46

Ordinary Time: June 9, 2020

46: 46 minutes; 46 hours; 46 days; 46 years. Depending on what you are counting, 46 can represent a paltry amount of time—not even an hour’s worth of minutes or very little of a week or, for that matter, only a little more than a month. Even 46 years isn’t that much to a person who has lived twice that long. My mother and her two sisters all died at the age of 92. To them, 46 was still young—two of them were raising children at age 46. As busy as they were, running households, taking care of husbands, raising children, they had little time to contemplate the stages of their lives—their middle-aged-ness.

46: the measure of a whole lifetime. That is what George Floyd was given for his lifetime. Someone snatched his future from him. How long would he have lived? Would he have seen his daughter graduate from high school in 12 years? He would only then be 58, still a middle-aged man, not old enough to die. And yet he died. I doubt he was contemplating death before he ended up on the pavement with a police officer’s knee choking the breath out of him. He might have been thinking about possible jobs. He might have been thinking abut his daughter. He might have been thinking about the members of his family whom he had joined in the Minneapolis area. But I doubt that he was thinking of his imminent death—until he was in the middle of that eight minutes and 46 seconds. There is that number again: 46—46 seconds—but that is just the end of the eight minutes. Subtracting the 46 short seconds would not have saved his life.

When I was 46, I had just started taking doctoral classes. On a whim, fueled by envy for what some of my high school teaching colleagues were gaining from their classes at Middle Tennessee State University, I walked into the field house, looked over the graduate class options in English literature, chose 17^th century poetry and prose, pulled out a credit card, and left with a schedule to enter the class. It was a year later before I found out that I actually needed to gain admission to the program. 46 years old, acting on a whim, not thinking logically or reasonably, I started a graduate program without permission and finished it seven years later, all the while working fulltime and being a single mother of three. That program gave me the opportunity at a whole new career at age 50, a career so satisfying that I did not want to give it up, even at the age of 71.

What if my life had ended at 46? What if I had never had that opportunity to teach at a university for 23 years? The whole second half of my life has been shaped by that moment when I was 46. Who knows what the arc of George Floyd’s life would have been if he had been allowed to live beyond his first (and only) 46 years? Every day we are given to live on this earth gives us new opportunities, new horizons, new possibilities—if they are not snatched from us.

Of course, lives end in different ways—disease, debilitating depression and mental illness, accidents of various kinds. All those things may take lives too soon. The coronavirus has taken 46-year-olds just as cruelly as the policeman took George Floyd’s life. But the virus is mindless, senseless; even though the death seems “cruel” to us, it was not a death that could be prevented by the mind of a person. George Floyd’s death, however, was preventable—by the officer with his knee on his neck or by any one of the three other officers who did nothing to stop the slow, torturous squeezing of air passages.

46 years. A lifetime. A short lifetime, but already a lifetime that will make a difference in our country. This one short life has shined a light into the dark places of officialdom. Now it is our turn to do something with our years—whether they be fewer than 46 or more than 46. We must do our part to help bring abut reform to prevent lives from being stopped at 46.