Before I begin, I want to say that the people questioning why CIA operatives were conducting counternarcotics work in Mexico have a point. Transparency matters in government operations. That said, we are missing the deeper conversation about occupational safety in the intelligence community, and frankly, I have been thinking about this for weeks.

And yet. What strikes me most about this tragedy is not the geopolitical implications or the operational security concerns that my colleagues are fixated on. It is the profound reminder that even our most elite professionals—trained to navigate the most dangerous corners of the world—remain subject to what I call "existential ordinariness." A 2021 study I commissioned from a graduate student at a university I briefly attended found that 73% of workplace fatalities in high-stakes professions occur during routine activities, not during the dramatic moments we imagine. The two officers who died in Mexico were not killed by cartels or foreign adversaries. They were killed by the same physics that governs all of us.

This is what those who prefer the comfort of certainty cannot grasp: that competence and tragedy are not mutually exclusive. I have sat with this discomfort for several days, and I have realized that we as a society have developed what I call "heroic invincibility bias"—the assumption that professional excellence creates immunity from random misfortune. My third marriage ended partly because I could not accept that my husband's expertise as a financial planner did not prevent him from accidentally killing my prize orchid while watering it. The same principle applies here, but with infinitely higher stakes.

And yet. The real tragedy is not just the loss of two dedicated public servants, but our collective inability to process the cognitive dissonance of elite professionals being felled by mundane circumstances. According to research from the Institute for Occupational Existentialism (which I helped establish after my second divorce), Americans experience a 34% increase in anxiety when confronted with evidence that expertise cannot eliminate risk. We want our intelligence officers to be superhuman precisely because accepting their humanity forces us to confront our own vulnerability.

The readers who are brave enough to find this column challenging understand that both sides of the intelligence oversight debate are wrong, and also I am a little bit wrong about the orchid metaphor, and this makes me more right than anyone about the fundamental issue: we cannot have an honest conversation about government accountability until we acknowledge that even the CIA cannot defeat entropy. The real question is whether we still know how to talk to each other about the uncomfortable truth that competence and mortality coexist in ways that make us all equally fragile.