LUCKY US
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
We are so lucky when we live lives that are just ordinary ones, day-to-day ones, uneventful ones – lucky us.
At this time of life, we get used to having parents pass on, friends too, but most of those exits are expected ones – the product of aging/genes or some form of a disease. And while we’ve all had our share of stories about people losing family members to COVID, they pale compared to the daily news from Ukraine, where senseless losses are now everyday conversation …
But even considering all of that, there is no thud to our thoughts than losing a child. Recently one of those car-crash headlines – the anonymous kind we read about someone getting killed by a drunk driver or some freak thing in lousy weather or disoriented traffic, but they seem so far away, not connected to us because it’s somebody else – wasn’t some stranger’s kid, but instead this was the child of a friend – a reader of this column.
I didn’t rush to offer condolences because it was one of those stories where the news coverage says the names were not being released, so it took time for the name to come out then you realize it didn’t just crush a car – it was a crushing blow to a family …
When news is bad, when it’s someone else’s tragedy – that means we are safe, one more day, from disaster knocking on our door.