Joy, interrupted

 All the world wanted to be Olga Carmona yesterday.

All the world wanted the pureness of her joy, the crystalline feel of the rarified air of the mountaintop in her lungs, the knowledge that, by scoring the only goal in the women's World Cup final, she passed from mortality to legend as the toast of her nation.

They'll put up statues of her now, maybe. They'll remember her name forever, surely. It was the best day of her life, just as surely.

Until it wasn't.

Until, after the goal in the 29th minute and the victory and the dancing beneath the confetti and getting her hands on what she'd worked and sweated all her life to get her hands on -- the World Cup trophy -- she learned one person was no longer around to share it all with her.

She learned her father had died. On Friday, two days before the final.

He died after a long illness, apparently, and it was the family's decision not to tell her until after the final. You can debate the propriety of that if you want, but I will not. There are no rules when there's a death in the family, and the only impropriety is trying to say there are. 

In any case, I can't imagine what it was like for Carmona, finding out her father was dead at the height of the most joyous moment of her life. I am 68 years old, well aware of my mortality, and it is unfathomable to me. Carmona is 23, when you are bone certain you're going to live forever. So, yes, it is beyond me to even guess.

All I've got is Carmona's response on social media was that "without knowing it, I had my own star before the game even started." And there did seem to be some mystic currents colliding out there in the cosmos. 

Her father dies on Friday, and Sunday she scores the biggest goal of her life and in the history of women's soccer in Spain. 

She score that goal while wearing an undershirt with the word "Merchi" on it, honoring a close friend's mother who herself had recently died.

I am neither a theologian nor a spiritualist, so I won't begin to try untangling the metaphysical implications of all that. But perhaps the bard was right when he wrote that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Or perhaps is was just a young woman's joy and a father's death, the one lending meaning to the other.