Life and Death

I saw a man die today. Screams pierced the serene tropical air, and I had to put down the book I was reading. How ironic, it was The Da Vinci Code... "Jacques Sauniere is dead..."
People were standing, looking to see what was happening. They stood and looked out over the golden beach from the raised plateau of our hotel area. There were yells from a little ways down the ocean shore. A small crowd was forming, and we stood up with the rest of the populace from our hotel to look out and see what happened.
A gasp, a yell. My mom inquired, "Is that a person...?"It was. A man was lying in the small crowd of people. His legs were visible, sticking out of the crowd. More people approached to see what was going on. We looked at my dad, "Will you go help?" He didn't answer, his lips set in a grim line. I could only imagine that he was thinking back to the long years it took him to get his medical degree... working in emergency rooms and seeing disaster all around. We stood on the edge of our plateau as my father lowered himself to the ground and jogged over to the scene. As the chaos around the victim increased, dad carefully maneuvered his way into the throng of hysterical mexicans. We froze on the wall as a moment later, we saw him performing CPR. We hopped down from the wall and found our way to the commotion. Girls and women were crying, presumably the man's family. I flinched as my dad performed rescue breaths.
After checking the man's pulse, my dad put down his hands and stood up, shaking his head.

Game over.

Dead.

There was more shrieking from the females as my dad left the scene, the Mexican ambulance had just come. I inquired from passerby's what had happened with my limited Spanish; the man went swimming in the ocean after a large meal and alcoholic drinks, and was dragged out of the sea twenty minutes before by a lifeguard. The lifeguard performed chest compressions, but no rescue breaths. When he gave up, 15 minutes had passed and the yelling and screaming begun. All was too late, the emergency medical workers could do nothing. I watched as two men pulled the body through the sand farther away from the water, and the man's family voiced their distress. An old woman beat her hands desperately against an emergency worker and a girl pulled herself through her tears to the man's corpse.

It was time to leave.

Life and death are so close, nearly touching. It was hard to imagine what his family must have felt... everything changed for them. Who would be the breadwinner now? How would they live now? I felt a pang of empathy for the family as I remembered the pallid corspe being pulled away from the scene under a sheet by rescue workers.

These events can be linked to any book or story, simply because the battle between life and death is the main theme for any plot. The tightrope between the two must be walked with precision, and those are the events in the storyline.