A SILENT MEMORIAL SO CLEARLY HEARD

It's difficult for just about everybody to talk about death, especially when it means the passing of someone so young and vibrant, with their entire life ahead of them.

When it comes to news reporters, it's something that comes with the territory. You are either emotionally affected every time an assignment to cover a murder, fatal accident, suicide or prominent death hits your desk or you grow immune to covering so much tragedy -- kind of like how police and firefighters are able to show up to work every day.

Although I have been at this craft for nearly 30 years and have covered some pretty grisly murders, accidental and intentional deaths, I have never been immune to every story I've done.

There was that guy whose girlfriend beat him to death with his own baseball bat, the two young kids who died after being stabbed and bound with duct tape by a guy their mom thought was a trusting babysitter, the child who was run over by her own school bus after being dropped off at her corner, the young teen with so much for which to live decided to run into a train's path and, most recently, the mom killed while crossing a busy 47th Street with her baby's stroller.

I've covered them all, and then some. And I always try and find out something, if not lots of things about these people to share with my readers.

Most of us in the media follow an unwritten policy that we don't talk about suicides except when they occur in public. And while I am going to share the latest such case to cross my desk, I am not going to violate that code. I don't need to know or tell who this kid was, but I am sure he had a lot of hopes and dreams and a good life story to tell.

He died at the end of the school year, so the impact on fellow students may not have been as dramatic had his death occurred in the middle of the year. But the impact felt by the extended neighborhood in which he lived is downright touching to say the least.

That neighborhood is directly across the street from La Grange's western border with Western Springs at Gilbert Avenue.

From Gilbert to Wolf Road and from 47th Street to Burlington Avenue, nearly every parkway tree is adorned this week with flowing thick white ribbons honoring the life of a young neighborhood kid whose life, for reasons we will never know, came to an abrupt halt in recent days.

There was no story about it, nor should there be, unless someone chooses to share what he meant to others.

I couldn't help but thinking what it was like for the family and friends of the boy to experience such a loss; but moreover what it felt like to be blessed with so much support and compassion largely from so many people they didn't even know.

I've seen ribbon "campaigns" to raise awareness of child abuse, to pass school building referenda and to mobilize a neighborhood opposed to overdevelopment of a vacant downtown lot where hundreds of condos now stand. I've seen resident groups stand tall for and against any number of causes. But I've never seen anything so simply overwhelming as this.

Sure, the ribbons, over time, will come down -- but the memory of this valiant silent memorial will live on, not just in me, but hopefully in others directly impacted by the loss of their son or brother, their classmate or teammate, their neighbor, their friend.