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The Goddess Speaks Sally Sorenson |
Tragedies show how
fragile life can beWe should have guessed that 2004, for all its elusive promises, would begin harshly. My husband and I watched it arrive in silent fury, cloaked in frozen white, piling in drifts outside our vacation home in Park City, Utah. We had to shovel through the first of the year just to get out and fly back to Hawaii. Here in Honolulu the year entered with a similar wet slap in the face, flooding right up to our front door as harbinger of bad news.
But we didn't know the New Year's full intensity until word spread along the family network that my nephew's newborn baby died. Arriving shortly after Christmas, his first child lived only 10 days. Condolences rang hollow. We never even saw the infant, born in an Air Force town in Texas.
We felt helpless. What could be done long distance for a young couple who didn't get a chance to be a family? We could only grieve sympathetically, the universal grief of parenthood that bares us to the special vulnerability of hurting more for others than for ourselves. We share the pain and disappointment they feel of empty arms and an unfulfilled future.
Right now no one can tell them that there will be a next time, and next time will be different. They are young and healthy, and life stretches before them full of possibilities and, yes, probably more children.
Not so for the couple our age. The second blow of '04 was news of the sudden death of a promising young man. The 24-year-old son of friends was our friend, too. The bright, enthusiastic overachiever graduated from Emory College had come to Hawaii to work for Aston hotels, his first job out of college.
He loved to surf, to scuba-dive, in fact, taking on everything athletic and challenging, which is why he chose to spend his high school years at the winter sports school in Park City. The specialized private school trains Olympic hopefuls and other young athletes dedicated to become the best of the best. Ross trained and lived and studied as one of them, and when Utah hosted the 2002 Olympics, he could boast that half his graduating class of roughly 15 was competing in the events.
He'd returned to Park City for a holiday ski trip and was found dead in his family's condo. The circumstances are, at this moment, a mystery. But no answer is going to be good enough. Nothing is going to give this young man back his life and make it all right.
THE TWO DEATHS, plus the death of the New Jersey cheerleader on Maui, have nothing in common other than the tragedy of lives cut short, before they really got a chance to experience their due. Both touched a raw spot we all own and hope never to acknowledge. Sometimes children die.
For every parent who has forsaken sleep to stand over the crib of a wheezing child, this is the awful truth. For the parents who answer the 2 a.m. phone call and pray it isn't the police with bad news, sometimes the unthinkable happens. Every parent who has waved goodbye to a summer camper, a coed, a soldier, harbors that worry. Be safe.
In the deepest, darkest closet of our souls, we give thanks that we are not the parents dealing with the nightmare that haunts us all.
If there is light in dark moments, it's the reminder that life is precious and often fragile, and we are grateful to have each day. We want to reach out and hold our own grown children -- all of childbearing age -- and tell them to be careful. Drive defensively, wear a bike helmet, eat a healthy diet, hug a spouse and most of all live with a joyful heart. The hopes and dreams of parents who love them ride on their shoulders like wings.
Sally Sorenson is a Honolulu-based writer.
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