SOCIETY HAS NO REMEDY WHEN A YOUNG LOVED ONE IS KILLED.

Byline: Richard Nemec

CEMETERIES look entirely different after you bury one of your children.

The one my 25-year-old daughter rests in sits on a hillside with an unobstructed view of Marina del Rey, Westchester and the constant jet traffic of landings and takeoffs at Los Angeles International Airport.

A brisk breeze flows almost constantly, bruising the flower arrangements but at the same time giving visitors the impression that there are higher, more eternal powers in the vicinity than merely man's silver birds crisscrossing the sky.

There is no age discrimination in cemeteries. Infants and centenarians rest side by side. Most people know this even if they haven't buried a young person, but it becomes much more chillingly apparent after you do so.

My daughter, Kristen, joined us occasionally in recent years when my wife and I put flowers on the graves of my wife's parents, who were buried in Orange County after their respective deaths in late 1990 and mid-1994. Kristen, as we did, took notice of the unusually (to us) large number of people age 20 or under buried within close proximity of my mother- and father-in-law, both of whom lived into their 70s.

Similarly, we all read the almost daily news accounts of local young people, usually age 17 or younger, being tragically killed in drive-by shootings, traffic accidents and random acts of fate. We never talked about it with one another because for us living, relatively safe individuals it was still an abstraction. One we could empathize with, for sure, but still distant, not totally relevant to us.

Now that my daughter has become the victim of a hit-and-run driver on the streets of Manhattan, I can do more than empathize with the families of so many victims in well-publicized crimes, tragedies and natural disasters. I now know what it is like to feel the eternal void of a young loved one lost to some random, senseless act that should never have happened.

I now know what it means to see your life, whatever it amounts to in the future, forever and irreparably altered.

The district attorney in New York City, a compassionate, caring female prosecutor, has quickly obtained a four-count indictment from the Manhattan Grand Jury in my daughter's case: (a) vehicular manslaughter, (b) leaving the scene of an accident, (c) aggravated homicide and (d) driving without a license. The last charge, the least severe (only a misdemeanor), is the most unnerving because you realize the suspect should not have been behind the wheel of a car at any time, let alone the early morning hours of May 25 over Memorial Day weekend just past; his license had been suspended for too many moving violations.

This is when all of a person's grief and sadness is replaced by a searing anger - not at a nameless, faceless individual you do not know, but at the whole set of incredibly remote circumstances that would place your daughter in harm's way.

You rage against everyone and everything, from God on down the pecking order.

The laws and the social service systems are changed today to help victims in an institutional sense. The prosecutors defer to you before making any plea-bargain deals. Counselors seemingly are available to whomever wants to avail themselves.

But there is no way society can help put back together the network of broken lives created by one random, senseless act of irresponsibility like the one that killed my beautiful daughter, who had just completed her first year of a two-year master's degree engineering program at Virginia Polytechnic University and had earlier in the evening been a bridesmaid at a college sorority sister's wedding in the Big Apple.

Who can help my wife sleep each early Sunday morning, a few hours past midnight, which is the time a doctor at a Greenwich Village hospital emergency room had to call and tell us Kristen was dead?

How do you cope with the fear every time your only remaining child, a son and older brother to Kristen, drives on a highway or takes a plane trip between Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, Mich., where he and his fiancee live?

How do you forget the wedding, children and lifetime adventures my daughter will never experience? And the endless ache for the voice and smile you will never see or experience again - at least not in this life?

No judge, jury or justice system deals with that part of being a victim's parent, sibling or other loved one.

Family, friends and loved ones continue to provide a cushion of sanity, a sliver of hope for the future. But they cannot restore the loss.

You are forever violated. The Grim Reaper has knocked at your door. And you will never again be naive enough to think he can't, or won't, come again.

Your life can never, ever be the same. There is no closure.