a life interrupted

The saddest thing happened yesterday. Here we all have been living the life with lots of tennis, wine, food and swimming when suddenly tragedy intruded into our idyll.
Lucy came running into our house mid afternoon shouting that there was a dead body floating in the water and that she was on the phone to the poice. Everybody congregated at her cottage as emergency services ran down the hill to the beach where Eagle was giving mouth to mouth to the man.
At first I thought it was somebody that had fallen from a boat and drifted in to shore. And I was sad. That is how immediate death affects you but then it turned closer to home.
The man on the beach was the charming Phil Boal who had only yesterday won the tennis tournament with young Ben Borris.
Nobody knew what was happening. The paramedics refused to tell us the status quo of what was happening on the beach. It was an hour or so before the sheriff formally told us that Phil was dead. His sister Winnie said "this is not happening" and then sat down to put on her socks. She had run from her house in just her shoes. She now wanted to put her socks on to be better prepared for what was to come.
A lot of tears were shed as the huge team of men pulled the body along the beach and up into the ambulance.
The last anyone had seen Phil was earlier in the day. Chris Moore and his kids were playing on the floating trampoline sun-baking when they were rudely splashed with water. It was Phil who had waded out to tease them. They joked around for a bit and then left. That was the last time anyone saw him alive. It is believed that he had a stroke or heart attack and fell into the water and drowned. Apparently he had had a stroke a year or so before.

Here are two pictures of Phil taken the day before he died. In the first he is sitting in our house and in the one above he is drinking from the bubbling spring. He embraced life with a child-like gusto.
He was a smiling, quiet, generous man. I only knew him a couple of days but his death leaves me diminished.