I donβt know why that affected me so strongly, but Iβm watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But itβs mentioned that the captainβs body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked βcaptainβ. And thatβs β¦
It didnβt work. It didnβt save her. But itβs so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldnβt work, that there wasnβt a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried β¦ he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.
You know that Mr Rogers thing of βlook for the helpersβ? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?
That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also β¦
Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.
And sometimes you canβt save one life, sometimes it doesnβt work, sometimes thereβs no getting out of this for anyone, but β¦ try anyway. Because it matters anyway.
And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.
