In a Moment

Today, somewhere, a young girl had her first glorious, awkward kiss. A mother held her baby in her arms and wondered at the softness and the curve of his tiny head. A sixteen-year-old came home waving his temporary license triumphantly in his hand. A man gave his silken and beveiled daughter away to the man of her dreams. Somewhere today, the last word of a first novel was typed with a flourish, someone signed the papers to buy her first home, and someone played the guitar on stage to a roomful of ardent fans. And somewhere today, someone was having the worst day of her life.

I spent this day in near-halcyon summer bliss: at a water park on a hot day with my husband and friends of ours. We ran around like children, screaming as we slid down the knee-shakingly steep slope of "The Avalanche" ride, laughing and chatting as we floated lazily under the hot sun in the slow-moving lagoon. We ate soft-serve ice cream, and got slightly sunburned, and afterward we went out to dinner and ate crab legs and shrimp and clam chowder with cheddary biscuits. And while we were doing all of this; while we were living a day as carefree as one almost never has after one enters adulthood, a little boy lost his battle with cancer.

When I heard the news from my dear friend, upon arriving home from our summery day at the waterslides, that her young friend had at last slipped into that last long night, the thing that kept running through my head was to wonder: what was I doing at the exact moment that he breathed his last breath? At the moment his mother realized that it was truly the end? At the moment the doctor pronounced those words "time of death", so irrevocably? Why was it me that got to savor those licks of butterscotch ice cream, those delicious cool dips into bright blue water? Why me, when this little child deserved it so much more?

I did not know this child personally, but I have a small small inkling of the massive enormity of the grief his loved ones are feeling, after having watched family members survive the accidental death of their toddler two years ago. I didn't then, and I don't now, know how to process this type of brutal unfairness in the world. The arbitrary decision that an innocent life be cut short before having that first kiss, that chance to accomplish something great, to fall in love and have children of one's own. The arbitrary decision that some parent must survive the unthinkable: the death of her child. If this is the sorrow necessary for the existence of its counterpart, joy, I sometimes wonder if it is not too high a price to pay. Can good ever justify its own existence, if evil is a necessary requisite?