If I asked you what is the most precious thing you have, what would be your answer? Would it be your family or your possessions or your health? I think they are all important but to be fair if you die, so does all three of them with you. Your absence of health and your subsequent death, separates you from everything else and one truth remains self-evident. You can’t take it with you. You can only enjoy it while you’re still alive.
Now there are those that say, “Hey what about my faith? That’s important to me. They have a point but your faith is a belief in a life beyond this life and yes you have to earn it but just to simplify things for the sake of argument, what I am talking about is the here and now.
The older I get, and I am about to enter my octogenarian years, the more I realize how precious this thing we call life really is. You see so many friends and family, that are ending their earthly journey and you kind of get the feeling that someone is following you and how long can you stay one step ahead. You have known for years that there are things that can hasten your demise. Smoking, drinking to excess, drugs and other reckless behavior. Your own D.N.A. may say you’re predisposed to certain things and you need to be aware of that. I once talked to a man who was in his mid-forties who told me he was one of five boys in his family. All of them died in their forties from heart disease and although he said, “He was feeling good right now, he wasn’t feeling good about his future.” I couldn’t help but notice the pack of cigarettes in his pocket.
Now everyday people are taken from us just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. One minute earlier and that wrong-way driver would not have hit them. If they had stayed in the house instead of going outside during that thunderstorm to get the dog, lightning would not have hit them. Bridges have collapsed, trees have fallen on cars and people have been caught in the middle of a shootout. Yes, nothing could have been done about it. But it is still tragic. You can’t quantify life, yet people try.
Right now, we are caught up in a great controversy about all of the people that are dying in the pandemic. Some have gone so far as to say it’s just a bunch of old people. It’s almost as if they feel, like in the animal kingdom, were culling the herd. Others point to underlying conditions and say if they weren’t diabetic or hadn’t had lupus they won’t be gone. I say if they hadn’t caught Covid, they wouldn’t be gone either. People lived long and fruitful lives around many chronic diseases. Franklin Roosevelt ran this country for a dozen years and took us through a great world war and all from a wheel chair. Life is always precious. And some of the world’s greatest minds don’t have a body to match.
If there was one thing the Fire Service taught me it was the sanctity of life. You can’t categorially put people’s rights to live, with what they have to offer society. As firefighters we fought as hard to save grandma, as we did a teenager. There could be no distinction, they were all people who had a right to live. Sometimes events like this pandemic, make some people show their real colors.
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