The lesson we can learn from horse trap tragedy? Life is fragile, so always make the most of it ROSLYN DEE

MAYBE it’s because her name was so close to my own – with just the additional letter ‘a’ in the middle – that Rosalyn Few has been in my thoughts so much. A slightly unusual name, I wonder if she had the same issues that I’ve had over the years. Was she, like me, the only one in her school with that name, for example? And did she have to spell it for people all her life, telling them that, no, it’s not Rosalind. Or Roselyn, or Rosaleen, or, indeed, Roslyn. It’s R-O-S-A-L-Y-N.

And I wonder was she called Ros by her family and friends? And did she spell it with an ‘s’, like me, or did she go for the final ‘z’ option instead?

So maybe that’s part of my interest – the name thing.

Active

Or maybe it’s because she was just a few years older than me. An active woman in her early 60s who seems to have been in a happy relationship, was obviously a devoted mother and grandmother, and at the centre of a close family who had decided to travel from America and holiday together in Ireland.

Rosalyn and her partner Normand Larose were seizing the day and travelling abroad on the trip of a lifetime. Little did they know that death would arrive earlier than expected for Normand, and snatch away Rosalyn as well.

Whatever the personal touchstones that drew me initially to Rosalyn Few in the wake of her tragic death alongside her partner in the Gap of Dunloe on Monday, it is, however, something with much more universal impact that has me still thinking about her.

The randomness of death. For Rosalyn died not just unexpectedly but randomly. She and Normand just happened to be in that particular trap, with that particular pony, when, for whatever reason, the animal lost its footing and careered over the edge, throwing Rosalyn and her partner to their deaths 20ft below.

Why them? Why not the tourists just ahead of them? Or why not Rosalyn’s daughter and her family in the pony and trap that was following some distance behind?

Indeed, Rosalyn’s grandchildren could well have opted to go in the same pony and trap as their granny. If they had chosen to do that, then they too, in all likelihood, would also be gone. It’s the randomness that is so shocking. It was completely unpredictable and there was nothing that anyone could have done to prevent the tragedy.

When people are sick, they get treatment. They know, of course, if it is a serious illness, that death may well be where they are heading in the not-too-distant future, but they can follow medical advice in the hope that they will get better.

Yes, there can still be an element of the random present with illness. Why, almost three years ago, did my own husband die from lung cancer, for example, having stopped smoking some years earlier, while someone else I know, now in her late 70s, is still well, and smoking 30 to 40 cigarettes a day?

But while there’s a random factor there, up to a point, the bottom line is that anyone who smokes is shortening their odds when it comes to early death.

Adventure

So there’s random. And then there’s the truly random. Like Rosalyn Few.

She wasn’t even doing anything potentially dangerous. She was sitting in a horse-drawn carriage and travelling along a well-trodden tourist path through one of the most scenic and beautiful parts of Ireland.

She wasn’t mountain climbing. She wasn’t on a dodgy cable car. She was engaged in the most gentle of holiday pursuits.

Even when holiday pursuits aren’t gentle, however, nobody expects to die. If they did, there wouldn’t be such a market for adventure sports holidays. And I wouldn’t have stepped on board all those helicopters while on holiday over the years, or nodded so enthusiastically, indeed, when one pilot once asked me if I was happy to swoop down UNDER the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Modern life makes us feel immortal in a way that our grandparents’ generation didn’t. My own grandmother, although she lived to be 92, always had an awareness of, and a respect for, death. She had seen it up close, losing her brother in the First World War, and witnessing women of her own generation lose children, almost as a matter of course, in childbirth.

Even my own mother’s best friend lost her three-year-old daughter when little Heather succumbed, in just a few days, to a virulent virus in the Fifties.

As science has progressed, we no longer expect children to die from relatively ‘normal’ illnesses, and when unexpected death strikes, in whatever form and at whatever age, we are shocked. And we are reminded of a truism that older generations always acknowledged and accepted – that life is fragile and unpredictable. That there are no guarantees. That you can live a healthy life and still be snuffed out. And that fatal accidents happen. Just like that.

Belief

To experience death up close inevitably makes you more death-aware. I am certainly much more attuned to the fragility of life – my own included – than I was, say, even five years ago.

In the last four years I have lost my husband, my father, and two close friends. One of those friends wasn’t even ill. Just 52 years of age, he was a walking advertisement for fitness and healthy living. And when he got out of bed on April 10, 2014, he had no notion that that was the last time he would ever wake up in the morning. That it was the last time he would ever kiss his wife goodbye as she went off to work, the final time he would ever hug his three children as they headed to school. By mid-morning he was unconscious in hospital, and by 10pm that night he was gone.

When death strikes suddenly and randomly, those left behind are often haunted by the spectre of unfinished business. By having left things unsaid. By thinking that there was still loads of time for all that.

The prospect of death – our own or that of loved ones – is difficult to accept. Especially in the modern world where religious belief is not so prevalent. For those who remain believers there is solace to be had. For someone like my own mother who, at almost 98, firmly believes that she will see my father again, that is an enormous comfort. For those without that particular comfort blanket, however, there is only devastation.

Life changes in a moment, but never more definitively than when death arrives. It came for Rosalyn Few and Normand Larose on Monday, randomly and without warning, thereby reinforcing what we must all acknowledge – that life is so very fragile. And that we never truly know for whom the bell will toll next.