I can’t confirm this directly, as I wasn’t there at the time, but I can confirm that something similar to this happened to me one time.

I was at SeaWorld: Orlando posing for a careless selfie when I accidentally tottered backwards over a fence and fell into the polar bear enclosure. Now, since I wasn’t a polar bear, this was ostensibly something of a problem. But I, like many others, seriously underestimated our plucky white arctic friends.

I was approached by Poncho, the alpha of the bear colony. She sized me up as a potential meal but decided instead that I could become a new member of the pack. I joined hesitantly, but quickly discovered that the bears were more welcoming than I’d originally given them credit for. I was given a job of hunting penguin in the local exhibit pool. Despite the fact that I never caught a single one, the polar bears never judged me for my shortcomings. “You’ll get one next time,” their eyes seemed to say. I felt a belief in me so deep that it still gives me chills to reflect back on it.

The exhibit was cold and I found warmth in the huddled company of other polar bears. And in their embrace, I found love as well. It had started with me vying to earn Poncho’s respect, but eventually I found that I had won her courtship. We sired an entire litter of cubs together. I had something then that my life never once had outside of those four painted walls: stability, and purpose.

But then one crisp morning, as the birds a cage over tweeted excitedly at the rising sun and nearby bonobos cacawed their cheery call, my entire new life shattered. It died a quiet death, the kind of solemn fade-out that a candle burned through its wick might show. My life ended there in the warm orange glow of sunrise, as there, in the center of a cage, stood a zookeeper.

He locked eyes with me, and I, him. I tried to push him away, but he was unrelenting in his purpose. Soon, more appeared and they latched their arms onto me and grasped at my neck with an elongated metal gripping pole. I didn’t fight them, nor did I scream. I didn’t want to make a scene and wake the cubs. Instead, I stared down the lead zookeeper, my chest rising and falling with silent exertion puffing clouds of white smoke in the cold morning air… I watched one of those clouds roll forwards, take shape into something beautiful and flowing and pristine, if only for a moment. And then, much like my halcyon stay with the polar bears, it vanished into nothing.

It has been eight years since that day. Eight years with a hole in my heart, I’ve trudged through life in black and white. I think on my cubs every single hour of every single day… cubs that were too young to even open their eyes when their father vanished. I think on the eldest cub, Jacob, and his tiny limp from his imperfect birth. I think of the girl, Agatha, and how her nose bore her mother’s mark in the small bump shaped of strawberry. I think of the youngest, Albert, and can even picture his tangled mane of white fur around his head. And last, I think of Poncho, the white bear who was more human than anyone I’ve ever known. And for all the sorrow I feel, there is a bitter-tasting joy of equal measure just behind it, rising whenever the pangs of sorrow wane. Because while the loss of that life stings unbearably, I cannot help but think oh!, but to have lived that life at all, if only for a fleeting moment.