Everyone has heard the story. A man on a cruise ship became momentarily distracted, and while he was distracted, his granddaughter crawled through an open window and fell to her death. Now the man—the grandfather—has been arrested and charged with negligent homicide. I suspect this is less about punishing the man and more about deflecting legal consequences for the cruise line. I’m sure there is plenty of guilt and remorse to go around. The cruise line should have done this thing; the grandfather should have done that thing. Blame is easy to pass around.
I felt a need to write something about the incident. And then I realized I had already written about it. The following text is from an essay I wrote on June 20, 2001, for a website I had then. I re-published it on this blog on June 20, 2011. I think it’s time for us to read it again. The title of the original essay is Tragedy in L.A. Hence the name of this essay: Tragedy Redux.
June 20, 2001
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.
Addendum
So how do I, the author of this snippet of wisdom, think this case should be handled?
I don’t have all the facts. But from what has been in the news, I would not charge the grandfather with homicide. A charge of homicide seems like piling tragedy onto tragedy.
In the news recently: a woman didn’t feed her baby and it starved to death. That’s negligent homicide. A man put a loaded gun on a table, and a toddler picked up the gun and shot and killed someone. That’s negligent homicide. But turning your head for a few seconds should not be a crime. As I said, humans are not failsafe robots. In fact, not even real robots are failsafe robots. A man looked away for a moment and within seconds tragedy struck. No one intended it—not the grandfather and not the cruise line. Where is it written that life has to be fair? Cars crash and planes crash, even when their human operators are doing their very best to be safe. That’s the nature of our reality, and it always will be.
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