EASING THE PAIN : They Can’t Forget, but Raiders Slowly Recovering From Shock of Toran’s Death

In professional football, where a sense of proportion seems to be the enemy, where George Allen describes losing as “dying a little,” and players are routinely reminded to perform as if this were their last play, real death has intruded.

Whatever the final small drill was that Stacey Toran ran Saturday morning at Raider training camp in Oxnard, it was his last.

He died Saturday night when his car rolled over a block from his home, for the crime of not buckling his seat belt.

And there is no “dying a little.”

His Raider teammates long ago learned to deal with loss. But in that context, loss meant a friend suffering a knee injury, or getting waived. The friend would no longer feel right about coming around, and the new difference in stations would throw a kink into the old relationship.

But this is death: unjust, cold and unlike the outcomes of those fantasies that we divert ourselves with, final.

Getting over this is not as simple as saying, “We’re playing the 49ers Saturday.”

“It’s hard getting back to normal,” said cornerback Lionel Washington, a friend of Toran’s. “You look out there, you expect to see Stacey and he’s no longer there.

“It’s something I continually think of. Each morning I wake up, he’s not there. You walk by his locker and he’s not here anymore. He’s gone.

“The other day (before Monday’s scrimmage against the Dallas Cowboys), myself, Matt Millen, Stefon Adams, Eddie Anderson--when we’re stretching, we have a circle. Stacey was always right there with us in that group. Matt turned around and was about to say something to Stacey and he realized, Stacey’s not there.

“When we stretch, I’m trying to get my mind in focus on what I have to do. Every time I was trying to concentrate, Stacey would pop up in my mind. I think it’ll take a little time before it wears off.

“You think about that--it could have been me, it could have been somebody else. I guess, when it’s your time, it’s your time. It was his time. You hate to see someone go like that, but whenever it’s your time to go, no matter how it feels or how tragic it is, then it’s going to happen.”

This was Tuesday in Oxnard, a beautiful morning after a light walk-through. The team’s routine was returning to normal. Here and there, players smiled at this or that, but it was still short of the old, raucous, everybody-needling-everybody-else tone. “I think it is,” Washington said. “You go in the training room where they’ve got his picture taped up on the wall. You go through the door, your eye is going to focus on that picture and at that moment, you’re going to think of what happened again.”

So they grieve and then they will try to cut it off. Life is earnest, life is real, their lives continue.

“I agree with that,” Washington said. “Some would say he’s gone to a better place now. You have to hope everything goes well with his family and that they get through the hard times. Because I think they’re the ones who are suffering the most right now. You’ve got to say a prayer for them each night, that the Lord helps them get through this.”

The irony is that, according to Toran’s friends, he always used to buckle his seat belt. Maybe, as many do, he let it slide on the occasional short trip in his neighborhood, but they remember him as conscientious about it.

“Stacey and I had gone out to dinner one night and gone to a club,” Washington said. “The first thing he said in the car was, ‘Wear your seat belt. Wear your seat belt. I’ve got to find your seat belt.’

“It’s strange, when they said he didn’t have his seat belt on. Nobody could believe it, because even when he was sitting in the back seat, he was looking for his seat belt to put on.”

Washington said he will buckle up first thing for the rest of his life.

It isn’t the legacy you would have wanted Stacey Toran to leave. He was 27 and it should have been too early for legacies of any kind, but there it is.

Time is short.

Nothing is guaranteed.

Remember Stacey Toran.