The unthinkable happens every day, somewhere.
Some ordinary thing, some routine activity, goes horribly awry.
Something such as going down the stairs at home.
Ashley Moss must have gone up and down the stairs in her apartment in Granite Falls hundreds of times, and gone up and down countless other stairs thousands of times since she was a child.
Yet something went badly wrong Tuesday, and she was found dead at those stairs. Police said it appeared to be just an accident. She fractured her neck in a fall.
My house has stairs, and every now and then I’m reading while walking, or thinking about something going on at work, and I miss a step, or I hit the edge of the step and slip down, flailing for the rail. I curse myself for not paying attention, but I don’t think much more about it.
Most of the time when we talk about “the unthinkable” we mean someone close to us dying suddenly in something like a car wreck, a boating accident, a random shooting. But those are things that we know are dangerous and potentially deadly events. We think about the possibility. That’s why we wear seat belts and why boats have to have life jackets on board, and why dark alleys in the city scare us. That’s why mothers ask us to call when we reach our destination so they know we are safe — and they can stop worrying.
We mean they are unthinkable because we hate to think about them.
But no one thinks about death when approaching a flight of stairs.
Falling down the stairs is depicted two ways in movies and TV shows: as comedy and as deadly – more often as comedy. In “Get Shorty,” John Travolta’s gangster character throws a stuntman down the stairs in a restaurant. The stuntman is humiliated but not injured. In “Die Hard,” Bruce Willis’ character and a terrorist he is fighting both tumble down a single flight of stairs. Willis is unharmed; the terrorist is killed — deadly for the bad guy, no big deal for the good guy.
Perhaps the number of times we have seen falling down the stairs portrayed without serious injury contributes to us not thinking about what could happen.
But it’s not the only thing we never think about that can go fatally wrong.
How many times have any of us had the flu? We don’t think about that as something that could be fatal except for young children or adults who are frail, but the flu can turn from what we think of as an incapacitating but temporary illness to pneumonia and then to sepsis, when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight an infection can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems. Less than two months ago a 21-year-old bodybuilder in Pennsylvania developed sepsis from the flu and died.
We don’t think about how fragile life can be, the myriad tiny hazards we cross each day, or how close we are to being in the situation of Ashley Moss’ parents, Mark and Cherry Moss. That’s something Mrs. Moss said in a story we ran Friday:
“The one thing that Mark and I are getting across to people is, hug your kids tight, … because you don’t know.”
Newsroom With A View 