The Three Musketeers

Instead of attending a memorial service yesterday, I did my best to celebrate the gift that is my life: I went out and had a fine meal with two dear friends, Doug Rees and Ken Bolden. Had I had my own way, I'd have had dinner with about 20 people, but they were the two who were in town and available.

I've been thinking a lot about what happened yesterday at Columbus Circle, and how that person was killed by the falling debris from the high rise that's being built. And that it should happen on the anniversary of 9/11 seemed, to me, somehow apropos. But I'm not really sure how to explain what I mean without sounding like I'm endorsing some sort of death on every anniversary of 9/11... What I'm really meaning is that it adds, in a strange way, some sort of poignancy to the tragic loss of a life; it makes us ponder it in ways we might not if it happened on any other day of the year.

I've bandied this number about before, but I read somewhere that around 25,000 people die around the world every day, for any number of reasons, and I've often wondered at what point you're supposed to be horrified by death. If ten people die in a flood, is that any less tragic than when 100,000 die in a monsoon? If one person is killed by falling debris from a construction site, is that less tragic than 3,000 dying? It's a question I don't think there's an easy answer to... because I go back and forth. At one moment I think that the loss of even a single human life is tragic, and then there are moments when I think that death comes for us all; it's a natural part of life, whether it comes through mishap or accident or murder or old age. But where does that leave me in the process of wrapping my head around the enormous, unfathomable losses my adopted home city has taken in the last year?

The point, ultimately, is that there are no easy answers, especially to the hard questions. But reflecting on this stuff lately has really put me in mind of Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being, which I think is pretty remarkable. In much the same way Pilgrim at Tinker Creek opened my eyes to the natural world around us - and our tendency to romanticize or personify it - Time Being has opened my eyes to the real meaning of death and how it's an integral part of life. Which is odd, since intellectually I've always known that, but have, apparently been a little slow on the uptake.