Tragedy in L.A.

I wrote this short essay 10 years ago, on June 20, 2001, for a website I had at that time. It still seems relevant.

As I write this, the TV news is telling the world about the death by drowning of a small child who was attending a pool party in Los Angeles. For a few minutes, at least, no one was watching the child. A few minutes is all it takes for a child to lose his life. Certainly, the death of a small child is a tragedy, and my heart goes out to the parents of that child. Yet it seems to me we are forgetting something important, or perhaps we are denying something important.  We are forgetting that we all are only imperfect human beings and not failsafe robots programmed for perfect operation. We are forgetting, too, that death is a part of life.

Our existence on Earth is brief and transitory. We are born, we live, we die. While we live, we know joy and we know pain.  Life is precarious. Our 21st century culture seeks to banish death, seeks to blame death on someone so that we can punish that someone. But children cannot be watched 24 - 7, and life has risks. Sometimes a tragedy is no one's fault. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy, the result of a confluence of events we could not control.

There was a time when a family stricken by cruel fate would seek out their spiritual advisor or find solace with family and friends. That time may now be a relic of the past. The parents of this child say they are consulting their attorney. Now, when one of life's tragedies overtakes us, our first thought, too often, is to find someone to blame, someone to sue, someone to punish. Our pain can cause us to strike out at others we perceive to be at fault, and we may not pause to consider that those others may be going through their own private suffering and regret.

Sometimes, of course, there really is someone to blame. Sometimes it really is appropriate to take someone to court. Sometimes. But all the laws and lawyers in the world will not eliminate the pain and suffering caused by life's accidents. That is the nature of our existence. Accepting this simple reality furthers healing; denying it, seeking someone or something to blame, delays healing and prolongs grief. For in denial, we are saying that accidents should not happen. We are saying that our world can and should be a risk-free world. And that means we are denying our reality and opting to live, instead, in a world that can never be.