Fragility

I saw a nine-month-old baby at the optometrist’s office 30 minutes ago. She was crawling on the floor, chewing on a rubber duck, and clapping just because she could. As I watched her drool and crawl and clap and stare – at me and my kids, at her grandma, at everything and everybody – I wondered what it was like to be her. I wondered if she would always be healthy and happy. I wondered how long she would live.

Tom “Killer” Kowalski was found dead yesterday at the age of 51. The popular writer/reporter who covered the Detroit Lions for Booth Newspapers was just 51 years old.

Last month, cancer killed Charlie Cain – a well-liked journalist who worked for the Detroit News for 34 years – at the age of 60.

Samantha Smith

Bobby Kennedy is dead, and Paul Wellstone, and Ann Richards and Molly Ivins and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and Walter Cronkite and Samantha Smith, the little girl who became famous back in the early 1980s for promoting peace in a letter to Yuri Andropov, leader of the Soviet Union. She was just 13 when she died in a plane crash in the summer of 1985.

TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes died in a car crash in Honduras at age 30. R&B singer Aaliyah was just 22 when the small plane she was in crashed shortly after takeoff in the Bahamas. Anne Frank died at 15 in a concentration camp.

The Challenger crew

I, like others, remember the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle like it was yesterday. It was on January 28, 1986, when we lost Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik due to a faulty O-ring seal in a solid rocket booster.

I was sad when I heard that Soupy Sales died, and Barbara Billingsley and Tom Bosley and Detroit’s Sir Graves Ghastly and Jack Parr and Don Knotts and Lucille Ball. (I loved Lucy.) Even though they lived a relatively long time in relative comfort, their exit from this mortal plane still represents candles that were extinguished. Darker is darker.

It’s too bad that George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks, people who didn’t just make us laugh but also made us think, had to go when they did. And say what you will about drug abuse, but Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse and River Phoenix and Charlie Parker left too soon.

Some deaths are especially sad. Children should but don’t always outlive their parents, as we all know, and the obituaries describing the strength and courage of, and lessons taught by, young cancer victims and kids with bad hearts and not-rare-enough diseases always make me cry.

The tenth anniversary of the September 11 tragedy is fast approaching. Surely we’ll be bombarded with media retrospectives and wounds will be reopened for those who suffered the loss of friends and loved ones. Although the significance of September 11 has evolved for me and the attacks were subsequently used by unscrupulous politicians to justify the unjustifiable, 2,966 human beings didn’t deserve to lose their lives on that bright and terrible morning.

I wrote about Eleanor Josaitis, who co-founded a charitable organization, Focus: HOPE, back in 1968 and enhanced the quality of life for countless fellow Michiganders before cancer took her earlier this month at the age of 79. She was mourned by thousands.

Some, like Elvis and Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, are mourned by millions when they die; others leave more quietly after leaving amazing marks on their loved ones, like my wife’s dad, Daulet Singh, and my good friend’s husband, Charles McGlashen. Although 6,026 soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan to date, I’m ashamed to admit that I know the names of just two or three.

Why am I thinking about death? Why write about it? It helps me to remember – when I’m offended or unfriended or irked or depressed – that life is short and fragile. No one is guaranteed a single day, no matter how good we are or what kind of lives we lead or how many others are affected for better or worse by our being here. I really need to try harder to live each day as if it were my last. Because it might be.