Reacting to Taylor's death? Not enough information

The lesson of Sean Taylor's death is there for us all to see, and that lesson is this:

It's awfully hard for people to say "I don't know."

What happened behind the gates at Sean Taylor's home? Reply hazy. (Getty Images)

They are the three worst words in the hyper-information age, which is why they are so rarely used. They say that in an era of snap judgments for hire, that the only sensible judgment is unavailable for reasons of vanity. And vanity is the worst reason to do nearly anything.

This we know.

Since Taylor was shot Monday morning and essentially bled to death over a 24-hour period, sports pundits and sports fans have been struggling to make it a cautionary tale of something, because that's what we tend to do with death -- make it fit a pre-fab template we have constructed with the help of our own experiences, our own prejudices and Google.

Well, so far, based on what we actually know, as opposed to what we think we might eventually learn, Sean Taylor's death is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you answer your front door. And that's not very helpful at all.

Not that "I don't know" is much more help. But it is all we have, and since we don't want to use that, we really have nothing at all.

Who shot him? I don't know. Why was he shot? I don't know. Was his checkered past part of the reason he was shot? I don't know. Did his murderer know who he was? I don't know. Was his murder linked to the attempted break-in of his home eight days earlier? I don't know. Had he really become a model parent and teammate? I don't know. How will his family and team cope with this tragedy? I don't know.

So what do we know then? His girlfriend has lost a mate. His daughter has lost a father. His NFL insurance policy is worth $600,000 and was issued with his sister as the beneficiary. His future salaries with the Redskins, base salaries and bonuses that total slightly more than $3.5 million, are not technically the Redskins' responsibility.

There are no cautionary tales in any of that, no grand lessons we can take with us except maybe that life is often short and cruel and unfair and capricious and valued too little by too many people. Nothing specific to Sean Taylor's experience.

But "I don't know" doesn't cut it these days, so assumptions must be made -- about Taylor, about the people who knew Taylor, about the people Taylor talked to and didn't talk to, about the lifestyles of the rich, famous and once not entirely savory, about the powers of redemption and the power of spin and the power of assumptions themselves.

All because we can't say "I don't know."

But that's often the problem in a world in which there are more outlets than ever for opinion but still only a few for actual fact-finding. We end up covering not Sean Taylor's death but our reactions to his death. We cover ourselves by dissecting our opinions and using them as proof in and of themselves of ... well, us. It is mega-narcissism, navel-gazing on a breathtaking scale.

And there is the lesson of Sean Taylor's death given what we know now. In time, the police may find the gunman (or gunwoman; we don't even know that right now), and we may get a more complete explanation and understanding of how this tragedy happened and how this family was savaged. We may actually learn that yes, Taylor's sketchy past wasn't really past at all. Or we may find out that he really had become the loving family man he was purported to be, and was just the victim of a home break-in.

But we don't wait very well. We have opinions and theories that must be aired and disseminated because, damn it, we're supposed to have them. It works after games, and after trades, and after retirements. In fact, we've pretty well made it work before games, trades and retirements, too.

But we're not good at making it work in real life. We haven't been good at making it work in the Barry Bonds perjury/obstruction trial, because again, we won't say "I don't know." What is the government's evidence? I don't know. What did Bonds actually know and when did he know it? I don't. Can the feds prove their case without Greg Anderson? I don't know. Did the feds deliberately target Bonds, or was this the natural course of the BALCO case and Bonds just caught not cooperating? I don't know. We surmise like crazy, but we don't know.

And we won't say we don't know, because then it sounds like ... well, we don't know. But sometimes "I don't know" is the only answer, and we have to give it because there is too much at stake, and because guessing at it to fill space or time is just too reckless.

So maybe that's the cautionary tale here -- that in a world full of high-tech magic 8-balls, sometimes we just have to be happy with the panel that reads, "Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later." Maybe we have to learn that reporting on a man's violent death isn't the same as every other story, and that the answers aren't found in the tape library, and that the truth comes out in drips and drops, and sometimes not at all.

Maybe, until we know who and what killed Sean Taylor, we need to get comfortable with the idea that the only thing worse than saying "I don't know" is pretending we do.