Sometimes life is not fair. Sometimes life will leave you wondering why? Sometimes a mother has to bury her son, thinking over and over again in her mind that it should be the other way around. On that early summer evening in 2008, I received a call. I was working at the Hellen Diller Vacation Home for the Blind in Avalon, NJ. As I answered the phone, I heard the words, “Yo man, I’m not sure if you heard, but Josh passed away today in a motorcycle accident. I am so sorry to have to tell you this.” As I hung up the phone, the life and energy escaped me, all that was left were tears and emptiness. A boy, just 18 years old, killed by a drunk driver on the way to see his family. Here’s the story of Joshua.
As I rewind back the years of my life, I emerge at a place far in the past. Josh and I began playing baseball together when we were 7 years old. Although we lived and played baseball in different areas of town, I built a relationship with his family over the years of playing baseball.
As we fast-forward ten years, we re-emerge at my senior year of high school. I transferred to Sacred Heart High School, a private Catholic School in my hometown of Vineland, NJ. Josh and I finally went to school and played baseball on the same team. I remember that year quite well, Josh would bat first in the lineup and would always find a way to get on base. Josh was a magnet for injuries though. Every time you turned around, Josh was getting injured on and off the field. In the line of injuries, he succumbed to, I was guilty of causing one of those injuries. I will never forget that evening during indoor winter practice. Before we went into the first cage for soft toss, a popular baseball drill, we would take practice cuts to get our swing right before we started live practice. As I was practicing my swing, I took one swift cut of the bat and on the back swing I hit Joshua right in the eye. His eye was swollen shut almost instantly. To this day, I have not been able to forgive myself for what I did to him at practice that day.
As I move this story forward, we will stop and reflect on that faithful June night in 2008. After I ended the call with my former teammate, I emerge from the conversation back to the chatter of a room full of children. One, two, three are the tears that are now dropping, and soon flowing from my tear ducts as the pain of his demise now comes flowing from the bottom of my soul. I couldn’t believe he was gone. I was just with him the night before. From the back driveway of Abel’s mom’s home, Robert, Abel, and I watched as Josh left on the same bike that would later lead to his demise the very next day.
And as the tears streamed down my face, my girlfriend, my co-workers, and the children came rushing to see what was wrong. I relayed the message as I wiped tears from my eyes, “I just lost a friend of mine.” As the children and my girlfriend came closer to comfort me in this tragedy, I got pulled aside by the camp director. She scolded me for showing emotion in front of the children. In the moment, I was very frustrated with the lack of empathy by my boss, but I could understand that the children did not need to see me in such a distressed emotional state. As I left the conversation, I sat on the front porch and made some phone calls before heading back to Vineland to mourn the loss of Joshua Moren with Abel, Robert, and the rest of our friends that lost apart of themselves that day. We stayed up all night in Robert’s back patio, reflecting and mourning the loss of our friend with none more heart broken than Joshua’s best friend, Abel Gonzalez.
Josh or “Chino” as his friends called him, was killed by a drunk driver. The woman had children in the car and was a repeat offender. She was found guilty of DUI and vehicular homicide, but eventually died from cancer of the liver in prison, certainly karma caught up to the woman who took my friend’s life. As a result of this terrible tragedy, a NJ state law was passed in his name, “Joshua’s Law.” I was present with my friend Robert Green when the bill was signed into law in Millville, NJ.
As I sit here and write these very words, it pains me to think of the lives of Grace and Chuck, the mother and father Josh, whose lives were forever altered on that day. As I enter the funeral home, my emotions succumb once again to my bitter thoughts, suddenly bursting into tears as I make my way to the casket. I greet Chuck and Grace with open arms before I kneeled before my friend to pay my respects to the young man taken from the world and from his family too soon. I went on to leave the funeral service and ventured off to my college summer league baseball game. In honor of Josh that day, I pitched a complete game shutout in 95-degree heat.
As the years went by, the memories of Josh continued to live on. Robert, one of my best friends back home, created a charity softball tournament in Josh’s name. The legacy of Josh and all the lives that he touched lived on in his name and through the game of slow pitch softball for the next 8 years. I still remember driving Chuck home from the first annual tournament. Since I lived down at the Jersey shore for my job that summer and was not able to buy a memorial shirt, Chuck took the shirt off his back in the car and handed it me saying, “Here you go son, it is yours now. Thank you for everything y’all did to honor my boy today. I love you.”
As I carried the official tournament sign to the house for him, I could sense the raw emotions and pain in his heart as I studied his eyes and body language. As we sat and chatted for a little while, others started to show up including Abel. As the group on the front stoop of Chuck’s home began to grow, I decided to leave and get home as it was getting late. I couldn’t help but walk away from that moment with growing feelings of pain and sorrow as I watched my friend’s dad kill the pain with a hefty swig of his tall boy Heineken.
