God does not allow us to know the moment or the way it will happen. We can only choose how to live until it does.
According to WCVB-TV in Boston, shortly after 9 p.m. on Dec. 2, police found stabbing victim Patrick Kenney Jr., 42, in the parking lot of the Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus, Massachusetts. Kenney was later pronounced dead at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Incredibly — and tragically — police described Kenney’s death as accidental and identified its cause as what WCVB called a “knife that was attached to something he was wearing around his neck.”
Indeed, Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker and Saugus police Chief Michael Ricciardelli suspected no foul play in the man’s death.
“This incident appears to be accidental, and no additional parties are believed to be involved,” Tucker and Ricciardelli said in a joint announcement.
Kenney’s father told a WCVB reporter that it was a “freak accident,” the outlet reported.
The man who died outside of #Kowloon last night was 42-year-old Patrick Kenney, Jr. His father tells me he leaves behind a wife and young twin children. Kenney suffered a fatal knife wound in the parking lot, which his father describes as a freak accident. #wcvb pic.twitter.com/qQtVMNB8QC
— Peter Eliopoulos (@petereliopoulos) December 3, 2023
Details surrounding both the knife and the accident’s cause remain hazy.
Do you carry a pocketknife?
For instance, WBZ-TV in Boston reported that Kenney wore “a lanyard with a knife attached.” The “lanyard” conjures images of college freshmen with plastic-encased student IDs around their necks.
On the other hand, WFXT-TV in Boston described the device that caused Kenney’s death as a “knife necklace.” That conjures very different images of the kind seen here, where knives dangle freely and without protective encasement.
Either way, Kenney appears to have “accidentally tripped” after leaving the restaurant and “somehow cut himself,” according to WFXT.
Such things defy comprehension.
According to a tribute-filled obituary posted on the Alfred D. Thomas Funeral Home website, Kenney excelled as a multisport athlete in high school and later played football at the University of Maine.
He went on to work long hours with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to bring relief to people devastated by natural disasters.
It hardly seems possible that a life marked by physical strength and arduous service could end in such a way.
Furthermore, according to his mother, Kenney already had overcome a “devastating medical condition” after suffering multiple strokes at age 37.
“After the strokes I really think he appreciated things and felt like he had a second chance,’’ she said in the obituary.
Then, in 2021, his wife, Lauren, gave birth to twins, Ava and Patrick III.
“It all seemed like a miracle,” Kenney’s father said. “He had gone from the depths of suffering strokes to the highest of highs as a father whose life was even more joyous than he had dared to imagine.”
That newfound appreciation and joy influenced the way Kenney lived.
“He was a great father,” Lauren said. “I feel like he wanted to live life to the fullest after that because he knew tomorrow wasn’t promised.”
This tragic story has caught the attention and inspired the generosity of many.
A GoFundMe campaign for Kenney’s surviving twins had raised more than $94,000 by Monday — nearly double its $50,000 goal.
We should, of course, acknowledge the danger inherent in wearing a “knife necklace.” But we need not dwell on that part of Kenney’s story.
In the 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” legendary Christian author C.S. Lewis warned us about such fears.
“It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty,” Lewis wrote.
Indeed, our world bristles with “such chances,” and death remains “a certainty.”
Better, therefore, that we should live as Kenney lived after his strokes.
Thanking God for every moment of every day must never become a platitude. It must constitute our life’s whole purpose.
