Death

Grief, Gratitude, and Perspective  

Roughly 8,400 people die every day in the U.S.  
Around 170,000 globally. Every single day.  

You read that… and probably feel nothing.
Just numbers.

Since October, about 2,000 Israelis have died in what many call their 9/11. 
An estimated 30,000 Palestinians, nearly 30% of them children, have died in return.  
Over 14,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine.  

In 2023, a record 348 school shootings in the U.S. injured or killed 249 people.  
This year, we’re already at 330 more.  

And just this week, 40 people died in a fire at a ski resort in Switzerland.  

The numbers don’t shock us anymore.  
They barely lift an eyebrow.  

Until it gets personal.  

On New Year’s Day, I got the call we all dread.  

Ted Pulver.  

We have gone years without speaking. So when his name showed up, I knew.  

Three sentences in, he said it:  
“I have some bad news.”  

I met Guy St. Louis 48 years ago at a business meeting.  
He joined my team, but more importantly, he and his wife Tina, and their three boys, became family.  

I was there when their first son was born.  
For a while, I lived in their home, all eight of us packed into three bedrooms.  
We shared the kind of life you only share with people who matter.  

We had stories we couldn’t tell most people.  
We both should’ve died 20 times. But we didn’t.  

Until now.  

Guy gave me a lot:  
Loyalty. Love. Laughter. Leadership. Listening.  

We were different in many ways, but when it came to what mattered, we were the same.  

We talked just a week before he passed. About life. His son in prison. Gratitude.  
We both knew how lucky we were to have lived so fully.  

A week later another call. Stan Callan, soul mates since being freshmen in high school. We drove into Mexico as 16-year-olds and ran home scared to death, went to Bali together, rode our bikes to Sturgis over and over, and even rode them to Cabo for our 50th birthday. I spent 8 days by his bed, the first few chatting away, the last few listening to his labored breathing of the death march. Stan drank too many beers and knew it.   

A week later, Mike Cullen, again, soul mates for 50 years. He moved to Idaho to help me build a home and stayed for 25 years as we both built lives. We laughed and cried together, supported each other through hell and highwater. And all of a sudden, he has ALS and is gone.  

In January, they became three of the 32,000 or so Americans who passed.   
31,997? I didn’t feel.  
But those three I felt deep.  

And I know every single one of those other deaths…  
…was the one to someone else.  

Guy’s death wasn’t tragic. It was right.  
The kind of ending that fits the life that came before it.  

Stan knew his was coming someday.

Mike was healthy and handsome at 71, and we all thought he would live to 100 

But so many others?  
They’re senseless. Political. Preventable.  

We lose children in schools.  
Families in bombings.  
Strangers in wars built on power and pride.  

And most of us move on…  
…until one of them is ours.  

We could be more present to the reality behind the numbers.  
More outraged by the apathy that enables them.  
More willing to hold our leaders accountable, as if their children were next in line.  

Because maybe they are.  

Next time you hear the news say “a dozen dead” or “a thousand buried”…  
Pause.  

See their faces.  
Feel their names.  
Let it in, even just a little.  
Because the one…  
…is everything.