Managing Mortality Obsessing On Prospect Of Tragedy Prevents Us From Living Full Life

I was sitting in the sunlight of a perfect summer day when my niece told me that a plane had crashed over the Atlantic ocean. All passengers were presumed to be dead.

We, my niece, sister, mother and brother, had gathered for our annual reunion. A small, ferociously loyal group, we meet each summer to laugh, eat, tell stories, and eat some more.

Usually our group is larger, with another niece and at least one husband, but this year the niece sprouted wings and the husbands were flying to meetings, one across the country, the other across the world. When we heard the doomed flight was destined for Paris, we breathed a momentary sigh of relief. No one in our family was going to France, at least not that morning. But they could have been, and we all knew it.

In the past year, my husband has flown more than 100,000 miles. He has been to every major city and most minor jungles in the world. Sometimes I go with him, but usually he flies alone. The trips are not vacations. For my husband, and for many Americans, traveling is simply a part of the way corporate America does business: globally. His experiences have brought the world home to me, making it smaller and more accessible.

And with this familiarity comes the realization that our hold on the world is more fragile and interconnected than we could ever have imagined.

I have taken my husband to the airport hundreds of times. Trips to Tokyo, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, seem as ordinary as trips to the grocery store. Domestic flights to the East Coast are simply day trips. Still, there is not a flight he takes that I don’t silently pray for his safety, the safety of all his fellow travelers, the safety of every last nut and bolt and engine that lifts that enormous metal bird into the sky and takes the man I love most in the world to another place. And when I hear his voice over a thin black line thousands of miles away saying, “I’m here,” I never forget to say thank you. Do I think my prayers protect him? Maybe. But surely someone’s prayers went with the passengers on TWA Flight 800, and still, they are all gone.

How could this happen, we wonder, and why? Physical evidence aside, the real answer will probably always elude the living.

Certainly, we die because we are mortal. We live in a body that has an expiration date and in a world where the failure of reason, kindness, chemotherapy or a parachute can end our lives just when we thought we were finally going to see the Eiffel Tower.

The searing kind of pain felt by those left behind cannot be assuaged by well-intended cliches. People say, “It’s for the best,” and “Everything happens for a reason,” because they don’t know what else to say and cannot bear the silence between their words.

But clearly, “the best” is not always what happens to us. It’s the meaning we derive from our tragedies that helps us to go on, to dream a new dream, pass new legislation, lobby for better security, donate to cutting-edge research, hold another’s hand and perhaps even to fly again.

Days after the crash, my brother walked into the kitchen and told me that a bomb had exploded at the Olympic Park in Atlanta. A child had gone to a concert with her mother to listen to the music, to celebrate summer. And now her mother was dead. A newscaster posed the question, “Are we ever really safe?” My answer would probably be somewhere between never and always.

Each of us, in our lifetime, will say goodbye to everything we love. We will lose our childhood, our adolescence, our adulthood and our old age. We will let go of lovers, friends, children, pets, houses and dreams. If we stick around long enough and pay attention, we may even give up our illusions.

Are we safe? Most of the time. Are we mortal? All of the time. And in between the being born and the dying, there’s life all around us just waiting to be lived.

Next week I will take my husband to the airport again. Just another routine flight. I know the path that takes him out and brings him home as well as I know the back of my own hand. Or his. The hand I will now hold more reverently, as if it were life.

MEMO: Kathleen Corkery Spencer is a free-lance writer based in Spokane.