Death is not reasonable. Although we can nod our heads and accept the loss of an elderly individual, most of us know it still doesn’t feel right. When death comes at a younger age, an age equal to or less than our own, it makes it more difficult to swallow, to reason our way through it. Death lies at the edges of our understanding. For anyone who has had a child, we can add birth to the list of things on the edges that don’t quite compute, either. One year a person doesn’t exist, and the next, a new human being is laying on its mother’s chest. There is another part of life (and death) that rests on the edges; miracles.
I do think there are miracles in everyday life; the birth of my son, a sunrise beaming through an icicle, or even the unbroken line of Orthodox liturgical practice reaching back thousands of years. But in this case, I mean the type of miracles we are much less equipped to explain. In this case, it was a miracle I didn’t even recognize.
My late friend, we’ll call her Jamie, was one of a few girls to appear in our first basketball leagues. And she was good. If a guy stood and held the ball out in front of him, number 24 would confidently remove it from his hands and head the other direction. She grew into her athleticism and loved basketball. It was something we shared; sports take up a lot of space in adolescence. So do homecoming dances and hanging out wherever our group of friends could find a house with no parents. But this is all typical of kids in high school. The not so typical part came when Jamie had a stroke.
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