Suddenly

When I was ten my older sister broke her ankle when the car she was riding in sped off a winding lake road and slammed into a tree. 

When I was sixteen I vomited at the feet of a detained drunk fifteen year-old while, a few feet away, medics shoved my sister’s bones back into her mangled leg and loaded her boyfriend into an ambulance. 

A couple years later she and two friends and their small jeep were buried but alive under a pile of steel girders thrown from a jack-knifed eighteen wheeler.

A few Mother’s Days back my Aunt’s heart stopped beating mid-sentence, just after church, in the middle of lunch. She was forty-something.

Just over a year ago an old friend was electrocuted while baptizing students on a Sunday morning. He was thirty-three.

A week ago Becky’s cousin choked on a piece of steak and soon after slept in a medically induced coma while doctors appraised how badly his brain was damaged when it went without oxygen for nearly twenty minutes.

Last night he was “unplugged” from his breathing machine and died. He was thirty-four with a wife and two small girls.

No soundtrack growing more and more dissonant as the moment of tragedy approached.  No foreshadowing of events to come.  No hint that life as usual would soon or ever be interrupted.  No, if life were a movie it would be a jarring thing to watch.  The beach party scene is suddenly interrupted by footage of a young girl limping from a crunched vehicle to flag down passing motorists.  Two small girls in pajamas sit at a breakfast with their dad and then, just what seems like seconds later, stand sobbing in Sunday dress beside his casket.

It’s as if the editor is splicing bits of film together at random with no concern for how his decisions make the audience feel.  The end result is beautiful and bizarre and frightening but truly makes no sense to most of us most of the time There’s no guessing who or what will enter the frame next.

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