The 80-year-old do-gooder Red Deer man, who stopped to help a Vancouver Island woman having car trouble in the dark, then pushed her off the road as a vehicle careened directly toward them.
According to family comments, he was a very unselfish guy, the kind who holds store doors open for others. (In a world where more and more people seem to care only about themselves and much less about others–especially strangers, I wonder how common or rare this kind of heroism is today.) Just a ‘small’ news item about the personal choices people make in emergencies and crises amidst unexpected, certain death.
In this case, an unselfish existential choice of a sudden highway hero in a strange land.
In that instant, this man confirmed his core values, the record of his past life-choices, his essential altruistic nature, and made a personal choice that was firmly true to his nature, full of significant meaning and purpose fulfilled.
In that blindingly fast, tragic accident, the man made an instinctive, truly heroic existential choice.
And, thus, an ordinary, yet significant human individual left behind his most indelible signature/mark on our absurd, unpredictable, and weirdly chaotic world.