How Transient Life is

Tonight I was shocked to read about actress Natasha Richardson’s death from a skiing accident. Unlike old age or terminal illness, which makes one more or less prepare for it, death from accidents is especially hard to accept.

It shows how transient and vulnerable life could be. After all, she died from an injury incurred on a BEGINNER’s Trail at a ski resort. I find myself literally shudder at the thought of going skiing again. The winter of 2001 was when my passion for skiing was at its peak. I must have gone skiing in New Hampshire and Vermont five times that winter alone, while living in Boston. To this day, I would still mention one ski trip I took with a friend. She was just starting to ski then. As a teacher, I was a very bad and impatient one. Instead of making her stay at the bunny slope, I was very cavalier about taking her onto a longer trail, reassuring her that the trail was really easy and it would be all “green” from beginning to end. Then half way through the trail, I realized that there was no more “green” trail left – we would have to go down a “blue” trail in order to go down the mountain. Sensing that the truth would freak her out, I decided not to tell her. Since she’s so tense and so focused on her skis, she never had the time to read the signs to realize that she’s on a “blue” trail. All she said when she reached the top of this “blue” trail was, “are you sure that it’s still green?” – to which I mustered all my lying power and said, “yes, it still is green.”

I skied to the bottom of the hill, and waited for her. She must have fallen a hundred times, as she was so nervous about going fast that she would fall down deliberately every minute – of course in reality she was going as slow as a snail. I know that the slope must have looked vertical to a beginner. I could not help laughing a little bit at the time, when I saw her whole body tense up, making a little turn only to sit down again, over and over again. She spent most of the time falling and getting up, as opposed to skiing. But her skiing improved dramatically after this trip and she’s probably a better skier than I am today. I thought that it had to do with my brutal way of teaching – which is equivalent to throwing someone into the water without any life jacket to teach him to swim. When Michael and I returned to the same ski resort a few weeks later, I pointed to the trail that we went down. He was positively surprised that a beginner could actually ski down, even if it included falling down many times. He said that he was quite amazed that she believed my lie that it was a “green” trail.

Now that I read that it’s possible to die even on a beginner’s slope, I shiver at the thought of how close I was to be a murderer, if my friend had suffered a fatal accident as a beginner on that treacherous “blue” trail.

We all take life for granted, until it’s taken away from us. Youth is wasted on the young, and life is wasted on the living.