No doubt it's the mark of getting older, but hardly a week goes by when a death — of someone I know or someone I know of — doesn't hit me in the gut. When I was younger and someone my age died (and it did happen, albeit not so often), I would dismiss it as a fluke (a rare disease) or a result of dangerous choices or the wages of war. But as you get older, the fluke excuse disappears, and asking over and over whether the person smoked or had regular colonoscopies (in other words, whether there was something that makes them different from you, that makes you safe) often doesn't work and in any event misses the point.
Two deaths hit me in the gut recently. Last week, my friend Diane's sister, Wendy Wayne, died after a four-year "battle" (such a strange word for what is not a fair fight) with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. I knew her mostly as Diane's sister, a woman who, like the rest of that family, was smart, committed, a great mother and also some kind of a big deal in the Bakersfield, Calif., community. When I heard that she had passed and typed her name into Google, it became clear just what an important figure she was in that community, known (behind her back because she was the exact opposite of a self-promoter) as the Mother Teresa of Bakersfield.
In a graduation speech she gave last year, she told the students: "When I was 20, I decided to leave my comfortable home in L.A. and my five siblings and travel halfway across the world to Africa to be a Peace Corps volunteer. Now, mind you, I'd never even been camping." She never let that kind of problem stop her. She was a nurse practitioner, a public health nurse, a childbirth educator, a credentialed community college teacher, Kern County planning commissioner and the chief administrator at two local nonprofit organizations dedicated to the health and well-being of children.
After she "retired" in 2004, she went to Louisiana to volunteer after Katrina, returned to Kenya where she had taught three decades earlier, and the next year went to Nigeria and India to administer vaccinations to children. She was a wife, a mother of two, a grandmother and, yes, a wonderful sister.
I never knew Robert Rainey, who died on May 31. His brother, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, interviewed me a few times. I vaguely remember people recommending him as a skilled chiropractor when I was having back problems, but I never went. Then I read in the paper that he had been found bludgeoned to death on the floor of his office — not far from where I live.
Robert Rainey was an adventurer. He traveled the world climbing mountains, which terrifies me just thinking about it. His "pastime" was extreme endurance running. A 33-mile canyon run was what he had planned to do just a few days after his death. The newspaper stories all describe him as a "gentle man" with a "kind heart" who took care of patients who couldn't afford to pay and found odd jobs for the homeless people who lived near his office. When his father died just short of his 97th birthday, he told friends he was aiming to live longer, to 100 or even 110. He died at 54.
Knowing, reading, hearing about these gentle giants who lived so well and died so young must teach us a lesson, if only we can divine it. Wendy died at home; it was expected. Robert died at his office, entirely unexpected and as yet unsolved. They both traveled the world and died in safe places. They both, it seems clear, loved life and were beloved.
I have long since stopped asking why so many good people die young and so many not so good people live long lives. I have stopped asking why. Now I look for lessons in lives well lived, and of course, that is, itself, the lesson. Live well. Follow your dreams. Make of your life a blessing — and not because there are any guarantees, but because there aren't.
To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
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4 Comments | Post Comment
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Susan, your two most recent essays are interesting but completely irrelevant to the political topic that is most pressing this week - that the president of the United States granted Executive Privilege to documents that his own Attorney General had offered to Congress the day before!
Where is your outrage that the highest officer of the courts in our country has lied for two years about events AFTER the murder of one of our own border patrol agents - caused by guns procured by criminals during a program created by his agency? This cannot be dismissed as politics. Holder has had to retract his written lies and his statements repeatedly.
Perhaps, like the Obama campaign itself, you are engaged in a process of distraction because of embarassment of the Obama administration actions and the failure of his economic policies. But why call yourself a political commentator if you do not comment on the important politics of the week?
