I remember when Steve Finney died. We were juniors in high school, and one morning when I walked into my first class I immediately noticed something was wrong. Instead of the usual chaos and cacophony that always pervaded the room before the teacher arrived and closed it down with roll call, the noise was barely perceptible, the tremulous whispers issuing from a cluster of girls, two of them in tears, two more holding hands, the agitation of boys trying to find a way to grip this terrible news that had so rudely pushed its way into our school this morning, trying to wrestle it down and force it to submit, to spit in its face and kick its ass, to make it go away.

Steve had been killed in a car wreck the night before. His girlfriend had been driving, and she was also killed. A guy named Jamie, who was also in our class, had been in the backseat and survived the crash. Those were about the only facts anybody knew. People kept talking about the last time they had seen Steve. Just yesterday, someone said. He bummed a cigarette off me, said another. It seemed very important to be as specific as possible about when people had last seen Steve and what Steve was doing, as if these facts might somehow refute the news of his death. You see, Mister Death, our friend Steve couldn’t possibly be dead today when he was so obviously alive yesterday.

One or two people mentioned plans they had with Steve, which only added to the seeming impossibility that he might not be able to follow through with them now. We were going to the river this weekend. We were going to throw a party for Sherry. Even as his parents were down at the funeral home choosing a casket and arranging his funeral, we, his classmates, were building a case against his death that was open and shut.

“He can’t be gone,” said one girl, collapsing into the arms of another.

“Goddamn,” said a boy. “Goddamn, Finney.”

It was not clear to me whether the boy was angry at God, angry at Steve, or just angry. It was probably not clear to him either.

After school, a bunch of us went down behind Irwin Chevrolet and looked at Steve’s car, which had been towed there and sat among several other wrecked cars. Whatever case we had been building against Steve’s death crumbled upon the introduction of his car into evidence. We stood around it and just looked on in amazement. We had, of course, seen Steve’s car almost every day since he bought it and had it souped up. He adored cars the way that some people do. I remember him drawing pictures of souped-up cars when we were in grade school, long before we got our licenses. He had decals of dragsters on his notebooks and textbooks. He collected Hot Wheels. It was no surprise that this car was, next to Sherry, his greatest love.

Now it had been reduced to a huge mound of crumpled metal and broken glass. If there had not been the tires jutting out now at odd angles on all four sides, we would have been hard pressed to identify what we saw before us as a car. It was clear that when the car left the road for the last time late last night, it had been, in somebody’s words, “friggin flying.” As impossible as it had been earlier to believe that Steve was gone, it was even harder to believe that anyone in the car had survived the wreck. Jamie must have been thrown from the car before the first major impact. Somebody said it was a miracle, and I guess it was. Somebody else said that Jamie had been down here earlier today, not to look at the wreckage and reflect on his luck, or the loss of his two friends, or the meaning of life, but to get Steve’s tape deck and speakers before the car was hauled away for good.

“Life goes on, I guess,” somebody said.

We all guessed so, turning away at last from some pretty damning evidence to the contrary.

•••

I didn’t really think of Steve Finney the evening of Memorial Day, but I might have. It was after all, Steve’s death that taught me and so many of my classmates the hard lesson of just how precarious and precious our lives on this earth really are, how death doesn’t give one damn about your plans, or what you did yesterday, or what you were saying or thinking just a minute ago. You go along each day from point A to point B as if point B is a given, but it isn’t, because there are no givens. Steve Finney will never graduate from high school. Never. At one point, I thought that was a given.

On Memorial Day, we went over to the Asheville Mall to get some pictures taken of our son, Jack, his three-month pictures. It turned out to be a beautiful day. On the way out of the mall, Tammy paused. We had been talking about chocolates, specifically some Godiva chocolates that they sell in the mall.

“I saw them back there,” she said. “Can’t we go back and look at some, see what they have?”

When Tammy asks a question about chocolates, it is wise to always answer in the affirmative, so we turn and go back to the Godiva counter and survey the rows of chocolates. They didn’t have quite what she was looking for, so we finally did leave the mall.

As Tammy was pulling out of the mall, we saw an elderly woman struggling across the parking lot in a wheel chair. Earlier in the day, we had been talking about the misfortune of some friends of ours who had lost their baby before she was born, and how grateful we were that Jack had been born without any complications, and by all signs, has been doing very well.

“We are so blessed,” Tammy said, after the woman in the wheelchair passed.

“We really are,” I said. After a brief pause for acknowledgement of our blessings, we began discussing plans for dinner. Should we grill out? What did we have left in the refrigerator? Chicken? Maybe wed open a bottle of wine. Was “Six Feet Under” on tonight?

Just east of Canton on I-40 and heading west, three lanes suddenly merge into two. Tammy was in the middle lane just cruising along when all of a sudden I noticed an 18-wheeler in the third lane beginning to merge over. It was a little in front of us, but not completely clear, and Tammy did not notice right away that he was beginning to cut over. Just as I was saying “Watch out for this truck,” he did merge over, and Tammy had to jerk the wheel to avoid being hit. We felt the rear end of our Toyota minivan sort of fishtail, and I thought for a split second that the van would correct and regain traction. Instead, we lost control of the van completely. Then I thought we were going to roll over in the road, and that we would all surely die, Tammy, me, and our two young children. How could we survive a rolling over at 60 miles per hour in heavy traffic on I-40? I thought our time was up.

“Honey,” I kept repeating, trying to calm Tammy as the van swerved all over both lanes. “Honey, honey!”

Finally, the van slammed into the cement divider, and then caromed to the shoulder on the other side before coming to a stop. Incredibly, no one was seriously injured, although our daughter Kayden had an abrasion on her neck from the seatbelt, and Tammy sustained a small cut on her foot. Once the van was still and we realized we were as far out of the road as we could get, Tammy jerked open the door and jumped into the back to see about the children, who were crying hysterically, but were more scared than hurt. A retired couple from Michigan had pulled in behind us and stayed with us until the Highway Patrol and wrecker arrived, and even beyond that. They helped calm us down, helped with the children, let us use their cell phone, counted our blessings with us. They were wonderful.

The car was totaled. When they put it up on the wrecker, Kayden, who is 4 years old, cried.

“They’re taking our car away,” she cried.

“I know, baby,” I said. “Don’t worry, we can get another car.”

(Steve Finney, he never did.)

“It’s really a miracle that this wasn’t a lot worse,” said the Michigan lady.

“You are absolutely right,” I said, holding Jack, who was still crying but beginning to calm down some. “A miracle.”

A couple of days later, Tammy took Kayden down to the junkyard so she could say “good-bye” to the minivan. They got some things out of it and spent a few moments reminiscing. We had bought the van on eBay, and the two of them flew out together and drove it back last summer. Kayden cried some, but less than a week later, even before we got the check from the insurance company, I bought a van nearly identical to it from a guy in Cary. She seems to like it just fine.

And life goes on.

(Chris Cox is a writer and English teacher. He can be reached at jchriscox@bellsouth.net.)