In my high school, the seniors would graduate and leave the next day to go to a select beach property with their best friends, hanging out and playing on the warm sand. It was the first time that many of the students were away from their parents. They had to fend for themselves: cook dinner, clean the apartment or house by themselves, etc.
But it was the time of the seniors’ lives. They got to take those first sips of alcohol if they wanted to. They got to stay up for hours and hours on end, only to go to sleep when their body made them. It was just another way of saying, “Hey, I did it. Now I’m going to do what I want.”
The potential dangers of this trip did not really hit home until I heard about a couple of boys from South Eugene High School who drowned in the Pacific Ocean, where they were playing around with no ideas about the dangers surrounding them.
I was reading the report in The Register-Guard, paying attention to the descriptive words used to describe the late high school boys.
What caught my attention was that the reporters couldn’t say much about the boys themselves. One reporter, Bob Keefer, went about as in-depth as he could about each of them, saying one had been on the basketball team and the other had traveled the world. It left me itching for more; like there had to be something else there that the kids have done. No alumni from any university? No awards or accolades? Nothing?
Then I realized: These are just kids. They are no older than 18 years old, at the most. They haven’t yet experienced life, nor had the chance to do so. Both seemed like they had such a promising future ahead of them, but they had that light grip taken from them.
Just kids.
It tears me up to see what has happened. It makes me appreciate everything that has happened right in my life, and brings me down to earth to see a couple of truths about this life. But the biggest one is this: Don’t take life for granted.
My heart goes out to the boys’ families. Let this be a wake-up call to everyone out there who isn’t living. These boys lost their chance. Don’t let yours pass you by.
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