I’ve been pretty fortunate throughout my life.

Instead of being born in Liberia or in Croatia or in Palestine, I somehow drew the lucky stick to fall out into this world in the United States. I made the cut to hit the tail end of the 20th century, and I also drew the middle class city kid card, so I grew up pretty sheltered from religious wars and famine and genocidal marauders and disease. In fact, throughout my whole life, within my family, everything has gone pretty much according to the plan. I’ve never lost a sibling or a cousin, or an aunt or uncle for that matter. Now in midlife, I’m pretty amazed that our family hasn’t experienced an aberration typical of many others- no childhood illnesses or terrible accidents or auto catastrophes or skydiving incidents have taken anyone early. I’ve been kinda sheltered.

Death is still around though, and you know it because here at some time a pet died, and there at another you dissected a frog in biology class and you thought, “This dude was alive”. And then there are those big swells of incidents that crash on you while you are in school, when someone you know, someone who was healthy and present for quite a few days in your life, is discovered sick, and then you meet the real thing for the first time. Dying.

I hit it briefly as a teen for the first time when my brother was reckless. He wasn’t intentionally reckless. He’s a pretty tough and head strong guy, but not random and looking for things to wreck into to see if he can survive them. Still, he was hit by a car one day walking home from high school. I gloss over this one because, while it was a scary moment in the family’s lives, we knew in a short time he was alright, and that he would continue to be alright. Still, being reckless as his body was, he also had a period where his lymph glands were swelling for a season, and the spectre of the ‘C’ word wandered about and around us for a few weeks. Fortunately, despite the glands’ best efforts to look diseased, they weren’t. The spectre went away, and so did our worry.

I turn, then, to the big two ones for me that let me know it was real, and it happened. The first encounter came with Vanessa, and the second, with David. I’ll start with David because for some reason I associate an event I saw with why he went, even though there is no basis for it. I end with Vanessa’s, because hers cut the deepest.

In brief, for much of my elementary school life, our family lived in a small home on an enclosed cull de sac in a neighborhood where the kids knew each other pretty well, all played with one another in everyone’s yards or out in the street, and the world seemed safe. David and Stephen were brothers who lived a few houses east of ours with their father. David was a year older than me, and Stephen a year younger. David and Stephen were boys, and David was a bigger brother, a little rougher than his sibling. In high school David played football at Manzano High School, so he was athletic. All the kids spent a lot of hours outside, running up and down the street that was our playground- playing war, riding bikes, playing tag, kicking balls, throwing footballs. Sometimes there were fights, and sometimes there were a few kids out milling around. But outside was where we played. Stephen usually followed David around when David came out- and when their Dad called them in, the went in.

Well, one summer either before or after I as in 4th grade, it was the summer of skateboarding, and being able to pick up speed and jet down the sidewalk from lot to lot, riding into and out of driveway dips, and not getting beached in overhanging bushes or rocks on the path was the accomplishment of the season. And so there was a lot of riding around on skateboards, where the clack-clack clack-clack of wheels slipping over clacks could be heard around the block.

And on one late morning, I was with David and Stephen and Michael, all in a line, cruising down the sidewalk west of our houses one behind another. We rarely went too far beyond the Prentiss house, but this day we did, and bordering a house’s front yard to our left was a low chain-link fence. The kind where the metal links were twisted together at the top to make metal forked barbs above the cross tube. The kind that was about the height of David at the groin. And the kind that had no concern about the fact somehow David hit the top of the fence going at a decent clip and impaled himself there.

I just remember David hitting and going down, and unworldly shriek and some blood, and then a rush to go see if David’s dad was home.

And the horror of thinking about what I had not seen.

Over the next year, we all saw David and Stephen out a lot less, for some reason. And then, towards the end of the following summer, my dad lifted our family out of the cul de sac and out of that intimate neighborhood to live in a bigger, newer home somewhere out at the north edge of town. Soon, outside to us was a lot of mesa and less yard, and before we knew it, we were laying new roots in new schools and stores and restaurants.

When I was a freshman, I ended up playing freshman basketball with a quiet, friendly redhead named Scott. As we got older in high school, Scott’s sister became more visible, because she was kind and pretty and cool, so that when we were sophomores, she was one of the juniors that stood out. She was a top student and a drill teamer and a student senator, I think, but despite all of those things, she was nice, and if you were an underclassman, you kind of couldn’t help getting a crush on her. Because she was just sweet. Throughout her junior year, she was a luminary on campus, until something happened, and she went to the doctor not feeling well, and then, she was not well.

I don’t remember how long in total she fought it. She didn’t cover it up, but she was sick. And yet she’d still get to school.

Her senior year, she was the homecoming queen- beautiful and optimistic and still reaching out to others around her, still living with and for those she was around at school during the first half of the year. And then her body started to give up. Her energy started to fail. And she disappeared from campus most of the time.

And kids would share what they were hearing. About pain. About her losing weight. About her coming back in a week probably. Or about her not.

Vanessa had been part of the campus ministry that I was involved with at the time, and through that I had come to experience why she seemed so up and positive most of the time. But when she quit coming, you could sense the flame in waffling before that cold wind.

And then I learned she had died.

I have not been to many funerals in my life (in part, out of choice, and in part because I’ve been surrounded by fortunate people), but as did anyone who had known her at all, I attended hers, which packed the sanctuary of a pretty large church.

Tributes were read, songs played, tears shed, and then a slideshow was played, and it was then it registered with me. Vanessa is gone.

Vanessa was gone.

And I felt the cold for the first time myself.

it was a year or so later that I heard about a former football player over at Manzano who had been fighting for his life had lost his battle with cancer. An article in the Albuquerque Journal gave a brief summary of his background, his diagnosis, his battle, and then his succumbing. it was a kind and warm piece about David, and hearing about him in it, I thought back to skateboarding and that accident, and just knew the latter battle was due to the former accident.

That was the second time I felt death creep by.

Since those years, I’ve been around others who have fought their own fight. For 10 months, I worked as a chaplain in a hospital in Houston, shuffling about the ICU and the emergency room, trying to serve as a stanch between life and death. I’ve seen a few flatlines and and a few amazing recoveries, but those were other people. People I didn’t know. Only one incident got to me while I was there, though, doing that. When the man wheeled in looked like my dad.

On that day, too, death crept by me, and reminded me that he-she-it was still real.

Being around death can do all kinds of things to different people, and understandably so. Death is uncomfortable to witness, and uncomfortable to face, and uncomfortable to accept. And yet, the reality is, it happens to every living thing.

Vanessa, like I similarly think, didn’t think death was the end. But it is most definitely a change that we all undergo. And how we approach it says a lot about how we see this existence of ours.

I am hanging on the hope that Love is bigger and Love is stronger, and that death is ultimately a straw man. Love, beyond space and time, rescues its own, I trust.

Still, we live this life here and now. And occasionally death creeps by.

A reminder to pay attention to important things. And more attention to penultimate things.

And a reminder that the clock for each of us is always ticking.

Attend to the greater things.

Carpe diem.