Fatimah Ali: A mother's bleakest moment

IT'S EVERY parent's greatest fear.

A middle-of-the-night call that a child has been hurt - or worse. And whether it's your own child or someone else's, and no matter how many times we've seen it happen before, no parent should ever have to bury a child. It just isn't natural.

The call came early on a recent morning, at an hour that's usually sacred to me. This better be a bleepin' emergency, I growled, annoyed at being yanked from the last vestiges of sleep.

But it only took seconds to realize that my own comfort didn't matter at all. My dearest friend was weeping as she related that she'd just heard that the oldest son of another friend had been killed.

"He was shot in the back," she sobbed. "I watched him grow up, and he was only 26 years old.

"How could he possibly be dead today?"

Almost in unison, we asked ourselves the hard question that gets asked all too often nowadays:

Why is it so difficult for so many young black men to escape violence, despite having parents who try to steer their children down the right path?

After I went to comfort the friend who had lost her son, she told me she'd often warned him about the hazards of hanging out in toxic environments.

ACCORDING TO reports that reached her from his friends, her son was struck by a bullet when a bar fight broke out in just another dive in just another neighborhood in black Philadelphia.

Although he was already in his mid-twenties, this young man still had plenty of time to blossom and move his life in a positive direction.

Still, his mother had always worried about him and the hazards found on some of Philadelphia's meanest streets.

"My greatest fears for my son now find me fully awake in my worst nightmare. And, there are two perpetrators involved here. The one who fired the gun, and the one called silence.

"Many mothers have reached out to me to remember him because he was so warm, but he was also no stranger to danger, either," she related emotionally, her eyes glistening with grief as we sat in her kitchen, just hours after she'd viewed his body at the hospital.

This friend tried to raise her children well. And while a brother is finishing college this year, she says her now-deceased son's path was taking longer.

All I could do to comfort her was to listen to her talk, looking for the details of his life that would dull the pain.

She remembered her son as being very spiritual.

"The last time I was with him, he was asking for God's blessings and whispering 'Bismillah' as he entered his home," she recalled.

But still she questioned his life's choices. "We always have be careful about what we say out loud and call into the universe," she lamented. "I was always afraid that he would either go to jail or get killed. And now, all my worst fears have come true."

As with any young person's death, there's an element of tragedy, but this one hit especially hard because he's the son of a friend, and especially close to home because I have a son of a similar age.

His grieving mother wanted desperately to remember him as the kind-hearted and loving young man who had big dreams.

But those dreams did not allow him to avoid his appointment with mortality at night in a dingy ghetto bar.

The actual details are hazy and conflicting, as in so many incidents like this.

But the medical details are stark: Doctors told her that a bullet ripped through her son's back and pierced his heart, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Several other people were injured in the knife and gun brawl.

"But why . . . won't anyone talk?" she wanted to know. "The bystanders who know who shot my son need to step up instead of refusing to talk to police."

It's a story we hear depressingly often about young people who never get the chance to grow up because their lives are snuffed out by violence. Like most mothers, my friend knows the reality behind the wishful thinking.

Her son, she said, "always had a tendency to walk a bit on the wild side." But he had started to turn his life around and was trying to improve himself.

"My son loved his family, and if only he'd had more time, I really believe he would have one day grown into a beautiful husband and father himself."

So tragic, these familiar words, from yet another Philadelphia mother who grieves because she has lost her child to violence - and has no real answer as to why.

Fatimah Ali blogs at healthysoutherncomforts.com.

Join her on Wednesday as she subs on WURD/900AM from 12-1 p.m.