Loss of Love, Loss of Possibility

I closely followed the coverage of the trial of George Huguely V, who was convicted Wednesday night of second-degree murder in the death of

Google the phrase “George Huguely trial” and you get 619,000 hits, at least as of this writing the day after the verdict. I don’t know what else could really be said about the tragic death of Love, and I feel bad about adding one more story to the hit count. But I imagine that my column is barely a blip on the radar screen given the week – make that the nearly two years – has had.

I read stories in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and of course Patch, as an outsider with no connection to the case other than, like many of you, that I live in Cockeysville. While knowing certainly drew me into the story, what really held my attention and made my heart clench in my chest was that somewhere out there in my own neighborhood was a mother who was experiencing the greatest loss and the most unimaginable hurt that any parent can endure.

The sense of loss for the Huguely family is different and obviously of lesser significance – their son is still alive, after all. But they are experiencing their own brand of loss as George faces the and a lifetime living with what happened at his own hands, of what choices he or they could have made to slam the brakes on what was by many accounts a life swiftly heading off the rails.

I looked at this case through the eyes a mother of two young children. During the past two weeks during the trial, I found myself looking at my own two kids, who are 4 and pushing 2, and thinking, “Mrs. Love once looked at a mini version of Yeardley just as I’m looking at right now.” I would wager that she, like every parent out there, looked at her daughter over and over again with a sense of awe through the years as she thought about all the possibility within Yeardley, the kinetic energy within every child that’s just waiting to spring itself into action in the world.

For both Love and Huguely, that energy has been snuffed out. They were both poised to graduate from the , to take off and make a wholly different mark on the world than the one that has been left behind since that awful day back in May 2010. No one looks at their child and pictures her or him winding up the way Love and Huguely did, and sadly no verdict or prison sentence can ever right that wrong.