Sometimes, Finland
A tragedy avoided plus a translation of a Hernan Casciari story on the fragility of a child's life.
Last Tuesday, my 2-year-old, Enzo, had an accident that could’ve resulted in the worst thing a parent can imagine. The past six days of processing through the aftermath while trying to care for him and keep the ship moving with work and other kids has been tough.
I don’t think about the Enneagram Types much anymore, but I know mine is among the worst to have when things go wrong. Even before God sent us a child who throws himself headfirst into danger, I anticipated tragedy at every turn. I imagined the death of loved ones from the quiet of a church pew during a Sunday morning sermon to the living room sofa on a Friday night when Haley was out with friends, her phone dead, and the clock ticking without news of when she’d be home.
It's terrible, psychologically speaking, to think constantly of bad things happening to your wife and children, whether car accidents, plane accidents, mass shootings, drownings, or cancers. Though I’m aware that control is an illusion and even anticipating tragedy won’t stop it from happening, I’ve been averse to risk since childhood, believing that avoiding it will keep me safe. My oldest, Alba, shares my anxieties. And even though I know it’s not the healthiest way to move about the world, I am relieved that her fear of ocean waves and earthworms, her unwillingness to jump off diving boards or walk to the mailbox alone, means she will likely live forever.
Just as it’s our shared challenge as parents to cultivate bravery in our daughter, the opposite is true for how Haley and I raise Enzo, who approaches each morning with a reckless abandon utterly foreign to me. Keeping him safe does not just require constant prayer and vigilance but the consideration of hiring outside help, perhaps a detail of retired Secret Service agents who could follow him, hawk-eyed, their jaws clenched, aware not just of the danger posed by external forces but of my son’s predisposition to opening the floodgates to calamity himself.
One of my worst fears is that I might be the culprit of an accident that would hurt my children. I’m well aware of how the death of a child can destroy a marriage and, so before Alba was born, I read up on or imagined every scenario I’d need to avoid to make it through her first year: never forgetting her in a car seat on a warm summer day, or stepping away from the tub during bathtime, or sitting her on the kitchen counter as I pulled her milk bottle from the fridge.
I blame myself, in part, for Enzo’s many accidents to date, from busted eyes to near concussion and broken bones, either for not doing enough to prevent them from happening or, like last Tuesday, because I feel sure that if I had been there, nothing bad would’ve happened (something that I know is not true).
I do not wish these morbid thoughts or images on any of you, and I pray that, among those of you who are parents, your inclination is not to think as I do.
Many years ago, I read a story about how the Contemporary Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman’s son accidentally ran over his little sister in the driveway of their home in the suburbs of Nashville. Watching Colony House in 2013 at The Shed in Maryville, I hadn’t realized that Chapman’s two sons play in the band: Caleb, as the frontman and lyricist, and Will, the one who had been behind the wheel, as the drummer.
Caleb introduced the song “Won’t Give Up,” which he wrote for Will in the years after the accident. All the lyrics to the song are beautiful and tragic, from the first verse, “I wear the guilt upon my chest cause I feel like I’ve earned it, and keep the bloodstains on my hands to show that I’ve done this…” through the second, “Oh the pictures in my head, they roll like movies. I shut my eyes to cut the thread, but my memory shows no mercy,” to the bridge, which I’ve clung to during moments of regret or suffering: “Too many dreams I didn’t want to dream. Too many nights alone where I can’t sleep. I’ve got the devil on my back, trying to take hope from me.”
And then it turns, “But I see Jesus out in front; He’s reaching back for the lonely. Reaching back ’cause He loves me. I take His hand because she loved me.”
I’ve also been thinking this week about “A Veces es Finlandía” by Hernán Casciari, whose work I translate, for free, on this Substack. Casciari’s story has been on my mind not just because of what happened to Enzo last Tuesday but also because of how aware I am of my instinct to respond to tragedy by either castigating myself or fleeing the scene. If I were to play a role in something terrible happening to Haley or the kids, I would run like Chris McCandless to the backcountry of a Western state and forge a new identity apart from everyone I love because of the shame and guilt of not keeping my promise to protect them.
With that, here’s “Sometimes, Finland.”
On November 14, 1995, I ran over and killed my sister’s only daughter backing the car out of the driveway.
In reality, I had hit a tree trunk. But between the dry thud and the panicked screams of my family and the realization that my niece was not outside but in her bedroom asleep, I experienced the worst ten seconds of my life—seconds during which time was suspended, and I accepted that any future I could envision would become an inextinguishable torment.
At the time, I was living in Buenos Aires. I had traveled home to Mercedes for the weekend to celebrate my grandmother’s 80th birthday. We were having an asado in the backyard and had just finished eating when, around 3 p.m., I asked my dad to borrow the car so I could drop off an assignment with my editor at the paper. I climbed into the front seat, adjusted the rearview mirror, checked to make sure no kids were running around, and put the car in reverse. A second later, I felt the sickening collision, heard as I still do now the sound of the rear bumper against what I presumed could only be a human body, and my world stopped forever.
