Marginal Mortality
Yesterday I saw a dead man. He was face down in a path of cropped grass cleared only minutes earlier by his scything and spinning BMW M3. The dust was still settling over his limp body and over the trail of destruction which resembled an aircraft landing gone horribly wrong. The shirt had been ripped from his body, his arms were neatly by his sides and his legs crossed at the ankles. Apart from a thick ooze of blood from his ear, he looked strangely peaceful, Miraculously two women had been pulled from the wreckage and had been seated nearby on a blanket. They were tending to their bumps and scratches and were dealing with their shock. For one of them, grief waited not in a dark alley around the corner, but face down, 20 metres away in the veld.
The other man was being calmed and nursed by a gentle black man, his leg half off at the knee. His life hung on a fragile thread - a thread of communication - a simple telephone call.
It was me who made that call. Thankfully within six minutes an ambulance arrived - our ability to help and contribute was handed over 'to those best equipped to handle a desperate situation. .
When all that we could do was done, we left the scene. The scene however, was not equally eager to part company with us. Forever it will remind us of the stark fragility of life - of the good fortune or rotten luck that is separated by the smallest of margins.
The margin may be that tiny ridge on a roulette wheel that captures the lucky number, the winner takes all - the loser, nothing! The putt that teeters on the edge of the US Masters but doesn't drop. The 1/100th of a second that determines your life's golden winner or an `also ran'.
Where you choose to sit in a speeding white car which suffers a blowout in the rural Free State.
These things determine the directions of the journeys we take.
In the same catastrophic instant there is a range of physical outcomes from death to mutilation to bumps and scratches to apparent normality.
The emotional range will be even more varied and will continue to fluctuate randomly. Those on the living side of fortune may come out stronger, with more zest for their second gift and a renewed respect for that margin. They may not and they may dig a deeper living grave for a lifeless life. The legless man (God willing he survives the ordeal) may rejoice in new life with his marginally lucky wife, or he may forever wallow in self-pity at the loss of his left leg.
Those emotions are themselves fragile strands of marginality, and if the things that happen to us determine the directions of our journeys, then it is how we deal with them that determines the colours of those journeys. Light and bright and pleasing or dull, clanging and dreary.
We knew nothing of their past other than they were ahead of us in the customs queue at the Oshoek border. That they had stopped to change a tyre, and had passed us again only minutes before.
We knew nothing of their future and many of those questions of their whereabouts and wellbeing continue to surface in our minds.
We only knew of their present and how severe that harshly divisive yet; fragile line of marginality had come down like a guillotine, taking a limb and a lover and leaving the rest.
Wherever they are may God, in whatever form he or she appears, bless them in the colours and music of their future journeys from a bleak present.
I know of the indiscriminate severity of the margin. My father was found hanging upside down from his seatbelt in a similar pile of wreckage. The follicle of fortune hanging over our heads for 24 days of intensive care. He came through with a passion and determination that forced the finger of fate to open its hand welcomingly. Since then, as a family, we have painted pictures of peace and sung symphonies of splendour.
My mother was particularly brave at being able to confront that fine line again in the fields of the Free-State, and my father saw for the first time what she had seen on that awful mid-March night in 1995. How close that margin was to the other side of the dusk.
It happens to be Father's Day on Sunday. We're still on the fun side of fortune and swinging together on a thread whose strength lies in its fragility.
Because we know how weak and transitory it can be, we spin the thread wholeheartedly while we still have its precious presence. Yee-Ha!
P.S. On leaving Swaziland with our close friends and hosts, Gilbert, a Swazi employee and friend of our friends, had said to me to please drive carefully – “You have expensive cargo.”
Gilbert, your cargo arrived safely and if we'd only listen to that true wisdom more often, we might avoid the margin more often and that white BMW M3 might still be gliding along beautifully with all of its occupants planning a Happy Father's Day.
