Death, Grief & Bereavement
Carpe Diem: Seize The Day
By Allen Johnson, Ph.D.
Aug 5, 2003, 21:21

I WONDER IF ALL CHILDREN SUFFER this way? When I was 12 years old, I went through a period when I thought nobody liked me. I don’t know why I felt that way; I was not an unpopular kid. I held a post on the crosswalk patrol, received my share of punch-out valentine cards, and even filled a term as president of Mrs. Northrup’s sixth-grade class.

And, yet, I still felt blue. I would lie in my bed in the middle of the day, staring blankly at my model airplanes strung from the ceiling overhead and wonder about the meaning of it all. It was a heavy burden for a 12-year-old to carry. “I feel so unhappy,” I told my mother one day.

“Oh, son, what’s wrong?” she asked, holding my face in her warm, soft hands.

“I don’t know.” I was on the verge of tears; one more question and I would be sobbing. “I just feel empty and sad,” I said quivering. My mother comforted me as best she could, but it was not enough to soothe my tender sorrows. I was beginning to think that I would never be happy again when something occurred that shook me to the core.

It happened after school. A bunch of us were playing flag football on the school playground. We were laughing and snorting and crashing to the ground like wounded elephants. For a moment I had forgotten my sadness.

It was dusk. Suddenly, in the middle of an end run, a flash of jagged white light ruptured the sky. At the same instant, there was the unmistakable sound of electricity, crackling like cross-wired jumper cables. It was as though ten thousand flash bulbs fired all at once. We were not looking at the sky, but we all saw it. It was not lightning; there were no clouds overhead. It was not the flash of the setting sun on a window pane or metal shingle. It was nothing like that.

Fifty yards away, at the top of a high school stadium light tower, a man hung from a single cord attached to his belt. He was bent over backwards, his arms and legs limply dangling below his head. His face was blackened from the electrical charge. A wild cable snapped and popped like a snake striking and recoiling and striking again. We knew he was dead. A few minutes later another man climbed the tower and gently eased his partner down with a hand line.

No one dared speak. We walked home quietly, solemnly, absorbed in our own thoughts. I could not stop picturing the lineman grotesquely suspended overhead. I had never seen a dead man before. It seemed inconceivable to me that a man could be alive one moment and gone the next. I was bewildered by the frailty of life. “It is so short,” I said to myself, “and so quickly gone.”

You might think that incident would have deepened my despair. It did not happen that way; the next morning my sadness had vanished. Somehow in the middle of the night, it had been replaced with a sense of respect and thanksgiving for life. That was the end of my brush with childhood depression.

Sometimes we need a dramatic episode to awaken us to the glory of the day. Sometimes that episode is traumatic, sometimes euphoric. Regardless of its nature, those events should not be treated lightly; they should be embraced as a blessed wakeup call.

Last week I met a man on an Alaskan cruise. We struck up a conversation over lunch, one that quickly drifted to heartfelt topics. Soon, the man confided in me that he had recently lost his mother.

“What did you learn from that experience,” I asked.

His answer was immediate and sure. “Carpe diem,” he said. “Seize the day. That is why I am on this cruise today with my family and friends. I am not waiting for tomorrow.” I nodded in understanding.

Forty-five years have passed since I witnessed the death of the man on the light tower. I have grieved for him. I still grieve for his family, wherever they may be. But I am convinced of this. That man-son or husband or father-did not die without meaning. In a way, the man on the tower gave his life for me

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