每23分钟（Every 23 Minutes）

　崔礼山选　Linda Weltner

　　My husband and I went to a funeral a few weeks ago. The man we honored had not been ill and will never grow old. He was killed in his car on a Sunday night, driving home along a pided highway.

　　It was an ordinary evening, no blacker than any other, when a car coming in the other direction went out of control, broke through the guard rail, and hit two other cars before smashing head on into his. According to the newspaper, the driver, who was returning from a wedding, seemed puzzled. "I only had two bottles of beer and a cocktail," she is reported to have said.

　　A wedding.

　　Followed by a funeral.

　　I wish she could have been there to see all the lives her act has changed forever, the wife, and four children, the extended family, the hundreds and hundreds of friends who sat in painful silence, listening to words which barely touched the depths of their grief.

　　Strange to think that, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this happens in America every 23 minutes.

　　Somebody drinks.

　　Somebody drives.

　　Somebody dies.

　　And other lives are altered forever, though sometimes the changes may be invisible to a casual observer. By chance, the day before the funeral I ran into a longtime acquaintance while shopping. He commented on my crutches. I asked if he had ever broken his leg.

　　"Uh, I have a long rod in this thigh," he said, "from a car accident two weeks after I came back from Vietnam."

　　"That's ironic. To leave a war zone and then get injured," I teased him. "You're lucky it wasn't worse."

　　"Well, my wife was killed in the crash and so was the wife of the driver," he said uncomfortably. "We were hit by a drunk."

　　I've known this man for years, yet suddenly realized there was a whole chapter of his life he'd never mentioned. I asked and discovered he'd remained in the hospital seven weeks, and that all that time he'd known his wife was dead. It was hard to know where to go from there, for there are questions you can't put to someone in a casual conversation — questions like, "How could you bear it?" or "What did you do about wanting revenge?"

　　I wish I knew the answers to those questions. I wish I could offer those answers to the woman who, overwhelmed by grief, could barely walk as she followed her husband's coffin from the church.

　　Every 23 minutes, who dies?

　　A mother who will never comfort the child who needs her. A woman who will never know how very much her friends depended on her. A man whose contributions to his community would have made a difference. A wife whose husband cannot picture the future without her.

　　Every 23 minutes, who dies?

　　A son who involuntarily abandons his parents in their old age. A father who can never acknowledge his children's accomplishments. A daughter who can never take back her angry words. A sister who will never be her sister's maid of honor.

　　Every 23 minutes, who dies?

　　A brother who will not be there to hold his newborn niece. A friend whose encouragement is gone forever. A bride-to-be who will never say her vows. An aunt whose family will fragment and fall apart.

　　Every 23 minutes, who dies?

　　A child who will never fulfill his early promise. An uncle who leaves his children without guidance and support. A grandmother whose husband must now grow old alone. A lover who never had a chance to say how much he cared.

　　Every 23 minutes.

　　A void opens.

　　Someone looks across the table at a vacant chair; climbs into an empty bed, feels the pain of no voice, no touch, no love. Where there was once intimacy and contact, now there is only absence and despair.

　　Every 23 minutes

　　A heart breaks.

　　Someone's pain shatters the confines of her body, leaking out in tears, exploding in cries, defying all efforts to soothe the despair. Sleep offers no escape from the nightmare of awakening. And morning brings only the irreversibility of loss.

　　Every 23 minutes.

　　A dream ends.

　　Someone's future blurs and goes blank as anticipation fades into nothingness. The phone will not ring, the car will not pull up to the house. The weight of tomorrow becomes unbearable in a world in which all promises have been broken by force.

　　Every 23 minutes.

　　Somebody wants to run. Somebody wants to hide.

　　Somebody is left with hate. Somebody wants to die.

　　And we permit this to go on.

　　Every 23 minutes.