When forever isn't very long

When I read on the news that Natasha Richardson had a tragic brain injury, I began to follow the story. She was one of those people who I knew about, hadn't ever seen her films or plays, but always liked seeing photos or reading anything about her. Then the news came that she was brain dead. I hoped it was not so; but it was and eventually the story changed to her death. I felt bad for her, for her family. I related to it as a mother and with how it makes a person wonder-- what the heck is life all about!

Her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, has been an actress I have admired since she played Guinevere in Camelot. She is one of the few big stars who has aged naturally (or so it appears) and that alone makes her enjoyable to watch today. For ironies, she had been doing the play, The Year of Magical Thinking, based on Joan Didion's book about dealing with grief and Didion's loss of her husband and her only daughter's coma. (Didion's daughter later died).

Then there is Liam Neeson, Natasha's husband, and one of my favorite actors. He seems to always choose quality roles. In any scene, he is the center of focus. He projects easily the image of a powerful man. Last week, he lived through for real what he once played in the movie, Love Actually.

Natasha appeared to have lived a full life, a good person (in the most true sense of that word), loving mother, wife, friend, and in general have done things to be admired by putting her own career secondary to her marriage and raising her boys. From all I have read, she was a nontraditional, earthy woman who was loved by all who knew her. Natasha from her neighbors

Suddenly she was dead, and in a freak accident where she obviously didn't realize her life was even at risk. It's the kind of situation where most of us can't even imagine someone could end up dead. How many people hit their heads, get concussions, skull fractures, but they don't die? How many hit their head hard enough to kill themselves when they are on soft snow? As her story unfolded, we learned these kind of head injuries happen more than we think; but still it's hard to get a handle on how it could be.

From a very young age, I have seen stuff happen that told me that forever sometimes isn't very long. I do not believe that old saw that god never gives us more than we can handle. I also don't believe when it's your time, you will go. Is that really how it gets decided; and if she had stayed at the resort one less day, she'd have died somewhere else? That's a fatalistic view that means we really have no control. Well maybe we don't but what makes us want to believe something or someone else does?

To me, we get what we get, and why do we have to pull god or a deeper meaning in on any of it? The good don't get rewarded or always die young. Stuff happens and while some want to find a reason, for me it happens with no logic.

Out here in the country, because farming and logging can be dangerous, I can quickly think of three instances of the same kind of work disaster leading to three different endings. All involved men who had done the same kind of job many times and then comes that one that isn't like the others. In one case, the man died. In the second, the man lost his eye, his ear, had brain damage and likely will be handicapped. The third was Farm Boss. When he was on the tractor, handling large hay bales, bent down to look at something, the chain broke, missed his head but knocked off his hat.

People want to make sense of why one is killed, another handicapped, and the third gets off with a whoa! I just don't think there is a why. Stuff happens. Yes, sometimes it's carelessness but a lot of the time, it's the kind that someone else did the same silly thing and missed the tragedy by a whisper. What makes us as humans want to put a why into it? I think probably it's a desire to control, but our control is fragile and her death reminds us all of that and to

love while and wherever we can.
Live every moment as fully as possible.
Live as though today is our last day
and also that we will live to be 101.4.
Life comes with no guarantees.
The unexpected often is exactly what happens.
Forget the odds as they are meaningless
where it comes to life.

and sometimes life is very sad and makes absolutely no sense-- at all! Will it after we die? Maybe and maybe not.

(The photo is one of mine from one of my favorite places, the Gros Ventre, in Wyoming. You see the Tetons in the distance. This big rock showed evidence, through droppings, of being where an eagle roosted. Before I left it, I picked a few wildflowers to leave below the rock as an offering of appreciation for the beautiful place and my time there. It is how I feel about life.)