I’m back at it—on my phone in the night, scrolling through our local Buy Nothing group, where many “gifts” are on offer: a Starbucks card that may or may not have any money left on it, two broken television sets, a dot-matrix printer, a cardboard box full of “pretty nice gravel,” a plastic tortoiseshell eyeglasses chain along with a pair of sporks (“Please take all”), a collection of barely expired Portuguese spices, a brand-new name-brand twin mattress, and a working air purifier shown with a banana for scale. Also someone is gifting five slices of turkey bacon. Not our favorite of the breakfast meats, the poster admits, but not past its expiration date. Sure! a game somebody else has commented. I’m interested. Can you deliver? Unfortunately, the turkey slices must be picked up in person. I love that people are living outside of the grinding engine of consumerism and exploitation, but used bacon feels like a sad form of resistance.

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Don’t, I think—but I am already typing “Miles Zapf car train” into the search engine to see what I can see. I’m not sure why this feels so wrong. Maybe because it’s a kind of voyeuristic excavation of someone else’s tragedy. Heartbreaking, but from a remove because not us. Or, at least, not us right now. Here’s what I find out from a pair of follow-up stories in the news: the train was owned by a freight railroad company called RCX; an investigation is pending, and the interested parties seem to include the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Railroad Administration, local police, and, because there was a roadway involved, the highway patrol; no witnesses have come forward; the driver of the train was unharmed and has not released a statement; the family has asked for privacy at this time; nobody from RCX has been available for comment.

I look at a picture of the car, which is f lipped over, the driver’s side obliterated. I back-arrow quickly away from it. Has his mom looked at that picture? Or worse—did she see it all in person? Did she climb into her own car in her nightgown and rush to her child, where he’d been pronounced dead on impact? The empathy part of my brain shuts down protectively when I try to imagine it—like a gate lowering, and a sign on it says simply: not available. No information can be shared between brain and heart at this time.

When Willa and Jamie were little, we played a game called Rivers, Roads, and Rails, which involved laying out illustrated transportation-themed tiles to create a grid of linked highways and byways. And honestly? I never liked the way the train tracks ran so close to the roads and waterways. The kids would be bent over the game with their rosy cheeks, plump limbs, and comically mild oaths (“Drat, I’ve run out of river.”) and I’d be lost to my doomsday imagination: a train sliding from bridge to river one car at a time, like the heavy links of a chain; a car tire stuck on the tracks—like a high-heeled shoe in a subway grate—with ten thousand tons of freight bearing down. I always pictured the kids looking at me trustingly from their seats, me wrapping them in my useless, protective arms. Let’s just agree to walk everywhere! I had to stop myself from saying aloud. The enormity of my love for these tender, fleshly beings was twinned with a potential for loss so unimaginably deep and powerful that it was like a black hole lurking just outside our window.

Why had we all been taught the expression Accidents happen? The presumed inevitability paralyzed me with fear. Was I brave enough to love anybody? Maybe. Maybe not.

There’s a handful of comments below the article, mostly of the condolences variety—sorrow, prayers, godspeed, a single May his memory be for a blessing—but two stand out: OMG, but are the shareholders okay? someone has written. And someone else has written, cryptically, Accidents do not happen by accident.

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From Wreck by Catherine Newman. Copyright © 2025 by Catherine Newman. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.