Pressure And Foolish Risks

If my mother had gone with her gut, and stuck to her guns, she might well be with us today

My mother was just 53 years old when she died. She drowned in a whitewater rafting accident in Costa Rica, when their raft tipped over on a river dangerously swollen with rain. The day after she and one of the other rafters had drowned, and their bodies were recovered by the Red Cross, who had to backpack them out of the jungle, I got a call from the US Consul giving me the broad outlines of what had happened. She promised me that death certificates would be mailed to my mother’s home address, informed me that my mother’s body would have to be cremated, and asked me how I wanted to get my mother’s remains back home. Her boyfriend and his son were on the trip with her, so I told her to have them bring my mother’s ashes home on the plane. (If you’d like to hear more of this story, you can watch or listen to this video.)

It’s been quite a while since I thought much about some of the circumstances of her death by drowning at an age I’ve now nearly reached. Usually when I do reflect on it, I’m imagining what her last minutes were like more than anything else, sad at the prospect of her dying essentially alone, cut off from her five raftmates by the waters that were filling her lungs. But one story that has been in the news a lot…