“We were told that Nick said the two NFL players took their life jackets off and drifted out to sea,” said Bob Bleakley, whose son Will Bleakley, 25, is also still missing.
~ via FoxNews

Four friends, all athletes, all young and in good condition, all dumped into the same vast frigid water miles from land with only a vest/cushion to lift them up, all with the same odds of survival. Only one comes back. Why?

Doctors say it was not only his physical stamina, but his mental stamina that made the difference. I couldn’t tell from the article, but I would surmise that he determined that his best course lay in giving himself every edge he could by sticking to the boat. A white hull of a 21′ boat is easier to see than a single human in a life vest. He must have determined to stick it out through the pain of his icy muscles and exhaustion of battling the powerful waves, and more importantly, stick it out through the temptation to lose his resolve by giving in to animal fear and wild desperate urges and despair. 46 hours later, the rescuers found him, still clinging to the boat, 35 miles out to sea, alone.

What of his friends? One was certain, floating in the pitch cold black, that he’d seen a light from shore. He stripped himself of his last advantage – his life vest – and struck out swimming for what he thought he’d seen. Even more sobering are the actions of the other two friends who died first. At some point in the first night they must have made a decision that the game was unwinnable, hopeless. Deliberately (and, one would assume, ignoring the pleas of their friends), they removed their jackets, let go, and drifted away. And down.

I don’t know what I would have done their positions and I don’t presume to know why they all made the decisions they did. I do know that I’m pitifully out of shape – physically for sure, and probably mentally. I also know that when circumstances collapse, my instinctive desire is to assert some kind of final control by deciding to preemptively get out – whatever “out” is. In other words, I’m often a lot more like the first two friends who stopped fighting, who drifted into the dark and never got to see the lights of the Coast Guard choppers.

The lessons to be drawn from this tragedy are so obvious as to practically write themselves, so obvious that maybe they’re even clichéd. (Lifetime Movie Of The Week, anyone?) But that doesn’t mean the lessons aren’t worth drawing. Sometimes being cynical just makes you take off your life vest.

The obvious lesson: Sometimes it’s gonna hurt bad, sometimes you’re gonna get pounded until you’re beyond exhausted, sometimes you’re going to be distracted by the temptation to take what you think is an easier way out of the oppressive dark, sometimes you’ll be tempted to simply give up because you think you know better than the friends who are rooting for you, telling you not to stop. But don’t let go of the thing that helped you venture out.

Don’t let go of the boat.