A quarter of a century ago our oldest son was caught in a rebellion. The crowd was protesting something or other, and the police came through on horseback to disperse them. He and his friends tried to escape the thrashing, but one of the girls he was with had recently broken her leg. She was in a cast. Lukas refused to abandon her, and cried out to the cops to spare her. They whacked him instead. Slowly he was able to get her to safety, but not without a grid of bruises on his back.

Margaret Mead once said that the first indication of civilization could be dated to a healed femur bone. It was proof that someone stayed behind with an injured person, protecting them, and bringing them food until they recovered. Without help, he or she would never have soon died. 

It would be easy to get distracted by the evidence of progress that surrounds us. Public transportation, technology, agriculture all testify our capacity to get what and where we want. But of greater significance is our compassion when one among us stumbles, or falls to fever. 

Those opportunities appear in a myriad of disguises. The question is, whether we slow down enough to see them. It turns out that there is more than one way to die.