Enduring What Cannot Be Endured

TOM JACKSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: Apr 18, 2008

Horror barges in when we least expect it. When we think we have paid our dues. When we would swear we had been prudent. Horror crashes through the front door to lay waste to our tidy constructs, to expose our schemes as flimsy and ridiculous.
Beautiful Brittany Saavedra, the Spring Hill fifth-grader with the news anchor bone structure and the adorable, gawky ears, has died. She suffocated in the collapse of a sandy burrow she and two friends spent late Saturday afternoon carving into a neighborhood retention area. Said her dad, “A freak accident.”
Brittany had thumbed her home number only minutes before. Parents do that for their children these days, give them cell phones to keep them connected, to report their whereabouts, their safe comings and goings.
Be home at 8, she said, maintaining the pact of reassurance between daughter and father, foreshadowing no hint of the threat to life's tranquil ebb and flow lurking within the manmade depression neighborhood kids considered one big sandbox.
Brittany would be home at 8. There would follow a shower, maybe a little TV, maybe a snack, then bed, peaceful slumber, and the promise of tomorrow.
Misconceptions, all.

Twice The Nightmare

The approach of sirens drew Mitchell Saavedra to his front lawn, to the curb, to the edge of the dry pond, to the threshold of a nightmare. A small figure between two Hernando County deputies. Who? Then, the realization. Oh no, oh no, oh my God, no. And, Not again.
Brittany's father buried the family's oldest boy, a 19-year-old killed in a traffic crash, three years ago – the world turned on its head. Ask any parent called to that unspeakable duty. Surviving it only once demands enduring the unendurable.
Like being struck by lightning, once is too much. After that, though, isn't insurance against a recurrence implied? Evidently not. Brittany Saavedra had long blond hair, a winning smile, a cell phone and instructions from her dad. Call in. Be careful. She lived in one of those increasingly rare neighborhoods where parents feel safe letting their kids romp. When those parks fill with water, that's when parents worry. They know about drownings.
They've seen the 6 o'clock news. When someone spots the first alligator basking on the bank, parents worry. Otherwise, the Sterling Hills retention area once resembled nothing so much as a big field at the foot of a grassy incline.

To Honor Her Memory

But wait. A moment already beyond description can be made worse by our fellow travelers unencumbered by an internal monologue. For those tempted to say, or post to some Internet comment board, “Where were the parents?” — hush yourselves.
Freakishness happens. We just think it never will happen to us; the evidence tends to support this. Who hasn't dug trenches in the sand, shimmied out on soaring oak branches, waded into unfamiliar rivers or ridden a bicycle against traffic against the advice of our elders and still survived into adulthood?
The residents of Sterling Hills, just across the line from Pasco County, had every reason to believe they'd turned back the clock. Soon, the parents of Brittany's friends will choose. To let their kids be kids once more. Or to lock them in their rooms until they are 21. One path is optimism and life, the other fear and another sort of death.
It's obvious which one honors the memory of beautiful Brittany Saavedra.

Tom Jackson can be reached at 813-948-4219.