One split second can change everything.

Two cars travel on I-75 in Gaylord on a Sunday afternoon. A 2006 Mercury sedan heads south, driven by a 21-year-old Harrison woman. A 2014 Prius heads north, full of young people. Their parents were in the car ahead of them, a family making the Up North Michigan pilgrimage for some vacation time together.

How many of us are fortunate to have taken a family vacation up north in our lives? How many traveled I-75 to get there? How many families loaded the stuff into more than one car, how many times did the young people gratefully volunteer to drive themselves?

How many of us returned on I-75 on a Sunday afternoon in traffic that moves downstate in an erratic mass?

One split second in that all-too-familiar weekend migration horribly changed everything for at least two Michigan families this week.

The sedan, swerving to avoid a collision, flew through the median, flipped over and hit the Prius.

Two Toyota passengers were killed — Kaele, 22, and Sara Polzin, 16, sisters from Richmond. The sedan driver was airlifted to Munson Medical Center with life-threatening injuries. The Prius driver survived with broken bones and a concussion.

The horrific crash — witnessed by the parents of the lost sisters — stunned many of us this week with its random and horrible familiarity. A fundraiser for parents Walter and Lori Polzin raised close to $35,000 in 21 hours. Lori’s message on the GoFundMe page came with a request for all of us:

“No one is to blame. This was an accident. A huge unpreventable tragedy. A split second took away two of my babies. Please don’t compound my pain with anger and lies.

“Hug your loved ones. We love you. We are hurting.”

We cannot imagine their pain and that of the survivors and their families. It seems the least we can do to acknowledge the grace in our lives.

The Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning cites a downward trend in traffic fatalities, from 1,030 in 2017 to 691 (provisional) in 2019 according to its annual report. It’s good news yet cold comfort, as each of those numbers represents a life changed or taken in an instant.

We can spend at least that long acknowledging the collective loss for these families and what we are lucky to have in our own lives.