One explanation for the Valley’s tragic Good Friday

The woman left a phone message Monday morning saying she’d once seen former NFL football player Todd Heap out in public with one of his children. A boy, she said. “Such a big man and he seemed to be so loving,” she said. “My husband told me he was some famous footballer but he looked like a gentle giant to me. When I heard about the news, about him and his little girl, and her dying, it broke my heart. And on Good Friday! We ended up praying for his family at our Easter service, and also for the family of those girls killed in the car crash. Also on Good Friday. Can you imagine that? It has me all upset because stories like that are all over the news and there’s something you want to do and you know you can’t and at the same time you can’t imagine how those families will get through it. And you wonder … why? Don’t you? Just … why? And as I recall you’ve actually written about stuff like this once before. Is that so?”

It is. Not once, though. Over and over again.

A journalist learns early on that unspeakable tragedies are not unusual. And worse, that today’s unimaginable horror is superseded by tomorrow’s. And that tomorrow’s is overshadowed by the next day’s. And so on.

Last week, the former NFL player Todd Heap experienced a parent’s worst nightmare. He was behind the wheel of a truck, navigating the driveway of his Mesa home, when his 3-yearold daughter passed in front of the vehicle. He didn’t see her. The girl was struck and killed.

That same day, three young people died in a head-on, wrong-way collision along Interstate 17. The wrong-way driver, 21-year-old Keaton Tyler Allison, collided with the car carrying sisters Karli Richardson, 20, and Kelsey Richardson, 18. The young women were headed to the Grand Canyon to catch the sunrise.

I’ve known horrors like this before. I’ve written about horrors like this. And you’ve read about them.

Each time we feel the same things, say the same things, pray for the same things. And each time we wonder how such things could happen … again.

I’ve told the story over the years of how as a child in Catholic school we were made to pause and pray whenever the family of a classmate suffered a tragedy.

After one of these instances, a boy in class asked the nun who was our teacher why God allowed such things to happen. The good sister said she could not say for sure, but that she believed God allowed bad things to happen to remind the rest of us how good we have it.

Another boy in class pointed out that only a month or two earlier, we’d said the same prayers after learning that a relative of one of our other classmates had died in an accident.

“Why do we have to be reminded so much about how good we have it?” he wondered.

Without hesitating, the nun said, “Because we keep forgetting.”