Part 3 of 31
They Found Another Body
Like everyone with any sense, I'm always wishing for perfect justice. Which is of course usually a disappointment in the results, since justice, even when we've got someone really trying their best in the courts and government, doesn’t always happen. Because someone’s got their finger on the scale and the whole thing's skewed.
When it comes to a different kind of justice, as in reuniting people with their loved ones, even if it’s only bringing their bodies back after death for closure and a nice service, even that's not always possible. And not necessarily through any red tape. Life’s not willingly against us, we hope. But not everyone can be found. When you swim with the fishes, whether someone threw you in or you jumped in, sometimes you stay with the fishes. Not to be too glib — I'm never glib — but life is a crap-shoot, a bastard, always the first and only draft, and not everyone comes back. As much as we rue it. I'm flogging myself as we speak.
The critical thing, if we hate our loved ones winding up in rivers and being lost, is to prevent it from happening in the first place. A simple act of prevention is the whole ball of wax. Everything you can do through prevention pays rich rewards for life downstream. With the added benefit that we don’t even know the problems we would’ve had had we not been in prevention mode. It’s better to be in prevention mode all the time than to rue it years later, moaning, 'I should’ve been in prevention mode.' The best way to not find your loved one’s body in the river is to not let them be in the river in the first place, in which case they weren't so there's no worries.
Do I wish life had more intrinsic justice and happy endings? Of course I do. Nearly everything that goes wrong for me — from computer breakdowns, stuff stolen, flat tires, low on money, dog’s sick, I’m sick, not having the ingredients when we want something for dinner, having neighbors mad at me for nothing — finds me looking back at what could’ve been done to prevent it. With myself possibly being at fault? That's a question. I don’t blame anyone else, unless there's someone else who had a role in screwing it up. It doesn’t happen enough like that, but when it does, you certainly have to consider, “If this person hadn’t been there, how would it have worked out? Wonder if he swims for exercise?”
It’s always fun to engage questions of What If? If life could be rigged so it was perfect justice, one part of me says that’d be good. Truly, what if only terrible evildoers were ever lost to the river and drowned? Or the only ones they ever found in the river were murderers? That’d be good, I guess, except for the unnecessary wear and tear on public boats. Having to scrape barnacles off them, etc. But it’d truly be great for the police. They'd show up at the river every morning and collect the bodies of various lowlifes, not bothering with mortuaries, just tagging them, taking their fingerprints, various possessions, and sending them straight to ... wherever. Dry dock? A few nasties taken care of, no muss, no fuss, perfect justice for all.
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