The first of many acts of kindness

I found out that my twenty-one year old daughter died at about 9:30 pm on July 17 th 2009-the doctors had given my wife and I periodic updates during surgery and then came out and looked at us with expressions that conveyed as much as any words could. They simply said “Casey did not survive surgery.”

After getting the call at about 5:00p.m. that Casey had been hit as a pedestrian and was being transported to Atlantic City Medial Center I was rushed to the hospital by an off-duty New Jersey state policeman who, after hearing that I planned to make the approximate one hour drive to the hospital alone, took my keys and told me to get in his car and that he would not allow me to drive. I had never met him until that moment. Driving through rush hour traffic my mind started to wander to the “what-ifs” that I had on occasion imagined with respect to the health of my wife or children. “What if Casey was crippled, brain inured or dead?”. The state policeman talked calmly to me telling me that we could not know anything until we got there and that we would just have to wait and see. After arriving he waited several hours with me and my family and was with us when we were told that Casey had died. The police officer’s kindness would be the first of many , many acts of kindness from that day to the present.