Stevie, we hardly knew ye

Early this morning, Steve Irwin, popularly known as the Crocodile Hunter, died as a result of injury sustained in a close encounter with a stingray off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. He died while filming a documentary on the great creatures, having come too close to one and agitating it, causing it to whip out with it's tail and catch him under the rib cage with the sharp, poisonous barb at the end of it's tail. He died of a massive puncture wound to his heart.

Granted, this was a freak accident, one which no one would have predicted, but it makes me ask again, what is it in the souls of some folks that makes them NEED life on the edge? Why do they thirst for the kind of excitement that would stop the hearts of most of the people I know? I would no sooner leap on the back of a 10' crocodile than I would jump from a moving train. Yet there are those whose lives are nothing without the adrenaline rush of cheating death.

Sorry, Steve, this time you didn't cheat it, you played right into it's hands. I hope it was worth it. If I believed in a hereafter I might take comfort in believing you had gone on to something greater. Instead I think of your widow and your fatherless little children, and all I can feel is "What a waste..."