A Time to Play Through

I was searching online for instances of tragedy among teammates where surviving team members have to find the resolve to continue without a fallen comrade. Death is a part of life to be certain and yet the loss of a teammate always seems awfully untimely. So then the advice begins streaming sounding much like pithy sayings and speculations about what the deceased would want. “He’d want us to go out there and compete,” we say. Actually, in all my experience of playing on sports teams I never lost one teammate to death. But I’ve lost friends to gang warfare and disease. And I’ve heard the same admonishments. Play on in honor of the fallen.

The funny thing is that with all of its hackneyed familiarity, I believe people now when they say, we’ve got to go on because that’s what ____________ would want us to do if he were here. The Cincinnati Bengals’ Chris Henry is gone and no one will ever know what his wishes were for his team at this point in the season. Henry was taken from this world at only 26 years old. The Bengals are two wins away from securing a playoff birth and I said to myself while watching Sportscenter, “Would I want my team to stop competing because I died?” The answer was easy. No! I’m like everybody else who spent formative years honing a craft and trying to win as an expert within that realm. If I died prematurely and had access to team members from beyond I’d say, “Go to work. Do what you’re trained to do.” Death is a grim reality. And it’s not so much unnatural as much as it is jarring because of its abruptness. It shocks and disrupts but if we honor the life of those who once flanked us, we’ll demonstrate it by Playing Through.