The Community's Loss

A mother's only son. A boy at the center of a web spinning lovely patterns ever outward, or almost ever outward. Silk shooting this way and that, entangling and commingling everyone who smiled at the sight of him. Now they smile in remembrance.

Carlos Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior who played first trumpet at East Hampton High School, died in a car accident on Friday. His family and friends, teachers and bosses, the people he knew at the high school and at the school in Montauk, where he had lived since moving with his family from Chile at the age of 9, those who speak Spanish, English, or both, those who knew him intimately, who are anxious about the children and adults who are grieving, or whose hearts feel broken just thinking about what his parents must feel - the community is in tears.

If there is any consolation in such blameless, apparently meaningless loss, perhaps it can be found in how the spokes radiate from the young man at the hub. He makes us one.