When my children were in the 15-20 age range, I more than once told them something along these lines:

“Don’t be part of that 1 percent.”

That was the shorthand I used for teenagers who die, well, stupidly. By making bad choices. Driving too fast, driving drunk, riding with someone driving drunk, being in bad locations at bad hours, using dangerous drugs.

“Don’t be part of that 1 percent,” I would say as they went out the door. And, thank goodness, they were not.

Don’t we all know of someone who died in their late teens while doing something that probably was a bad idea? Or a very bad idea?

I do. He was my cousin.

Earlier today, his sister posted an item on a social media site noting this was his birthday, and he would have been 65.

He was 18 or 19 when he died. I do not remember the exact year, but I was in high school, and the whole of my family drove up to the farmlands of California’s  Central Valley for the funeral. The cousins on that side of my family were close, and we spent quite a bit of time together, especially at Dodgers games.

Some background. When I was 10, I spent a week at his family’s ranch-style house deep in farm country. And wondered what I was doing there.

The house was surrounded by enormous tracts of land on which the family grew white corn, cotton and alfalfa, as I recall. I remember thinking that farmers grew things they needed to live. Wheat and such. Couldn’t eat cotton or alfalfa, and white corn is usually consumed only in corn chips.

The concept of “cash crops” had not occurred to me.

He was very patient with the visitor from the city, spending time trying to help me figure out how to do the most basic of chores. I did not take to them quickly.

I still remember some dexterity in the wrist which would enable the holder of a bent length of pipe to put one end of the pipe in a water-filled trough and thus transfer some of the water out the other end of the pipe, a steady stream of it, to a neighboring (but not connected) trough. Gravity, hydraulics involved. He did it with ease. I never figured it out.

I also remember riding behind him while he steered a powerful little Honda. I remember thinking he was going awfully fast. Four or five of us also went swimming, unsupervised, in a sort of pool — it was a rectangle and it had water in it, anyway, though it also had algae on the sides and bottom.

He also produced, about five days into my stay, a go-kart, and he tore up and down the typically empty street in front of the house. He let me drive it, which was the ultimate in cool for a 10-year-old. I’m sure I wasn’t nearly as fast or as daring, but it was impressive to see yourself scooting along at 20 or 25 mph with the asphalt about four inches below the seat.

So, five or six years later he and his cousin (not related to me) and a third guy, a friend of theirs, were in a boat on one of the man-made lakes in the area … maybe a reservoir more than a lake. They were, I think, fishing.

It was the winter, and the water was cold. And as the story filtered out, it seems likely they were messing around, on the lake. Perhaps going too fast. I suppose we have to take into consideration that alcohol might have been involved.

The boat turned over.

The third guy decided to swim, and made it to shore. My cousin, and his cousin, apparently stayed by the overturned boat, in the lake. Eventually, hypothermia got them, and they sunk beneath the water. As I recall, their bodies came up a few days later.

Anyway, it made an impression on me. The funeral. Seeing the newspapers with stories about my own cousin, dead in an accident. Grieving relatives.

Later on, I probably did some dumb stuff myself; for sure, I drove too fast. But I was lucky, or maybe I was more cautious than some.

Eventually, as an adult, I took note of teens killed in road accidents, or in boating accidents on the river, or from overdoses — or something else that didn’t have to happen. It seemed like we had one in the newspaper every day.

And it seems somehow true. Like some immutable force sees to it that 1 percent of everyone between 15 and 20 dies when they did not have to.

Years later, I told my children “your goal is not to be part of that 1 percent”.

Some good kids get caught up in that stat. And, 45 years later, are still missed.