In all seriousness, when a family loses a loved one, a family member, it is a wrenching, terrible thing. One minute you're standing on the ground — on solid earth — and the next minute the earth seemingly slips away. You're in the air... struggling to get back to your once firm footing and you can't quite make it. The finality of death, so obscenely close, has removed all the familiar melodies of normal life; another odd, precariously sounding chord — a drab gray lifeless world — resonates in its place, engulfing those wholly shattered and rife with loss. In some respects, in this twilight oblivion, people exist between two distinctly vague worlds and — as some will intimately attest — the world of life sometimes melds mysteriously with the realm of death. And if you've been watching the doleful Weaver family in recent weeks traverse through The Amazing Race: Family Edition, you may have noticed this ethereal alter-reality unleash its nebulous fog.

By David W. Taylor (Email Me)
Reality Reel Media
10.21.05
Featuring Jonathan Baker from The Amazing Race 6 www.jonathanbakerandvictoriafuller.com

Linda Weaver, as we've learned, lost her husband — and Rachel, Rebbeca and Rolly lost their father — in a racetrack accident. He was apparently run over by a car. That is what is sort of 'driving' the Weavers pell-mell through this Amazing Race — a grand distraction, no doubt; a winsome 'What The Hell!' after a more careful life unglued suddenly and detached. I'm sure the one million dollar prize lingers somewhere there among the roughly mangled dreams in the Weaver attic but I think the mere gruesome ritual of getting the family up each day and forcibly focused on something other than their dear departed is an unfathomable reward in and of itself. And the Weaver devotion to God and Jesus and Prayer to see them through every facet of this maniacal Race is totally understandable, and somewhat admirable, if not slightly sectarian. But life and its merry angels, and phantoms, have not remained passive in the Weaver television saga. There are many strange things afoot, brimming over from the unimaginable parallel universe. Or not.

I have already mentioned a few of these queer blips: In the first episode, Linda Weaver is in a nameless parking lot asking for directions to the Washington Crossing Historic Park in Pennsylvania and runs into a truck driver who also happens to be a Christian. After a short conversation about "the Lord," Linda bids farewell by saying, "We'll be spending eternity together!" Within hours she's in Amish Country, pulling along a traditional Amish buggy (two of her female children are sitting inside) which soon overruns her grasp and Linda is summarily run over by the buggy. From the snippets of information gathered about the death of her husband, what we witnessed was a fairly succinct recreation of that tragic accident.