There comes a time and place where we all realize an important fact about life: how fleeting and fragile it is. Today was one of those days for me.

I work in an industry that focuses on just about everything going on in our community, down to the best and worst moments of life. The best moments include milestones, birthdays, celebrations and so on. The worst moments include wrecks, fires, drownings, homicides…

This summer, I got my first taste of a worst moment at the scene of a drowning. Obviously, I had never covered this sort of thing before and ended up spending about 30 minutes on a bridge overlooking the river and rescuers. They couldn’t find the boy. And the entire time, I was praying.

According to this boy’s friend, he got tired and was pulled under by the current. He was lost in an instant. And I was struck by just how fragile we are as I was overlooking the scene and how something that gives us life, like water, can take it away.

Last week, I was called to the scene of a flipped 18-wheeler log truck. It smashed into the side of a small sedan making a left turn out of a community college. Logs littered the four-lane highway, cutting traffic off for hours.

Miraculously, the girl in the car didn’t have a scratch on her. And while her car flipped numerous times before it rolled to a stop in the ditch on the side of the highway, she was OK.

Today, a writer, another photographer and I spent time with a woman whose husband was shot and killed after pulling over to ask for directions on the way to a football game last week.

What I hadn’t realized was she sat in the passenger seat next to her husband as his killer (who is 15) raised the gun and fired, hitting her husband in the chest as they were attempting to escape. The kid and his friends wanted to steal the car. Her husband’s life was lost for nothing.

She is a witness to one of the horrific things I could ever imagine someone could experience. And I cannot fathom having the strength to carry on after see the person you love most in the world die so senselessly.

It breaks my heart to hear stories like this, and I hear them all too often, whether it’s in a conference room at a hospital or on the scene of a crime. I cannot believe the things people do to each other. And every day like this one, I’m reminded just how precious and fragile we all are.

And while I know this simple realization won’t make the world a better place, I figure if more people experience it, maybe things will start looking up. Maybe we’ll start treating each other better. And maybe we’ll respect life for what is it — something so fleeting, so ephemeral — we’ll live for and capture every moment we can.