Death is the part of life that shadows the procession when we lose those we love.
It’s there as we say our expected goodbyes to our elders. Expected doesn’t make goodbye less painful, but it’s grief life prepares us for.
That’s how it was with my parents as both died after long illnesses.
The death of someone young hits differently. It defies the natural order of life. Most often its arrival is unexpected. There’s no process to prepare you for when a child, or young person, is lost to tragedy.
When an elder dies — a death long foreshadowed — the path through grief can be a celebration of a life well lived, recognizing its many accomplishments and milestones. But when we lose someone young, we’re left with just frayed threads once tied to a life unrealized.
I’ve been fortunate in that I haven’t lost someone young and especially close. I remember a few students from high school, but they were people I only knew of, rather than knew.
One loss had a lasting impact. It came later, after I had children of my own. It was the death of a high school athlete, the star of his team in the Bitterroot when I worked there as a sportswriter in the 1990s. I apologize if I’ve written about this before, but some of the kids were partying one Saturday night in the middle of the season and the star was caught drinking. Since he was a senior, he knew this ended his athletic career.
By morning he’d committed suicide.
I have since opposed the “one strike and you’re out” policy regarding school activities that are so common these days. When we’re dealing with young people it seems the adult reaction should be a little more nuanced than reading a rule book and telling a kid, “You’re done.”
What if keeping a kid playing keeps them alive?
Right now, the world is filled with news of young people dying. At least 27 children and counselors at a youth camp in Texas died in flash flooding last weekend.
More remain missing and the death toll will surely rise.
As horrible as that is, it’s the recent death of another sports figure that has hit me hardest. Diogo Jota, a Portuguese striker who played for my favorite team, Liverpool Football Club, died in a car crash two weeks ago, just a week after he married the mother of his three young children.
His younger brother died in the passenger seat.
I’m not trying to equate tragedies here. The magnitude of the Texas disaster is hard to comprehend. But sports fans bond with the athletes they support, and I’ve watched Jota play a lot of football.
Athletics isn’t an art, but it does produce items of lasting beauty. Goals are singular moments when a footballer executes to perfection. Intensifying the drama is that the same moment represents the pinnacle of defeat for the defender who failed to stop the goal.
Football is a simple game, and the stakes are always clear.
American sports fans don’t always take to football. Our culture prefers sports where the scoring comes ceaselessly as surf crashes onto the beach. You know, like basketball.
The infrequent scoring of football is more like good graphic design. The goal is where the eye lingers. The empty space around it amplifies its beauty.
A goal is life and Jota netted 65 for Liverpool. Maybe the best was his last, the lone goal in a 1-0 win over Everton in the Merseyside Derby in April. He was on his way back to Liverpool for preseason when he crashed. He had a lot more goals in him.
I know that Bitterroot basketball star had more baskets in him, as well. And what we lost from all those beautiful babies in Texas is incalculable.
They were all taken away from us too soon.