This Death’s Sting Is About Forgiveness

It’s the nature of the beast that we in the news business can seem indifferent to life’s tragedies. We cover so many of them, all the while telling ourselves to be dispassionate, that others may conclude we aren’t touched by the suffering. Worse is the suspicion that we care about tragedy only as the proverbial “good story.”

For the most part, it’s a bad rap. But it’s probably true that we build up more immunity to misfortune than is good for one’s soul.

Not so this past Friday as the week wound down against the usual backdrop. Good news, bad news--it all went into the maw that we accept as the human condition.

Late in the day, however, I ran into an editor in the cafeteria who had come out of the afternoon news meeting. She asked if I’d seen the story on “the 15-year-old.” That’s the one that people in the meeting were talking about, she said.

It was on their minds not just as journalists, she said, but as parents, as spouses, as friends.

The story was about a 15-year-old boy killed by a hit-and-run driver as he walked along Pacific Coast Highway.

A tragedy, to be sure. But what sobered the people at the meeting, the editor said, was that the mother had told police she and her son had argued just before he took off on his final and fatal walk. The boy’s last moments were spent walking at 1:30 in the morning on a lonely highway, probably listening to music on his headphones.

Everyone who has ever argued with a friend or relative, only to have that person hang up the phone or leave in a fit of anger or resentment, mourns for both mother and son. Who among us hasn’t cast someone out of our sight, either literally or figuratively, all the while knowing we’d make up later?

We’re all human. We all do it.

We fight, we forgive, we love. It is the natural order of things.

But as the story about the 15-year-old brought home with all too much reality, sometimes the order gets cockeyed. Sometimes things go horribly wrong before we get a chance to forgive and love again.

Lai Phan, a 56-year-old mother with an only son living at home with her in Newport Beach, now faces that reality. She and her son, Samsun, had argued Wednesday night about his spending too much time on the computer. They’d had the argument before, just as millions of parents and children do every day on every topic from A to Z.

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To let off steam, Samsun left the house around 11 p.m. for a walk that, instead of taking him on his usual course through the neighborhood, wound up on a dark stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. His mother went looking for him but couldn’t find him. She didn’t know what happened until the call came from the hospital.

Only then did the layers of the tragedy become clear.

Words spoken in anger. Unspoken words that would have patched things up. The reality that those unspoken words would remain unheard forever.

Relations between people being what they are, we’ve all got simmering fires to be put out. Parent-child. Husband-wife. Brother-sister. Friend-to-friend.

We’re all sure we’ve got tomorrow or next week or next month to set things right.

I won’t insult your intelligence this morning by telling you what you should do about your own fires. We wouldn’t be human if we always did the smart thing.

“My son is gone. I lost my son,” Lai Phan cried Friday as she mourned Samsun, an A student whose classmates memorialized him Thursday at Mater Dei High School.

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In these tortured days after the accident, Lai Phan perhaps can be comforted by two daughters from a previous marriage. Perhaps the tributes from Samsun’s classmates and teachers will give her the solace she needs.

Aside from pondering life’s cruel vagaries, the rest of us can draw what lessons we will from this. I suspect that’s what my colleagues were doing Friday. In the myriad of tragedies we digest, this is one that should give us special pause.

We can continue playing the odds that we’ve always got tomorrow to settle accounts.

We can let pride rule our lives instead of uttering a simple “I love you” or “I’m sorry” that will make things right.

I hope Lai Phan realizes that we who share her grief from a distance know she was being just as human as us.

She grieves, and we reflect.

It could have been any of us.

And because it could, I hope she doesn’t punish herself for being human.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com