Sailing and Smiling

I'm not a big fan of posting on that kind of news (the video link at the end of the article explains the situation quite well), but I still want to comment on this one.

The girl that died in this story is a stranger. I don't know her and won't pretend I do. Despite her dad being "well-known", I won't pretend the same of him, as it's a common mistake among "normal" people to think we know celebrities because we're familiar with their faces on our TVs.

Apparently, the girl had problems in her youth. Whatever. We don't even need to know that. What touched me in this whole story is the fact that she died doing something she had a passion for. As I said, I don't know her, but I would bet that everytime she was back in town, seeing family and friends, she'd talk about her life on the sea. That's where she discovered her life.

She went there, worked harder than any time before. She got sick, got blisters, injuries, and didn't sleep well. But she made friends, she saw incredible things and places. She did things and went places not many people will do and go.

Despite all the sufferings, when the opportunity arose, she went back. And again.

Then, she got swept away by a wave. She probably didn't die right away, realized how bad her condition was, but I'm quite sure she didn't panic right away. Why? Because it could happen. Obviously, it hit her pretty bad when she realized the precarity of her situation, but the girl had been working on a ship for a long while. She was not expecting it, she wasn't ready, but she wasn't surprised.

Dying is the ultimate bad luck, it's fucking bad on your family, on your friends, on you, mostly. But that woman was where she wanted to be, and died doing what she wanted to do. It isn't solace for anybody, I'm not trying to find any. I'm just saying that despite the sadness of it all, despite her extreme loneliness in the end, alone with her own thoughts, regrets and memories in the middle of a huge, empty body of water, despite all of this, she chose her path. And she had a blast.

Don't believe me? They showed us a bunch of pics in the last days: Some of her youth, taken from the media archives back when her dad played for the Montréal Canadiens. Her recent ones where all on a boat. Look at the picture below, at those eyes, this smile. Tell me she didn't find where she belonged.



Cheers, Laura Gainey, hope you found new adventures.

Time to pursue mine...