Overcoming the — shock? surprise? shrug? — of Steve Irwin’s untimely death, and I came across this:
People have taken me to task for the tone of my Irwin post, fine. But Andy’s one-line link to the news had a tagline that’s haunted me all day: “died doing what he loved.” It’s a statement, rationale, explanation that’s meant, I guess, to help make sense of an otherwise senseless, random event.
I wanted to type ‘accident,’ but the whole point is that it’s not referring to some banal everyday activity like crossing the street or a sudden illness like stage 2 pancreatic cancer, or even something stupidly avoidable like standing under a tree in a lightning storm. Beyond the basics, though, we regularly put ourselves at varying degrees of risk doing “what we love” whether that’s our jobs, our hobbies, our compulsions, or our passions. And when that risk-reward calculation goes south, it’s not just we who pay the price, it’s our families.
So, add “sick with guilt” to that list of options, above.
