Lives Mid-Sentence

In the early hours of Friday night, a college community was shaken by something no one ever expects and everyone eventually fears. Two student athletes, a young soccer player and his girlfriend, were killed instantly by a drunk driver traveling the wrong direction on the road as they were driving back to campus from his parents’ home, about an hour away.

One moment they were returning to a life still unfolding, the next, they were gone.

There is no clean way to transition from a fact like that into language. This isn’t an explanation or a lesson, and it isn’t meant to tidy up what cannot be made tidy. It is simply a reflection, an attempt to sit with the weight of what happened, to hold space for those grieving, and to acknowledge how deeply something like this reaches into all of us, even if we don’t yet know how…

There are moments when the world doesn’t shatter loudly…

It just… stops.

As if time itself pauses, looks around the room, and realizes it no longer knows how to move forward.

This is one of those moments…

Two young lives, heading back toward a place that still believed in tomorrow, erased in an instant by a decision they never saw coming. A familiar road… a routine drive… the quiet assumption that you will arrive.

And then… nothing.

No warning. No meaning we can point to. Just absence where there was once laughter, movement, breath, and a future still forming.

There is something uniquely cruel about loss like this…not because death itself is unfamiliar (we all know it waits), but because of how unfinished everything feels. The conversations that didn’t happen. The mornings that never arrived. The soccer games that will never be played. The laughter, the tears, the experiences that never got their chance. Lives that were still mid-sentence.

When something like this happens, the mind does what it always does… it reaches for explanation.

“Why this way?” “Why now?” “Why them?” “Why so sudden?” “Why so unnecessary?”

We interrogate the moment as if answers might stitch the wound shut, as if understanding could reverse the impact.

But this is where the philosophies we lean on, Buddhism, Stoicism, Christianity, whatever suits, all the quiet wisdom we keep on our shelves, stop being ideas and start becoming something much heavier.

Buddhism offers this gentle truth… impermanence is the water we swim in. All things arrive, stay as long as they are meant to, and then pass on, carried by the steady, uncomplicated honesty of being alive.

Stoicism reminds us that the universe is indifferent, that fate doesn’t ask permission, that control is far more limited than our egos would like to admit.

And one of my favorite authors, Pema Chödrön, so gently and so relentlessly, reminds us that when things fall apart, that is not a failure of the path… it is the path.

None of this makes it hurt less.

If anything, it makes the hurt sharper, because it removes the illusion that tragedy has to justify itself to us.

And still… we ask.

We ask about the man who made the decision that changed everything. We ask what pain he was carrying, what numbness or despair or recklessness led him to drink, to drive, to cross a line that cannot be uncrossed. Holding compassion for him does not excuse what he did. It simply acknowledges a deeper truth… suffering begets suffering, and one unhealed moment can ripple outward into devastation that touches hundreds of lives.

That, too, is unbearable to hold.

What lingers hardest is not merely that death arrived, but how abruptly it entered… without ritual, without warning, without giving the heart time to prepare. In that instant, the future was rewritten for families, teammates, friends, partners, coaches, professors, and an entire community now learning how to live with the quiet, impossible absence of two people who were still becoming who they were meant to be.

This is usually the moment when language fails us. When clichés show up like nervous guests who don’t know what else to say.

Be present. Savor the moment. Tell people you love them. Be grateful. [Insert your own…]

These phrases aren’t wrong… but they’re painfully insufficient, they feel thin against the weight of this kind of grief.

Because there's a quieter, harder truth lurking in the shadows…you don’t really understand how fragile life is until it takes someone close enough to rearrange your insides. Until the loss isn’t theoretical, until death stops being an abstraction and becomes a name, a face, a jersey, a seat left empty.

And once that happens, you don’t go back… you can’t go back.

After something like this, you find yourself moving through life with a softer step. You hold people differently, as if aware that every embrace is borrowed time. Ordinary moments glow briefly with their own fragility, ordinary only because they have not yet been taken. Kindness becomes less about who you are and more about what you choose, day after day, in the presence of uncertainty. And love, always threaded with risk, is still what we lean toward, because a life built to avoid loss is also a life that never fully opens to connection.

I want to be honest about where I’m standing as I write this.

I am a father. I have two daughters. One of them plays soccer at the college, as he did, and she is dating one of his teammates. This loss is not distant for her, and it is not abstract for me. I have not yet lost someone in the way many reading this have, and I won’t pretend to understand this grief from the inside… but I am standing close enough to feel its weight, close enough to hear the questions that arrive without answers.

What I do understand is proximity. I understand how easily it could have been my child, or yours. A sister. A brother. A son. A daughter. A husband. A wife. Someone driving home, believing… reasonably, quietly… that they would arrive.

That is the part that won’t loosen its grip. It’s why I’m writing this… for my daughter, for her friend(s), and for those standing near this loss… because when meaning slips away, words have always been how I begin to gather myself again.

This didn’t just happen to them, it happened frighteningly close to all of us.

And I don’t really know what to make of that. I don’t have a philosophy strong enough to explain it away or a belief system tidy enough to make it make sense. What I do know is that the life we’ve been given is fragile, unguarded, and far more temporary than we like to admit. It can be taken from us unceremoniously, without warning, without fairness, without meaning we’ll ever fully understand.

So maybe the truest thing to say is this…

Tell your children you love them.

Tell your parents.

Tell your partner.

Tell your friends.

Let love be spoken, because words of love have a way of remaining with us, shaping what we remember and what we hold close.

We don’t honor lives like these by understanding their ending. We honor them by living with more care, more presence, and more gentleness than we did before… knowing full well that none of it guarantees safety.

We don’t get certainty.

We don’t get fairness.

We don’t get answers.

We only get this fragile, fleeting chance to love while we’re here.

And tonight, that’s what I’m sitting with.

About Deevo

Deevo is a father, writer, and brand strategist whose work often explores identity, meaning, and the human experience. He writes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and lived experience, using language as a way to make sense of moments that resist easy explanation. When he isn’t writing or coaching, he is most often found being a dad, listening closely, and trying... like the rest of us... to live with care in a fragile world.