Lives Taken Too Young

There can be no adventure without an expectation of adversity.

It is natural for young people to believe they will live forever. Sadly, the truth eventually proves otherwise, whether it comes in the form of accident, illness or just old age.

Perry Cohen and Austin Stephanos, teenage friends enjoying an outing in the family boat, disappeared after leaving Jupiter, Florida, on a July day this past summer. They never returned. Two days after a relative reported them missing, the U.S. Coast Guard found their overturned boat 67 miles offshore. A weeklong search netted no sign of them, and they were presumed lost.

The story received nationwide attention, but it was personal for me. I didn’t know Perry and Austin, but my niece attended school with one of them, the same school attended by my own three kids when we lived in Jupiter in the 1980s.

Our family, including two sons and a daughter, lived on the waterfront just west of the inlet, under the morning shadow of the iconic red lighthouse that was probably the boys’ last view of land. Like those boys, our three kids loved nothing better than spending time on the water.

Their boat was a 19-foot center console. We had a larger family boat, but our teens wanted the added freedom that comes only with a boat of your own. They started with a Sears rowboat and eventually saved enough to upgrade to a larger skiff. The three siblings spent weeks lovingly restoring it to Bristol condition, and they received a new outboard as their reward from us for a job well done. They built equity and pride for themselves, and in the process learned every inch of their new boat, including a reasonable understanding of her capabilities and limitations.

Their time on the water was so all-consuming that my wife, with a nod to Mark Twain, referred to them as Tom, Huck and Becky. They spent all summer and every weekend together in that boat, leaving at daybreak and getting home just ahead of the ravenous no-see-ums. The intervening hours were spent exploring the murky Intracoastal Waterway, the sparkling waters of Hobe Sound and the meandering reaches and shallow bars of the Loxahatchee River.

They gained knowledge, self-confdence and maturity that served them well in the journey to parenting families of their own. It is likely that Perry and Austin, with similar joy and enthusiasm, had explored the same waters and taken the same tentative steps toward adulthood, when they took one step too far and fate intervened.

We thank God every day that it turned out well for our family, but we understood from the beginning that there were no guarantees. There can be no adventure without an expectation of adversity, but we believed that having given our children roots, it was time for them to try their wings. We set geographical limits to protect them, including a restriction on travel out the inlet to the ocean. We hoped that our kids would honor our trust by observing those limits, but to this day, we really have no way of knowing whether they actually did, or if they were just lucky.

Perry and Austin’s parents, like my wife and me, and all who raise kids to love the sea, did what they thought was right and best for their children. No one—not me, not you, not the armchair experts nor the talking heads—has any right to question their decisions. Doing so serves no purpose and only compounds a tragedy that is already unfathomable.

I grieve deeply for Perry and Austin and their families, but I continue to believe that a life enjoyed to the fullest is worth the inherent risks. In spite of a parent’s best efforts, tragedy can come at any time, more often than not a result of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.