They say that a single death is a tragedy, but tens of thousands of deaths are a statistic. This is
one story that hit close to my home.
[A] Boulder woman . . . died after a wave struck her beach cabana as she ate breakfast with her fiance [who] survived but was separated from her. Two hours later, [he] found her body in 5 feet of water, touching the hand of a 2-year-old victim. . . . "I'd like to think she was clutching onto it, trying to save his or her life"
More below the fold.
The disaster that has killed thousands in Asia claimed the life of a Boulder woman whose family says she died after a wave struck her beach cabana as she ate breakfast with her fiance. . . . . Hillgrove's fiance, Nasser Zouaoui, survived but was separated from her. Two hours later, Zouaoui found her body in 5 feet of water, touching the hand of a 2-year-old victim. . . . "I'd like to think she was clutching onto it, trying to save his or her life," Robert Hillgrove told the Daily Camera. "I just hope she didn't die scared." . . . . Friends and family gathered at her apartment in Boulder and spent the day going through hundreds of photos taken during her global travels. . . .Hillgrove, a hair stylist who attended the University of Colorado and Fairview High School, grew up in Thomaston, Maine, and moved with her family to Colorado 20 years ago. She was pursuing an ethnic studies degree at CU, in between her full-time job and volunteering for the Boulder County AIDS Project, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Navajo Nation and the Southern Poverty Law Center. . . . Hillgrove met her fiance, a Parisian schoolteacher, while on a trip to Guatemala.
Not all tragedies have moral meaning. Sometimes good people die, through no fault of their own, due to impersonal events operating on a scale completely divorced from that of human events. We can't stop these events, although we can do our best to minimize their effects. But, nature provides quite enough mayhem for all of us. We should all live the kind of life that she did, in the hope that humanity can avoid inflicting this kind of mayhem upon itself.