“Quack if you’re buckled,” I said, as I neared the end of our driveway. Two “quacks” sounded from the back seat where my daughters situated their backpacks and coats, ready for another day at school. It was a Friday in early December, a half-day of school. As I glanced left before turning right out of our driveway, I noticed flashing lights on Wallula Road, a block and a half north of us. I wondered aloud if there was an accident.
Half an hour later, as I returned home from dropping the girls at school, I noticed there were still lights flashing down the street. In fact, there seemed to be emergency vehicles stretching along most of the block. Curious, I drove past my house and continued toward the flashing lights. When I got near, I saw a car bumper in the front lawn of the corner house. I pulled to the side of the road and stopped. Across the street was a power pole that had snapped like a toothpick. A giant “splinter” over ten feet tall stuck out to the side, and the base of the pole was a bouquet of splinters, looking like a bristly patch of tall grass. I could see one damaged vehicle—a red SUV. I didn’t want to impose too much so I turned around and drove home.
Four hours later, as the girls and I returned from school pick-up, we decided to drive down and see the accident, but found that all the roads had been blocked off a full block away from the intersection, where emergency lights still flashed. We parked at home and decided to walk down as a family, so the four of us set off on foot to investigate.
As we neared the flashing lights, we saw utility trucks at work, preparing to replace the broken power pole. One large truck held the broken pole with a giant gripper, presumably so its weight wasn’t continuing to hang on the wires. A man with a chain saw trimmed part of the broken pole, while other men in bucket trucks hovered nearby. The damaged red SUV was still there, and further down the road we saw what looked like a white car, totally mangled, loaded on a flatbed truck. A section of chain-link fence beyond the telephone pole was decimated. Emergency responders were still cleaning up pieces of wood, metal and glass from the collision. Our kids watched in wonder as two men moved a windshield—shattered, but still in tact.
Like us, other neighbors surveyed the scene and checked their phones for news articles. We discussed the likelihood of someone dying. My husband was optimistic about modern cars preserving life, while our older daughter concluded someone must have died. We watched for a while, then walked home for lunch.
At 2:41 that afternoon a friend texted: “Please pray for Rudy Scott and his family.” Attached was a link to a news article announcing that Martin Scott, age 73, had died at the scene of the crash that morning. Martin was a professor at Walla Walla University, where my husband and I both received our Bachelor’s degrees. Martin’s son, Rudy, hired my husband after college, giving him his first full time job as a software engineer. These were people we knew, who—although we weren’t close to them—were a strong thread in the weaving that is our community. To have that thread suddenly snapped sent a shock through the whole fabric, leaving it visibly weakened.
I thought of all the times I have made the same right-hand turn on Wallula that Martin was making when an oncoming car going way too fast crushed his vehicle and his life. I wonder what it is that compels me to take my life in my hands every day as I drive? What made it so important to humans to get places fast instead of walking, as our ancestors did for thousands of years? On the mornings following the accident, as I drive my kids to school, I look around at all the cars on the highway and think, Why do we do this?
Freshly aware of life’s fragility, I perused a CBS News article1 listing the 59 leading causes of death in the United States (data from the year 2017). Of the top twenty, 17 are health-related, including various cancers, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Only three are “accidental” in nature: number seven was accidental poisoning (which included drug overdoses), number 14 was motor vehicle accidents, and number 15 was accidental falls. As I continued down the list, cancer figured prominently among an ongoing list of other health issues, including pneumonia, birth defects, and obesity, to name a few. The outliers in the 21st-50th leading causes of death were suicide, homicide, and accidental suffocation.
It’s funny how my friends and I avoid risk by not swimming during thunderstorms, locking our doors, and killing spiders, but we keep driving, taking pharmaceutical drugs, and—apparently—falling. More often than we’d like to admit, we take sides around the unknowns of life, choosing opposite courses of action to avoid risk. Several of my friends signed up to volunteer for vaccination clinics so they would be among the first to receive the Covid vaccine, while an unvaccinated family member continued giving me newspaper clippings about the Covid vaccine causing death, even after I was vaccinated. As far as I could tell, both were going for the same outcome—avoiding risk.
I have always been low on the risk-taking scale. I rarely break rules, avoid risky social or health habits, and I married a stable and risk-averse man. Together we avoid risk by over-discussing every decision, keeping tight control on our time, money, and emotions—hoping somehow to keep our world spinning in the right direction. And we manage to keep enough control to sustain the illusion that we can avoid risk. Our carefulness seems to be working. This is a dangerous position to be in. Having not been overtaken by disease or loss of a loved one or financial hardship, we continue on our merry way, thinking we can manage our little world by making the “right” decisions.
I am sobered by Martin Scott’s death. My reading and wondering—rather than giving me comfort—resoundingly confirm that I have little control over when and how I die. Pain and suffering are also an unmapped course, appearing in my story at random, mostly unrelated to how I live my life. I realize that I spend time every day avoiding risk—from the amount of sleep I get and the things I eat, to how fast I drive and whether I remember my cell phone when I’m going out. But what am I gaining? How often do the benefits of risk-avoidance outweigh the heaviness of the fear and worry that drives so many of those behaviors?
