[From July 24, 2014 – Key Largo, FL]

You’ve planned for a day of snorkeling, but as you’re about to drop anchor you notice a boat in distress. You pull up to learn of a seventy-one-year-old drowning/seizure victim in need of aid. And like a superhero, your wife throws her hat and sunglasses to the deck and leaps overboard to swim onto the other boat and commence CPR. And a hush falls over your children as the minutes pass, and the coast guard still hasn’t arrived, and the woman they know as “mom” barks instructions to several panicked adults. And your buddy fires the flare gun at her instruction. And the coast guard arrives – except it’s not the coast guard, it’s the Florida Wildlife Commission – and he has no paramedics on board. So your wife boards his boat with the patient and two of his grandsons, continuously performing CPR all the way into shore. And as your kids watch her motor away, they understand death in a way they didn’t before, and that the woman who tucks them in at night may, under the right circumstances, have some power over it.