Pressure From Others And Accepting Bad Risks

If my mother had gone with her gut, and stuck to her guns, she might well be with us today

(an earlier version of this story was originally published in my Medium publication, shortly after the Titan submersible implosion)

My mother was just 53 years old when she died in 2000. She drowned in a whitewater rafting accident in Costa Rica, when their raft tipped over on a river dangerously swollen with rain. The day after she and one of the other rafters had drowned, and their bodies were recovered by the Red Cross, who had to backpack them out of the jungle, I got a call from the US Consul giving me the broad outlines of what had happened.

She promised me that death certificates would be mailed to my mother’s home address, informed me that my mother’s body would have to be cremated, and asked me how I wanted to get my mother’s remains back home. Her boyfriend and his son were on the trip with her, so I told her to have them bring my mother’s ashes home on the plane. (If you’d like to hear more of this story, you can watch or listen to this video.)

It’s been quite a while since I thought much about some of the circumstances of her death by drowning at an age I’ve now nearly reached. Usually when I do reflect on her death, I’m imagining what her last minutes were like more than anything else, sad at the prospect of her dying essentially alone, cut off from her five raft-mates by the waters that were filling her lungs. But one story that has been in the news a lot recently brought back to mind another dimension to what happened to her.

I expect nearly everyone is familiar with the story of OceanGate Expeditions’ submersible Titan, taken for a tourist ride to the Titanic wreck down way past its safety zone. It imploded, killing all five of the people on board. As we later learned from his aunt, one of the passengers, a 19-year-old student Suleman Dawood, was reportedly terrified about taking the trip, but went along despite his misgivings in order to please his Titanic-obsessed father. If he had chosen not to take what was likely billed as an “opportunity of a lifetime”, he would have lost his father and not died down there with him.

Reading that story was like a sudden gut punch. It recalled an aspect of my mother’s death I hadn’t thought about for a long time. That last day of her life, two of her friends had told me, she didn’t want to go out onto the river. She thought it looked too dangerous. And she had more good reasons for that concern than were immediately clear at the time. Her previous whitewater rafting trip, they had hit bad rapids that overturned the raft and swept them all downstream. She had nearly drowned, trapped under a log beneath the waterline, but had been rescued. So she was certainly and existentially aware of the risks.

Three other factors came together to take her life.

• The first was that it was the wrong time of the year to be out on that river. Heavy seasonal rains had turned the Pacuare river into a faster, stronger, and more unpredictable environment.

• The second was that the company they went with, Tico’s Rivers, not only decided to continue sending whitewater rafting tours out on the river when nearly all the other companies prudently cancelled the trips for that day. They also were slipshod about safety, foisting old and ineffective equipment onto the rafters, as later investigations revealed.

• The third factor, however, was my mother’s boyfriend, who — according to her friends — had foolishly and selfishly pressured her and the other rafters to go out on the river despite their reluctance that day.

It’s interesting that, looking at one of the main reports about the accident, Ron gets listed as my mother’s fiancé, which was clearly not the case. She and I had talked often about why she never had any intention of marrying him.

She allowed him (and for a while his sons) to live in the house she owned, and he was responsible for paying the utilities. She explicitly told him, and my sister and I, that she not only had no plans to marry him (which would hold out the possibility of perhaps changing her mind), but that she had decided after considerable thought that she would never marry him.

So how did they wind up — to everyone’s surprise — “engaged”? Ron was making recourse to his usual expedient of making stuff up and telling lies when the truth could prove inconvenient for him. That’s the kind of guy he was.

Two of my mother’s friends told me later, after Ron and his son had flown back with my mother’s ashes, that my mother had expressed her unwillingness to go out on the river phoning them sometime before it (perhaps the night before — it’s been more than two decades since we talked, so I’m a bit hazy on some details). They added that her boyfriend Ron was talking up the trip, dismissing her concerns, trying to steer things the way he wanted.

This came as zero surprise to me, since I’d seen him do precisely that over the years not only with my mom (who sometimes pushed back) but with his sons and with his colleagues and contacts. He was the sort of person who thought he knew best, did minimal research about matters, and created problems and inconveniences for others by screwing up. And in this case, contributed to getting two people killed.

My mother kept a journal of the trip, and we found it in her luggage. One of the people who survived the trip explained to my sister and I that the missing pages from it — you could see where the last entries had been torn out — had been taken by Ron, who was acting “squirrely” and “weird”.

What had my mother written in those final pages? Why would they need to be removed from the journal? What could possibly, in his mind, outweigh allowing his dead girlfriend’s children to read the thoughts she set down her final days? Obviously, I can’t say for certain. But I imagine it had to be something that definitively cast Ron in a bad light.

As I said, it’s been quite a while since I thought about this aspect of my mother’s death, namely that one key factor was her boyfriend pressuring her into going out onto the river that fateful day, when she had expressed that she didn’t want to. Obviously drowning in a rafting accident is not the only way a person can die, and there are no guarantees that she wouldn’t have been done in by something else in the 24 years since that accident in Costa Rica. But had she not gone along with her foolish, selfish boyfriend’s (quite likely) whining, she very well might be alive today.

If she were, she would be 78 years old, long retired but likely serving in volunteer and leadership positions. She would have long ago finished the B.A. she was taking classes towards at Marquette University, and I’m willing to bet she would have gone on to pursue some graduate studies. She would have been there when my sister and I got our final degrees.

Monique Sadler would have gotten to see her grandchildren born and grow up. My sister was pregnant with her oldest child at the time our mother died. Perhaps somewhere in there, she’d have kicked Ron to the well-deserved curb, and found someone better to share her future decades with. We’ll never know, because all of that was taken away from her by a river, a company, and a thoughtless person who wanted to have things his own way, even at the expense of making others shoulder bad risks.