intersection.

A cyclist travelling beside me on Third Street arrives at King Street and pulls a hard left across the walkway in front of a stopped car to proceed – one assumes – as a wheeled pedestrian on to the sidewalk, swooping and weaving between those walking. Sure, King Street had the right of way, but he was on Third Street; we had the red light.

By the end of the day, my heart is heavy because I fear until people start paying more attention to what they are doing when driving, cycling, inline skating or walking, this month could produce more devastating moments for me to capture.

More moments for first responders, police officers and victim services personnel who help the victims, console the families and try to make sense of what happened.

Moments that irrevocably change the lives of those involved – whether the victims or otherwise – change their families, alter how they perceive this time of year forever.

More moments that will come back with vivid Technicolor – an unwanted gift – when I see a child turn too quickly to run back across the road to give a classmate a forgotten item after school.

Because even if the way is clear, I know that the mind of a motorist might not be.

And I don’t want to have that image in my head again; I’ve seen it too many times already.

There are few accidents in this world, just poor decisions.

Perhaps our gift to society this month and the months to come could be attention.

Give your full attention to what you are doing – whether it’s spending time with your family and friends, driving in your car, walking across the road or appreciating that you are, in this moment, alive and able to make a difference.

photo@chathamdailynews.ca

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