Not forty yards away—I can still see them now—my family sprung up from the table. My sister screamed in anguish the name of her daughter. “Rebecca!” My mother or grandmother—I can’t remember which—said, “He hit her. He hit her.”
And in the front seat, I was frozen in place, gripping the steering wheel tighter than ever, realizing my life was over. Whatever had come before that moment, whatever was to come, had evaporated. I knew it immediately. I knew that my 3-year-old niece had been behind the car and that, due to her height, I couldn’t have seen her before pressing down on the gas. I was sure I had just killed her.
“I hope El Negro kills me,” was all I could think (El Negro is the father of the girl, my brother-in-law). I wished that his delirious, paternal anger would be so savage that when he ran to the car and saw the lifeless body of his only daughter, he’d grab me by the throat, pull me from the front seat, and hit me until I was brain dead. I would’ve let him do it, I swear.
Because that would’ve rid me of the only alternative: to kill myself, by my own hands, alone in my bedroom that night. Because I know I wouldn’t have been brave enough to do it. I am a coward. And instead of owning up to my transgression, I would’ve committed the worst sin of all; I would’ve fled to Finland.
That afternoon, I was almost 25 years old. I owned a beautiful house in the city, worked for a magazine that paid me well, and had an intense social life. I was happy. And then, unexpectedly, I kill my 3-year-old niece and every light in every room of every house in which I could be happy suddenly turns off. I thought of it that way, coldly, callously, because I could no longer feel enough to tremble.
In those ten seconds, time fractured and stretched. In my mind, the only option I had left if my brother-in-law didn’t do me the favor of murdering me was fleeing, bribing some official, and boarding a plane for Finland.
Do you understand what I’m telling you? I had just destroyed the life of my younger sister and the only person I could think of was me.
Seconds passed. My sister and mother and every person at the table rushed to the back of the car. And what hurt the most in that instant was that I knew I would no longer be able to write in Finland. I would no longer be able to be happy. Those ten seconds were the longest of my life—they were eternal—until someone realized it was a tree trunk, and my family erased the other possibility from their minds. They strode back to the table, thinking that I was merely a buffoon.
For a long time, many years, in fact, I was surprised by my callousness in the aftermath of my niece’s false death. It wasn’t just the cold logic in the way I interpreted the catastrophe, but worse. It was a coming apart of the human soul, a ruthless objectivity in which I felt the pain of no longer being able to do what I loved most. Yes, I could’ve gone to Finland if she had been there underneath my bumper. I could’ve lived a life in which I’d no longer be able to see my family or friends. I could’ve become a butcher in a supermarket in Hämeenlinna. But I would’ve no longer been able to tell stories, love a woman, or fish. Any experience of joy would’ve brought with it an irrepressible shame for forgetting how guilty I deserved to feel over what I’d done.
Not a single person there that day in Mercedes remembers this story. Not one of them has suffered nightmares with these images stuck inside their heads. I’m the only one who’s woken up covered in sweat for years when those ten seconds return without the happy ending of the tree trunk. For them, nothing happened that afternoon besides the denting of a car bumper at the end of spring.
Why, then, do I still replay every second in my memory? Why do I wake more than 20 years later and feel like my lungs have lost all their air? And I remember the cold air of an apartment in Finland, and I find myself clinging to the loose strands of terror and exile, choking in the cowardice of not having had the power to kill myself.
It must be the false send of peace that leads us, in the moments when terror strikes, to shiver in the uncertainty of what could be. Right now, we are at peace. Our children are in bed. Our loved ones are alive and safe. But peace is so fragile. The reaper hides in the shadows, stalking us under the cover of darkness, waiting to strike and rob us of everything we love and leave us clutching a steering wheel, believing that the only option we have left is to die alone in Finland with dry, unblinking eyes.
Thank God that almost every time, what is there behind the terror is not death but a tree trunk. And so, we live in peace. But we all know that beneath the self-assurance and love and sex and the nights out with friends and the good books and favorite records—we all know—there isn’t always a tree trunk. Sometimes, there’s Finland.
Read previous The Weekly Big Head columns::
May 28 - Tough Fishin’
May 20 - Living with Foreigners
May 13 - An Ode to Useless Information
April 29 – Naked Old Dudes at the YMCA
April 22 – What Color is the Grass in Alaska?
April 15 – Restlessness on Weekends
April 8 – Adventures with the Apocalyptic Cowboy
April 1 – Free Barabbas
Upgrade your subscription for as little as $4.17/month to join The Attic Club, where I share a super-secret dispatch every week, plus Odds and Ends and early drafts of projects.