For the lives of others outside the family, life always goes on, but for a family of a loved one lost so soon the pain never goes away. As we continue this story, time speeds up past our view, and we emerge in the summer of 2015. Although Chuck, Grace, and I have always maintained a close relationship over the years, our time together was few, but the summer of 2015 saw a rekindling of our lifelong relationship. You see I needed a job, and Chuck needed a reliable ground man to work for his tree company, Joshua’s Tree and Lawn. I sit here and reminisce about my first day. I walked up to his garage along the path of his driveway. As I look beyond and behind the trailer, I see Chuck sitting in a chair below the original sign made for the softball tournament. As he sees me, a huge smile stretches across his face. On that day, and that summer in 2015, Chuck Moren made me a man. From making phone calls, to writing invoices, to doing his taxes, to carrying 300-pound pieces of wood all day every day, I learned the value of hard work. Chuck is an interesting man as you will see. On lunch breaks, he would kindly force me to do 500 pushups before we went back to work. It got to the point that I could do 1,000 pushups in less than ten minutes. That summer and fall, I spent almost every waking moment with Chuck Moren. I would work all day with him, go home and take a shower, then head right back to his place to talk about life for the rest of the night. He would always comment on the fact that he would drink in front of me every day, and never did I ask him for one. That summer Chuck started to let go of the pain and anger over the loss of his son. As I also learned that summer, others will need you just as much as you need them.
As summer turned to fall and then again to winter, I emerge in a scene from the memory of my subconscious. This memory is not of Chuck, but of Grace, my high school guidance counselor, and I at the dining room table of Grace’s house, the childhood home of Joshua. As we sit at the table and laugh and talk about the past years, the conversation comes to a close, and what came next was something I had never bear witness to before. As I sat at the lead chair at the dining room table, around me the two women began praying. Grace was not praying in English, but was instead speaking in tongues. She prayed for her son and for all those present in the room. Grace is but a small, Filipino woman, but in that moment her words and energy carried many times her weight. The evening ended with dinner, and solo chat with Grace in the living room about scripture and what part I enjoyed most. I told her I had recently enjoyed the lessons and teachings of Proverbs. We spoke about the lessons on life and relationships spoken about in Proverbs before agreeing to go to church together the next morning.
We met at Grace’s home the next morning, and drove together to her church on the corner of Chestnut Ave and Brewster Road across the street from Vineland High School. I don’t remember much about the sermon or message that day, but it was not the sermon that made this day extra-ordinary, but the sequence of events that unfolded next. As the formal church service ended, the pastors gave the congregation a chance to come have a prayer said for them. As Grace and I waited for the crowd of people to lessen in size, what I saw before my eyes was yet another first experience. As a woman was touched by the pastor, she began shaking profusely, and as I turned and look towards the other side of the room, yet another woman had succumbed to violent convulsions that ended with her shaking on the floor. Before this day, I had only heard of such a religious experience, but on that day, it became real for me.
When it finally became time, Grace and I walked together to the front of the church and waited in short lines with her being about 50 feet to my left. As I walked up to the pastor, I can still hear his words ring and echo in my ear as if they were still being uttered. ‘May G-d give you strength, wisdom, and courage,” were the first words spoken from the lips and tongue of the pastor. With a dabble of oil on his fingers, he moved his hand toward me forehead and spoke the words, “You have been anointed.”
As the words were spoken, I felt a tingling sensation emanate throughout my body, leaving with a feeling of awe as I walked away from the dialogue and subsequent blessing. As Grace and I made our way to the door after chatting with a few members of the congregation, the two women were still lying on the floor convulsing, and it seemed strange to me that no one thought it was odd that these women were on the ground shaking. I suppose the power of G-d works in strange and mysterious ways and who am I to judge what is real in the mind of another.
I have had many visits from Joshua, a friend now turned guardian angel, but the first vision was on this day. After church and a subsequent lunch date with Grace I went home. After entering my home, I walked through the house to the back patio. I opened the door and stepped out, walking towards the deck. As I walked along the pavers with my bare feet, I looked up and saw an eagle flying overhead. As I observed the bird floating along with its wings stretched out, a picture of Joshua with his big smile appeared in my mind, accompanied by his voice as he spoke to me, “Keep Going , I am always watching over you.”
As my mind rolls back to the time and place of each of my memories of Joshua and his family in the present moment, a dream emerges from within the dream. A message about the cycles of life and the universe emerge. Just as we come from the dust, we shall return to the dirt at the end of our physical existence, but our light lives on forever. Like Joshua’s Tree, we grow from the dirt, living our life to reach for the light only to return to in the end. As the mind of the boy in the dream dives deeper into the meaning of life, he deduces that just as we come from pure energy to life and mass, we return to pure energy at the end of our life.
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