Death Dive
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A few years back I took a vacation to Honolulu with my girlfriend; we were really excited to be going somewhere tropical. At the top of our list of things to do was snorkelling. We headed over to Hanauma Bay which was only a short bus ride away. We rented our equipment, set down our towels and snapped a few photos; including the one above. I had taken notice of the man on the far right walking into the water but between all the other tourists he hadn’t really stood out much. We slapped on our equipment, jumped in the water and enjoyed an afternoon of snorkelling. We made our way back to the rental booth and were waiting in line to return our equipment when one of the life guards ran into the booth looking for an Epipen. My girlfriend, being a pharmacist, immediately new that something was wrong. As the lifeguard ran off behind us we both turned back to see the man in the black shorts being dragged out of the water by two life guards. They dropped him on the sand and started doing CPR frantically. A woman who must have been with the man stood up and hysterically watched over the life guards. After every consecutive minute that passed I knew his chances of survival greatly diminished. We had been standing at the edge of the beach for about five minutes already and I had figured that the man had probably been in the water for a few minutes before anyone noticed him; I could tell that this wasn’t going to end well.
I was begining to become uncomfortable and mentioned to my girlfriend that we should probably leave before the ambulance came. Working in a hospital, my girlfriend wasn’t the least bit shocked at what we were watching and refused to leave even though I pleaded with her over and over. What made the situation worse was that my girlfriend kept giving me the play by play on what they were doing and refused to stop imparting unwanted information to me. I had never been to a funeral let alone watched someone die in front of me and emotionally it was a pretty big shock. At around 10 minutes you could see the desperation set in on the lifeguards as they continued to do CPR. I don’t know what happened to the woman at the point, she may have sat down but she was nowhere I could see. At that point I had seen enough and had no intention of staying there any longer so I grabbed my girlfriend and forced her out of the park with me. We waited quietly for about 20 minutes for our bus to arrive which is also when the ambulance arrived. As we started our trip back to our hotel I couldn’t understand how people continued to lounge on the beach snorkelling while some one died a few feet away. As I replayed the events of that afternoon in my head, thoughts of mortality overcame me to the point that I a hard time focusing on anything that night.
When I looked back on our photos of the trip I realized that I had caught the last few moments of a man’s life with my camera and although I have no Idea who he was, I knew that he would never be forgotten.
