A Strange Feeling

There have been several times in my life when I thought I was going to die.  Once I took a bad wipe out on skis and couldn’t get up.  Another time I was trapped under a wave and thought I might drown down there.  But this time was different.  This time I knew I was going to die.  Or at least I thought I did.  It was everything that I had nightmares about.  The weird kind of nightmare where I realize what’s happening and as my body thrashes around the car I feel a sense of peace with the fact that I am going to die.  This obviously comes with the lack of time to think about and understand what dying actually means in this instance.  At least I hope so.  Because as our car slid across the ice and slammed 60 miles per hour into a cement wall I felt exactly the way I did in my dream.   And the thing that scared me the most was my state of serenity in a situation that would normally get my heart racing just thinking about.  When the car finally stopped after what felt like an eternity of ping ponging from wall to wall, I realized that by some miracle we were all still alive.  I climbed out of the driver’s side door, the only door that still opened and stood watching a few nice civilians help my friend Jessica out of the back seat.  I don’t know if it was due to hitting my head so hard or the shock of something like this actually happening, but I collapsed on the side of the road and the next thing I knew I was being carried to the police car and then put on a stretcher to be taken to the hospital via ambulance.

I know accidents happen to people all the time and my friends and I are terribly lucky to be alive and barely injured.  But for a couple seconds I thought my friend was dead, and I can’t stop thinking about how horribly heartbreaking  and life changing it would be to lose a loved one with you in that car.  And it blows my mind how we hit the walls at the exact right angle to survive and how Jessica had her feet on the seat which prevented her legs from being crushed and how no other cars were around to get involved.  Why were we so lucky when so many other people are not?   We were blessed to have experienced such a situation that reminded us to appreciate the ones we love and to really live our lives because we are all granted the chance to do so.