From time to time, I have to do work on the AT&T wireless network in the middle of the night. We have some maintenance and repair items that we do in the middle of the night when network utilization is the lowest. So Monday night, I traveled to our Cincinnati location for this kind of work. On the way there, I passed by a car wash that's in what many would agree is a "bad neighborhood." It's hard for me to use the term "bad neighborhood" in a post like this. Pardon my digression from my real point but there are times when we make blanket statements like "bad neighborhood" that fall short of the entire story. Yes, there are areas of every town that seem to constantly ping the crime radar. But I find that there are always good people in "bad neighborhoods" so it makes it difficult for me to use the term. But for the sake of this post and so the reader understands what I'm getting at, this was in one of those neighborhoods. This street memorial caught my attention as I drove. I couldn't keep driving and not go take a look. It was around midnight. There was a guy near by that was having a heated argument with a wall that seemed to be escalating to violence so I chose not to spend a whole lot of time there. But looking at this picture later, I spotted some things that touched my heart. It's way to easy for many of us to look at a scene like this and reach some conclusions about what happened. If we process the scene at all we might think someone died next to a crummy car wash in a bad part of town. We might make presumptions about what led to the person's death. But for a moment, let's push all of that aside and really look at this picture. There are balloons, a football, flowers, hand-written notes on the wall, pictures, a collection of liquor bottles and candles. Not everyone shows their affection and their loss in the same ways. We might not all leave liquor bottles as our way of memorializing someone. But what grabbed my attention was the number of them. There was a memorial service to someone on this spot. Someone's life was remembered. There was grieving at this location. There was a feeling of loss. Someone's son lost their life here. Maybe it was someone's father and husband. Maybe he was a brother. It saddened me that he died in this less than desirable place. Regardless of what led to his death, no one wants to breath their final breath next to the crummy car wash with nothing more than a crooked construction sign as their final view of this world. No one wants to be memorialized next to the same place where they might have washed their car earlier that same week. But apparently, that's exactly what happened. Did he die from violence? Was an overdose part of what happened? Maybe he was walking on that sidewalk and had a medical condition. I have no idea and it would be wrong of me to presume. What I do know is that this guy was loved. Whoever he was, he was loved and he is being missed by many right now. My hope is that when we see street memorials like this, we take a moment to remember that there was a human being who lost their life and there are those that are impacted by it, regardless of the circumstances that led to it.