Close Calls

Death isn’t on my mind much.
  January 15, 2004

Life is dying.  Or so my pessimistic friend tells me.  I disagree and say that life is living but he one-ups me and claims that the two are the same.  Ultimately, we are simply at odds on semantics.

As any other human, I am constantly presented with the issue of my mortality and constantly avoid making a big deal out of it.  There is a blind spot the size of death that hangs over any dark shapes on our minds’ horizon.  I like it there just fine.

There are times, however, when the dark shapes loom too large to be obscured.  My friend, who walked into his girlfriend’s dorm room to find her depending on a rope from the fire sprinkler pipe, rotating—he walked into a time like that and perhaps never quite walked out.  The people who found that kid I went to high school with, doubly dead by the snowy curbside with alcohol poisoning and hypothermia—they must have had at least a moment.  My own time came when my grandmother died: her body lay in the coffin in the living room of our small apartment; everybody tiptoed around speaking in hushed voices; and I sat in the corner with a book written in Chinese wondering whether I should be crying that very moment, then wondering why I wondered.  I couldn’t make sense of my feelings except for a sticky hollowness somewhere under the breastbone.

Surprisingly, personal brushes with death left the least morbid impressions on my mind.  It may be because they were all accidents and happened fast, in a daze of adrenaline.  It may be because I was a kid.  The first close call was parents’ ultimate nightmare: I stuck two nails into the inviting holes of an electric socket when I was four.  For a second two hundred and twenty volts of electricity happily buzzing inside took a spin around my body.  I remember suddenly coming to on the opposite side of the room (never quite figured out how I got there—did the shock throw me?), screaming, a puddle of urine under me, tears on my face and zinging in my chest.  I was a curious cat.  I survived.

The second accident happened in first grade, during a game of tag.  Unwilling to be “it,” I escaped from pursuit onto the street and was promptly hit by a minivan.  It was going slowly enough to spare me any injuries but fast enough to send me flying through the air, head over heels, down onto the tram tracks.  This happened in front of a busy tram stop, and as I went up, air went down startled windpipes in a loud collective “ah!”.  I got up and hobbled home, thinking that this was what it felt like, to meet with an irresistible force.

The third time was also at a transport stop; I was waiting for a bus.  Stepping to the doors I slipped on the icy ground, fell, slid under, stopped myself by grabbing the ridged iron of the lowest step in the doorwell.  And again a multilunged gasp (crowds are predictable); and someone yelled at the driver to wait, wait, wait, don’t close the doors; and I thought with calm and resignation: he won’t hear, he’ll close them right over my fingers (that’ll hurt) then start the bus forward and crush me (that’ll hurt more).  But he heard, of course—am I not here writing this?

I think that apart from the shadows of pain and death, these close calls are kind of comical.  I find the nails-in-socket incident in particular a hilarious mixture of the cute and the horrible.  I hope I won’t have similar experiences in the future, but I’m comfortable with the ones from the past: they give me stories to tell.  And that, in a nutshell, is the attitude of everyone I know.  Death doesn’t darken my thoughts much.  At most I am sad to think that my explorations of life will end sometime: like a baby, I find the world overwhelmingly huge and fascinating, to the point where I stop functioning in the realm of the practical.  But for the most part, I think “whatever happens, happens” and believe I’ll live to write about it afterwards.

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