Imagine, we whispered to each other on the playground. Imagine being buried alive. Do you think he was aware, as all that sand held him fast and stole away his breath? Did the weight of it crush him? How long did he live in oppressive darkness?

Another boy was run over by his father while riding a dirt bike in his back yard. The dad was driving a dump truck and just didn’t see his son before the kid disappeared beneath the tires of the rig. A tragedy. A nightmare.

We speculated long about it. Surely, the old man was driven to madness by the deed. He probably prowled his back lot in the dead of night, waiting for his boy to come home.

Occasionally, we dared each other to run across that yard after dark. Don’t let the old man catch you, we’d warn the sucker who took the dare. Because surely the man was insane. Surely, he’d snatch any kid who dared to venture to the scene of the atrocity.

A boy we knew hung himself in his bedroom one morning before school. With absolute certainty, the neighborhood kids decided the house was haunted. We avoided it at all costs. Unless, of course, it was time to dare some sap to peek in the window of the very bedroom where the suicide had occurred.

Kids have an astounding ability to turn tragedy into tantalization. While grown-ups weep and wonder, kids marvel and muse. And who’s to say which is the better technique for dealing with loss and confusion?

On a recent weekend, I went to a cemetery in my hometown. I searched for the graves of young people I had once been close to. One was a young man killed in a car crash. Another was a teenage girl who shot herself. I found the latter, couldn’t find the former. But either way, I was astounded by how many years covered the graves of each of them.

It’s just amazing how quickly we adapt to dealing with the untimely deaths of friends and associates. By the time most people become young adults, funerals are commonplace. We slap on our best duds and head for the church or funeral parlor. We give our sympathies to the family, try to pray at the graveside service and resume the business of feeling indestructible.

What teenager hasn’t said to his friends, “Man, if something ever happens to me, I want you all to have the biggest bash ever. Get a keg of beer and put it on my coffin. Crank the tunes and have yourselves one rip-roaring time.”

It’s the sense of indestructibility talking. How many graveside keggers have you really been to?

Young people generally die through violent means and it’s almost always unexpected. Young people die in car wrecks. They die in fires or accidental overdoses. There are freak childhood mishaps, such as avalanches, and more common tragedies, like drowning.

Shock, sorrow and morbid fascination. That’s what death inspires for the young.

Then one day, weird things begin to happen. You lose a friend to cancer or heart disease. Another succumbs to an aneurysm while yet another is felled by some malady you’ve never heard of.

You get older. Affliction, rather than catastrophe, begins to eliminate the people in your life. That girl who drank herself silly at every party became an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis. That guy with the wicked temper developed hypertension and dropped dead of a heart attack. Time to tune in to the obituary page daily because you have a lot of friends with one foot in.

Death is a much drearier thing when you’re all grown up. You understand the science of it now, so you don’t spend much time speculating about ghosts. You don’t gather in a whispering circle of friends to discuss the morbid details. You gather over coffee and talk about the poor widow and the poor children left behind. Nobody double-dog dares someone else to visit the scene of the death. Death is sad, not spooky. Sad is far worse than spooky.

Trips to cemeteries always make me think of these things. But so does the job I do. I tend to write about calamity: the fatal crashes, the deadly fires, the life-ending crime sprees. I don’t write so much about lung cancer, embolisms and renal failure.

Violent death as opposed to creeping death. Bleak reality instead of the ghosts of childhood imagination.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.