Two of my close friends told me terrible news last week.

One lost his 25-year-old son to addictions after a tragic overdose.

For the last five years, my friend did everything humanly possible to help his son escape the habit. He even spent most of his free time volunteering at Siloam Mission to learn more about addictions.

The other told me her brother — who is mentally handicapped — tried to take his own life and is now in the hospital under careful supervision. Adding to the stress of the situation is he lives in Germany and she is not able to with him at this time.

Both of these families loved and supported these individuals as much as anyone could, and yet tragedy struck regardless.

Looking for some kind of explanation or meaning in it all, I have little to offer that could give these families any peace or comfort.

What I do know is nobody is immune to such heart-wrenching experiences.

At Siloam, we often talk about the people using our services as somebody’s daughter, son, father, mother, neighbour, employee and more.

We know every person has, or has had, a family just like everyone else.

Thousands of volunteers come to Siloam every year to help serve meals and provide support. Many have some kind of connection to someone who died before their time or is on the streets right now.

That’s the thing about life: nobody is safe from tragedy and human frailty.

At one point, I believed I was.

March 26 marked my brother’s birthday. Wayne was 11 months younger and we did pretty much everything together in our younger years. Without going into details, I’ll just say the RCMP knew us by our first names quite well.

By the time Wayne was 20, he had already spent a couple of years in prison. A few years later, he was looking at armed robbery charges, but his case fell apart and he was released.

Little by little, he started changing directions and was doing better.

He began working in a restaurant. He began planning for a better future. One day, someone else abruptly ended his life, and our family was left to make sense of his death.

I’m not sure any of us ever did, and perhaps that’s why I do what I do now.

I hope I can make some kind of difference for someone along the way, so they can find their way and perhaps won’t be another tragic story.

Tragedy defines us more than anything else. It can create character in us that moves us to make the world a better place. Or it can defeat us.

There are many people living on the streets of Winnipeg because tragedy has defeated them.

If you spend time with them, you often discover at some point life cut them down and they stopped coping, caring and living.

Perhaps if we take the time to make a difference for someone else’s son or brother, daughter or sister, someone might be there for our loves ones in their time of need — because that time will come.

— Floyd Perras is the executive director of Siloam Mission.

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