Milieu online: One Willard Avenue

“Houghton's worst day ever,” is what Professor of Christian Ministries Mike Walters ’86 recently called October 2, 1981. On that day, Beth Andes ’82, Mark Anderson ’82, Al Bushart ’82, Joy Ellis ’82, Burt Rapp ’82 and Cindy Rudes ’82 were on their way to pick up costumes for the Homecoming parade when they pulled out of a dangerous intersection and into the path of a tractor-trailer. The young women were the chosen representatives to the Homecoming court; the young men their escorts. None survived the crash.

We discovered that day that the world was a dark and dangerous place and that God didn’t seem to be watching out for us in quite the way we’d always imagined. Those dark days in the fall of 1981 made us think often of Sen. Daniel Moynihan’s observation after the assassination of President Kennedy: “Yes, we’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

In the days (and years) that followed, we have tried to make sense of the senseless. Historians tell us that 25 years represents a generation, and we have lived this. As we have become parents and watched our own children grow and even enter college, we feel the pain of the six families ever more acutely.

We always thought that by this time we would be much wiser, and would have come to terms with the accident. Instead, we have more questions than answers to life’s big questions; we find ourselves less sure. We still don't know why they are gone. Couldn’t God have prevented the accident? Wouldn’t He want to?

There are, however, subtle changes in our reflections on what we know simply as “the accident.” We find ourselves musing, sometimes, what it would have been like to slip into heaven early. Our six friends never had to face September 11; the illnesses and pains of aging; the pressures associated with career, finances and marriage; or the other trials that life has etched into our faces. What would it have been like to remain forever 20?

We have few answers, but of this we are certain: the same loving arms that received our friends will one day embrace us as well. Their deaths remind us that it could be a generation from now, or it could be tomorrow. We are not made for this earth, but for eternity. And we have this final hope, made certain by our Lord, Jesus Christ: the sadness that we have over the loss of our friends will fall away, replaced with joy, at our Homecoming reunion in the glorious world that is to come.—Tim Nichols ’81 and Doug Roorbach ’81

Milieu welcomes readers' comments.—Ed.