Comment: #1
Posted by: Lesley Barnard
Fri Jun 22, 2012 11:02 AM
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Re: Lesley Barnard ...,,,
DEAR Lesley, I have been watching as much of the ISSA hearings as are being carried on C=Span. One thing that is clear is that no one has been able to determine exactly WHAT gun killed Agent Terry. Do you have some inside knowledge of the weapon. If so please share it with us and please pass that information along to Chairman Issa. I note that Chairman Issa has steadfastly refused to hafve any members of the previous administration called as witnesses and any time any witness before his committee even mentions the role of the previous administration in any gun walking operations he cuts them off rather angrily. Amazingly, he was on a Sunday morning talk show and when one of the other Panelist mentioned this, he forgot the fact that he was a guest on the show and not sitting in his tyrant's seat in his committee and rudely tried to silence the other guest. It did not work, the fellow got in his point about the previous administrations involvement in gun running. But what the heck, Republicans have been running guns and weapons to terroriswt since Bob McFarlane and Ollie North did it in the Iran-Conta days.
Comment: #2
Posted by: robert lipka
Sun Jun 24, 2012 5:59 PM
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Re: robert lipka
Cuckoo ! Cuckoo ! Cuckoo! The trivia king apologist in chief for all Democrat wrong doing, law breaking, anti America activity, lies and deceit and chief apologist for the boy barack has returned with even more idiocy. Irrespective of what gun or what bullet actually caused the death of Agent Terry, it cannot be gainsaid that Fast and Furious was an entirely illegal operation implemented by the boy's regime in October 2009. That it was instigated in 2009 by the boy's regime was expressly admitted by the liar Holder in the early hearings and reaffirmed recently when liar Holder had to retract his assertion that it was commenced under the previous administration.
Further, to the extent that Lipka refers to prior gun walking to Mexico, to wit, Wide Receiver, the trivia king seems wholly missinformed or blind to the truth. Nothing unusal there.
For those that want the facts not liberal lies deceit and mendacity here they are
1. Wide Receiver [under Bush] was a lawful, law enforcement gun smuggling interdiction operation against the cartels that ended in 2007, whereas Fast and Furious was an illegal effort to undermine and to attack lawful Americans by attacking the Second Amendment and their Second Amendment rights.
2. As part of Wide Receiver the Bush Administration informed the Mexican Government when arms and guns {400] were being walked into Mexico. Under the boy's illegal Fast and Furious, the Mexican Government was never informed that the program even existed, let alone when guns [2000] were being walked.
3. Under Wide Receiver, the guns walked were actually fitted with tracking devices and followed by ground resources and helicopter in order to actually track the guns. Under the boy's illegal Fast and Furious there was no intention and no effort to track at all.
4. Under Wide Receiver, over 1400 arrests of smugglers and other bad actors were made. Under Fast and Furious only a handful of innocent fall guys have been arrested, to wit, those US gun dealers forced to cooperate with the regime.
5. Wide Reveiver was closed down in 2007 so soon as the cartels understood what was happening and started removing the tracking devices. The boy's Fast and Furious, whose instigators knew that Mexican lives were being put at risk, was not closed down, even after hundreds of Mexican lives had been lost as a direct result thereof, until three of the guns, the boy had previously walked showed up at the scene of Agent Terry's death. Fast and Furious would still be operating but for that unexpected slip by the regime.
The inescapable conclusion, given force by the boy's laughable and indeed delusional declaration of executive privilege, is that the liar Holder and his boss the Liar in Chief the boy barack wanted to put guns from gun stores in America into the hands of the cartels, secretly, with no intention of tracking or interdiction, in order to create gun crime, by America supplied guns so as to create the impression that American gun laws were too lax and needed to be tightened.
Fast and Furious was a criminal conspiracy by the liar Holder and the boy barack's regime, designed to attack the Second Amendment.
The question to be asked is what is the boy barack hiding? The libs like Lipka loved Watergate, but now when confronted with something more evil and Nixonian that Nixon himself the apologists circle the wagons. Nothing to see here! Except that is for the parents of Agent Terry and anyone who still beleives we are a nation of laws and not under the divine rule of King boy barack the first.
Still, to borrow from Lipka, Democrats have always been treacherous, seditious haters of America. What's new?
Comment: #3
Posted by: joseph wright
Mon Jun 25, 2012 12:27 PM
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With any luck, death - and especially aging damage - will become radically more postponable in the next few decades. Two sources: Aubrey de Grey, and Maxlife. Best wishes, Forrest S. Walters, Erie, Pa.
Comment: #4
Posted by: forrest walters
Mon Jun 25, 2012 6:36 PM
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