A Reflection on the Fragility of Life...

Today, I attended a funeral...

It wasn't a "normal" funeral...you know, one where the deceased has lived a long, full life, is in his or her 70s or 80s or 90s, and even though there is sorrow at the passing, there's not shock or devastation at the sudden, inexplicable loss that happened too soon...

Today, I went to a funeral for the son of a friend, a man I work with. His son, just 19 years old, was killed sometime shortly after 3AM this past Sunday. In the rain, which made the roads slick, in the middle of the night, he wrecked his car, got out, tried to cross the interstate to get to safety, and was hit by a semi-truck and killed.

It's not the details of the accident that provide the shock, though they are shocking enough. It's the sense of senseless loss, the end of an all-too-young life in an instant, the tragedy for a father and mother and four-year-old brother he leaves behind, of instantly being robbed of a bright light in their lives. As a father myself, I cannot fathom, nor do I hope that I will ever have to, the profundity of their loss. Fathers are not supposed to bury their sons...not supposed to bear the pain of going on after having someone so precious taken from them...

And, as for this child's mother...I cannot ever claim that I can know what she must feel. I have always been (just the tiniest bit) jealous of the bond between my wife and our children...she carried them inside her for 9 months, felt them, literally, as a part of her...gave them life, and then nurtured and fed that life, all in a way that I, of course, could not, a bond I can never share. No matter how much Dad must feel that his heart has been wrenched out of his chest, his grief, his pain, must pale in comparison to that of his wife...

This is the third time in just over ten years that I have attended a funeral like this one. The first, in November, 1997, was for the daughter of a friend of mine, a child who suffered from Shone's Syndrome, and lost her hard-fought battle at the tender age of 8 1/2. The second, in June, 2004, was a friend of my son's, an almost 8-year-old boy who died when, while riding his bike, he collided with a pickup truck. And now this one...

It is these times, when a life ends so suddenly, that we're reminded just how fragile and how precious life is. It is times like this when you realize that you may not get the time to mend a broken friendship, or to renew a relationship with a relative. Life is oh so short, oh so tenuous, and each day lived is a victory over death. In our rapid-fire culture here in the US, it seems sometimes as though we always live for tomorrow. If we work just a little harder now...if we invest ourselves in our careers a little more now...if we labor to make progress now, so that someday...SOME day...we might be able to slow down a little, take a breath, and smell the proverbial roses.

We see commercials on television that tell us we need "a plan" for our retirement, that play on our baby-boomer sensibilities, that tell us we can have our cake and eat it too, our sense that there is a future to which we are entitled...

We are entitled to nothing...

I am certainly not preaching a "live for today, to hell with the future" philosophy...certainly we should never fail to plan...but we must also learn to live, to wring every drop from life each and every day, because tomorrow is not guaranteed. The very title of this blog captures the essence of what I'm talking about..."Il dolce far niente"... literally, the sweetness of doing nothing...the idea that in those moments we can steal from the grind of daily life, obligation, work...one can find the sweetness that is what living is truly about...

Recently, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann (if you read this blog, you know Keith is my hero), there was a short piece about a man in the United Kingdom, 101 years old, who was preparing to run the London marathon. When asked what he does to prepare, the first thing he said was that he wakes up every morning...good prep!

There's no lesson here (I'm not qualified to offer one even if there were), and I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, except perhaps for catharsis for myself.

For each of my friends, I cannot know your grief and your pain, and I pray that I never shall, and I do not know what I can do to help you with yours, other than to pray for you, for your children, and for myself and mine...