I’m not the first to wonder if I’m avoiding living by trying to avoid dying. Risk-avoidance serves as a nice distraction from being gracious to myself, loving the person in front of me, petting the neighbor’s dog, or visiting a sick friend. When I leave a tool in the rain to rust, I am much more grieved by the ruin of the tool than by the cruel way in which I treat myself for this mistake. Somewhere inside I know that love is more important than stuff, but that synapse seems disconnected from the synapses making all my decisions. And what if love is even more important than life?
When Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River in January 1982, passenger Arland Williams—who was in the water with a handful of other initial survivors—handed the rescue line to others in the water rather than be rescued himself, and in the end disappeared under the water and lost his own life. Shortly after, Roger Roosenblatt wrote these words in an essay published in Time magazine: “So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.”2
Would I, too, be willing to give up the fight against my own circumstances and take up the real fight for the life of the person next to me? Could I let go the distraction of apparent safety and hold fast to the only narrative that lasts—the living out of love and redemption?
As wild as this loving sounds, perhaps the hardest thing of all is not to love, but to be loved. I used to think being loved was easy. I like kind words and gifts and hugs—all the “love languages.” What’s not to love? But meeting a God who insists on love in the most unlikely spaces—adultery, death, arrogance—I am forced to consider receiving a love that leans into my most shameful moments, unforgivable selfishness, and spiteful diatribes. This is an uncomfortable love. It brings roses to war, and gives trophies to losers. It does things all wrong, and insists on being present at the most inconvenient times. I would like to receive Love in a pretty dress at the front door, but it insists that if we are going to be in relationship, the bathroom floor is also included (those nights you embrace the toilet bowl while the flu has it’s way with your digestive system). This Love is as fiercely present in a divorce courtroom as in a wedding ceremony, in an AIDS victim as in a marathon runner, and in a gun-holder as in the man bleeding on the ground.
This Love does not pick and choose, and I’m not at all sure I want to give it my allegiance. Yet I realize Love has wooed me sufficiently that I am already involved. I have moved into the risk zone. Several years ago I wrote, “How can I love my life and hate it at the same time?” I was miserable in my own self, yet it was obvious that I had an objectively good life—faithful husband, healthy children, flexible schedule, nice home, good friends, lots of family nearby. I guess that was the moment it became painfully clear that circumstances do not buy happiness. This realization was followed by a period of mourning, which included all the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Those were some difficult times. A death necessary to precede new life.
I’m learning to love life—not just mine, but my husband’s life and my daughters’ lives, the life in trees and birds and rivers, the wonders entering my awareness all day through my five senses. I am daring to be alive, knowing it is more risky than being half dead, and choosing it just the same. As Superchick’s song, “Cross the Line,” says: “Play it safe, play by the rules / Or don’t play at all—what if you lose? / That’s not the secret, but I know what is: / Everybody dies but not everyone lives.”3
What does it look like for me to “cross the line” into living? It looks like sleeping in (that’s not productive!), drinking coffee (stimulants are bad for you!), writing when the sink is full of dishes (pleasure before work?!), accepting unexpected conversations, and weather, and sickness. It looks like spending a little more than I normally would, and planning Christmas without a spreadsheet. It looks like rearranging the living room furniture so it’s all facing the fireplace, and wrapping an unfinished Christmas gift without feeling guilty at all that the right time to finish it will be after Christmas. It looks like letting things fall in place every day, retiring the sledgehammer I previously employed to fit everything in the “right” place.
Another song from my high school years comes to mind, and I quietly sing: “Living might mean taking chances / But they’re worth taking. Loving might be a mistake / But it’s worth making … And if you get the choice / To sit it out or dance / I hope you dance.”4
God has been watching me sitting at the edge of the dance hall, hiding behind a glass of punch. He has sat beside me and listened to every excuse in the book: I’m tired. I’m afraid of what I’ll do or not do out there on the floor. When the song ends, I won’t know what to do next, and standing on the dance floor without a glass in my hands is too vulnerable. Everybody else knows what to do, and as long as I’m sitting here they may think I know what to do. But the moment I stand up, the thinking will be over, and the doing is too much. Being seen is terrifying.
God never stops sitting with me to dance, yet He never stops dancing to sit with me. He is always doing both. This gives me courage. I can move from sitting to dancing, without losing myself. Where He is, there I am also. This strengthens me to set my glass down and watch without hiding, to feel the desire to dance emerge from beneath the excuses.
Once I allow myself to want to dance, the want becomes an ache, a longing, until finally I stand, half-wistful, half-determined, and God and I take the floor together.
When the song ends, it is a little scary. I don’t know if anyone else could see God, so it may have looked like I was just dancing by myself. What do I do next?
My husband comes to me, takes my hand, and leads me further out on the dance floor. As the music carries us, I realize with astonishment that my husband is an excellent dancer. I am surprised. I didn’t know that either of us were dancers. But here I am, and I can dance too!
Now I’m getting excited. Maybe I could dance with my daughters, and with my friends. Maybe I’ll dance with beautiful skies and beautiful music, and with heartache and questions and strangers. Perhaps I was made to dance through life. Should the unthinkable happen, and the dance floor open over a swimming pool—as in the classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”—maybe I will keep dancing, wet and surprised and delightfully free.
Endnotes:
1 https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/death-index-top-50-ways-americans-die/56/
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arland_D._Williams_Jr.
3 https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/superchick/crosstheline.html
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV-Z1YwaOiw&ab_channel=LeeAnnWomackVEVO
