Following the sad story of Natasha Richardson reinforces for me the kind of culture we are living in. It is basically a culture of fear.
All the reports now are focused on helmets. Buy them, wear them, never take them off. Save your life. Endless discussions and film clips of brain swelling and surgical procedures. In fact on the National last night it showed there were a mere 14 deaths due to brain injury on ski hills in Canada in the last DECADE! (When I say mere, I don’t minimize the tragedy or the value of the lives lost, but you get my point).
But very little discussion about the very real fact life is precarious, accidents happen every day, in less likely places than ski hills. Life is fleeting, fragile. The message should be: Live it fully. Not carefully.
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum