The Edge

I've been hearing on the radio about two young women who were kayaking in Maine this week, disappeared, and later were both found "unresponsive" in the 48 degree water - dead. First they had not shown up when they were expected to, then their empty kayaks were found, and finally their bodies were found. They were 18 and 20.

With our world-wide media, tales of young people dying come to us all the time, and we can develop a numbness to this information out of necessity. But something about these girls' story struck me deeply. I heard about it when they were simply missing, and then again once their bodies had been recovered. I can imagine them going out happily for their Sunday kayaking, I can imagine a variety of waves, accidents that could have flipped one and then the other into the water, their last moments in this life. And I can imagine the people who love them, mourning them now and forever.

Their deaths came to them with such swiftness; not through an illness in which it could have been anticipated, but just by an accident that happened to befall them both that day. In the morning they were alive, planning an adventure, and later that day their lives were done.

The knowledge of what has happened to these two young women reminds me forcefully, deeply, that we are all right at the edge of death all the time - potential death, at least. Are we not? A gas explosion, a heart attack, food caught in our throats as we eat alone... A few years back, a man in western Mass was walking down the sidewalk when a manhole cover was blown high into the air by a freak explosion in the sewer pipe and landed on him, crushing him. Death is with us, around us every moment, and we simply don't know when it will take us. (Garrison Keillor's chosen poem for today's Writer's Almanac touches this subject, as well.)

This knowledge is a gift: we are straddling the line between life and death at every moment. When this knowing comes to mind, it offers an effortless route to an especially sacred presence. Because if I might die in five minutes (or one minute), then it does not really matter if I get through my to-do list for the day. It matters that I really listen to and look at my boy as he chatters about his world to me. It matters that I drink in the astonishing sheen on the swallow's feathers out the window. That I notice and point out to my boy the gentle way the clouds are moving across our sky. What a precious gift, this awakening to what actually matters, when we are also gifted a little more time to love it all.