Last week, we printed our top 10 staff picks for stories of the year. We finish our 2012 retrospective with our reporters’ thoughts for the year past. In the first of two installments, Daniel Nash discusses the summer drownings of 2012. Brian Beckley will discuss his thoughts on the year next week.

Statistically, the chances of death on Lake Tapps are still slim. If thousands venture out to swim any given summer and only three people—at the most—lose their life, the fatality rate is a fraction of a percent. In the grand scheme of public safety, that’s an exceptional rate of return. That’s better than deaths from smoking. Statistically.

If that perspective sounds cold, it’s because it is. If it sounds hard to live with, well, it’s that too.

I remember where I was the day Marques Weekly, the third Tapps victim, drowned. I was on my way to visit my mother in Auburn, passing the North Tapps county park on the way. It was a busy day; maybe not the busiest of the summer, but the busiest I’ve seen.

Cars lined the shoulders of the road from end-to-end, crowded enough that pedestrians gave up all pretense of ability to stay out of the roadway. There were more feet than wheels on the asphalt because, well, it just wasn’t possible for it to be otherwise. Briefly, and with the prior two drownings on my mind, I thought to myself, “You know, in terms of pure numbers…”

The thought passed in seconds, but returned as I drove through the 9th Street S-curve on my way home. “You know, in terms of pure numbers…”

Then the ambulance came screaming from behind. In a moment like that, it’s hard not to feel like a monster.

Quantitative thought is useful—and often superior—when you’re dealing with big picture problems, but its Achilles’ heel is that it dehumanizes. It separates itself from reality even as it attempts to analyze and understand it.

The reason I bring this up is to address the pronouncement in community reaction to deaths on Lake Tapps in 2012 compared to 2010, which also saw three people lose their lives. There’s no doubt that it was due to the initial drowning of Quentin Boggan, who I hesitate to mention because the repetition of his name in our pages long after his death has become morbid to me. But, unfortunately, that gets to the core of the issue.

The three men who lost their lives in 2010 were all adults and visitors. Each death was a sad story but, ultimately, they’re just that: a story to anyone other than the people who knew them. Maybe that’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s just not possible for a person to mourn everyone as if they were one of his own. He would go crazy if he did.

Boggan, on the other hand, was a young, well-liked student with connections to many families through his friendships with fellow Bonney Lake High School students and football players. But his popularity wasn’t what was most relevant: he was young and close to home. I think everyone in the community mourned his death in some way; every parent, especially, held their child a little bit tighter.

By the time Marcus Henderson, Tapps’ second summer victim, had drowned, it had become a semi-regular occurrence to find emails from local mothers in my inbox. It was the same question every time: was there any new information on the cause of Quentin’s drowning? I had contacted the county coroner with no luck, so I stuck to East Pierce Fire and Rescue’s talking points, that Tapps was a glacial lake and that muscle-seizure from sudden freezing water was a constant risk. This seemed to be the case in all three drownings.

One email in particular sticks out in my mind. The mother in question was already aware of the cold water risks of the lake, but her teenaged son didn’t believe it. He was convinced Quentin had to have done something wrong; people just don’t drown for no reason.

What do you say to that? What can you say?

Wherever he stands now, I realize now that boy was just mourning in his own way. How was his stance much different from all the parents curious about mysterious new revelations in the investigation? The mothers were hungrier for useful information, perhaps, but both had on some level decided there was a hidden reason, a hidden fault that — if they could only find it — would explain the whole tragedy handily.

Untimely death haunts every community and season, but the 2012 Lake Tapps drownings were particularly disturbing. They were disturbing because of their rapid succession, because of the victims’ youth, and because the victims were competent swimmers doing nothing out of the ordinary. They were disturbing because they were reminders that death doesn’t need a reason. It never has, but that’s no easier to accept no matter how true it is.