By Crispin Sartwell

One minute you're dancing; the next, you no longer exist.

The accidents of the last few days - the collapse of the dock, the plane crash near the Scranton/ Wilkes-Barre airport - remind us of the fragility of life. But they remind us also of the seeming arbitrariness of death.

Sometimes, people get what they deserve, or at least get what we might expect. A smoker dies of lung cancer; a drug addict contracts AIDS; a person with a violent temper dies violently.

But sometimes we just can't make any sense out of the question of who lives and who dies. The other day my best friend, who'd been feeling kind of funky, called me up and told me he had colon cancer. Then he told me it had spread already to his liver. The sob in his voice was the sob in my head.

When I told my kids about it, they started asking questions: Did he smoke? Did he eat the wrong food? Did he ever exercise? But Glen leads as healthy a life as one could imagine on all those counts. And he's only 49. And even after we cease being children, we want to know why bad things happen. I want to know, too. But in this as in so many other cases there seems simply to be no satisfactory explanation.

We want these things to make sense. And one reason we want them to make sense is because we want to reassure ourselves. Maybe if we eliminate our vices we can be immortal. Maybe if we deserve to live, we won't die. Sad and self-centered as it sounds, one question we're asking is: How can this not be me?

But the world often seems indifferent to our moral desserts. Even good people die, even if they do everything right.

Glen had a series of tests. Two days later the doctor called. Nothing was the same after that call as it was before. And the people who loved those three young women who died at a birthday party had that same experience of the surreal irrevocable moment when everything changes.

You can spend the rest of your life trying to get a handle on a moment like that, trying to reduce its profuse, impossible irrationality to something that makes sense, something you can understand and control.

When death happens suddenly, we struggle toward an explanation in the sense of an etiology: we want to know how something like this could happen. So we deploy the investigators to recover the black boxes, inspect the pilings, and tell us what the hell went wrong.

But usually we don't actually know, even when they're done. There are suspicious cracks. The engine failure was probable caused by x.

Even if we get to a causal story we can believe, though, that doesn't give us the explanation we want. Why her? Why now? Towns like Montoursville PA, which lost so many of its kids in TWA flight 800, or Columbine, CO, which seems to be in a downward spiral of death, ask those questions over and over, hard and with a catch in the throat.

We want to know not how these people died, but why. You make a casual decision, like going out tonight instead of staying home and renting a video, or leaving at 6 rather than 7, and you pay with your life. Was God calling you home? Or was it the inexorable crushing arbitrariness of an entirely amoral universe?

Maybe we can't know. But maybe we have to ask. Maybe even if there are no answers this groping for reasons is part of our mourning, part of our survival, part of our humanity.

I think of those families gathered at the airport, or those folks waiting for their daughters to come home, about all of us who have had to face impossible inexplicable loss. Perhaps we can't really blame the people (inspectors, mechanics, pilots) who made mistakes; we can only try to be careful. We can't blame the people who died. We can't even blame ourselves. We can't blame God or our broken world.

All we can do is to try to keep loving each other.

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