Into the void...and back

finding relief in perdition.
tempting the fangs of fate.

the void you left.

Hope has one of those gentle blogs that presents a very soothing environment. I’m not familiar with her personal history (she writes that she was just married) but she has alluded to a close brush with death which she credits with drastically affecting her outlook. I’m not sure what it is, for these things are private. Readers may get the impression you are hammering them over the head if you pontificate too much about your near-death experience. I fear falling into that trap, and sometimes I feel I may mention my vague “scrape with death” a little more often than I’d like. I consciously try not to do that.

On that note, why not devote a post to the subject…

Maybe there is something about staring mortality in the face that makes people blog. Another blog friend, Shawn, has had personal experience with mortality in her past from what I’ve read on her blog. I’m not sure how she’d choose to coin the experience, but I think it’s safe to say Hope, Shawn and I have had to deal with our mortality in an immediate fashion most people have not (our general age, anyways).

Hope, commenting the other day, wrote:

Anger is easy. Understanding is difficult.

I have no idea why facing death changes a person so much, but it sure does, huh?

Indeed it does.

But I would add (or subtract) from Hope’s thought.
I don’t like to call it “facing death.” Not quite. Facing death is dramatic, for sure. I wonder how many people have been close to death and not realized it? If they’d driven just a bit faster, or slower, or not been delayed because they couldn’t find their keys in the morning, maybe…they would be dead.

There are gradations of death experience.

At one end of the spectrum you have those who have actually died, flat-lined. You know them, they saw the warm, white light and underwent a spiritual struggle, stay or return to Earthly reality. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people who weren’t physically injured, but who might be dead if not for the matter of inches or dumb luck. The person who gets shot point blank but is spared when the gun jams.

Facing death should give way to a more fitting description: “facing mortality. ”
I like that.
It describes an experience in which your life is literally reduced to an equation, a circumstance, and its apparent end is spelled out to you in vivid black and white.

This more aptly describes one’s proximity to death.

Someone who is diagnosed with cancer certainly is looking at life and death, but at that very moment, are not looking death squarely in the eye of a gun barrel. Illness presents an opportunity for a person to face death over the long haul, which is certainly one of the more frightening aspects of terminal illness. The oft-repeated refrains, “I want to go fast” or “I want to go in my sleep.”

Being killed quickly in an accident or at the hands of another certainly leaves little time for suffering.

Dying slowly in any form stretches the cruel hands of mortality over a long period of time which is contrary to human instinct. I doubt the death process was a prolonged experience before the advent of modern medicine (and even some forms of modern human cruelty).

Regarding my own situation, I sometimes joke that I was “robbed” of the experience, because though I faced immediate mortality, any memory or conscious awareness of it was washed away for 2 reasons:

1) I was falling down drunk when I had my car accident.
2) I was knocked unconscious/comatose, and any memory of those moments immediately prior to the accident, the moments when my mortality screamed past my eyes, only reside in the furthest and unrecognized corners of my mind.

I faced mortality in hindsight.

In the weeks following my return to consciousness, I had no comprehension of what I’d been through nor the extent of my injuries. I knew something bad had happened and it wasn’t until lucidity slowly began to return that the gravity of my situation became apparent (besides that damned cervical collar and other injuries dispersed throughout my body) and every thought of mortality I contemplated was in the context of “was” or “could have been.” Certainly, wearing a cervical collar, an apparatus whose primary aim is to keep your neck and upper spine stabilized, signals that doom is waiting right outside your door. One wrong move. One extra centimeter…

Standing that close to life’s exit sign cannot leave you untouched.
How can it not.
Shawn rightly pointed out, in another comment on a different post, that everyone is affected differently by such trying experiences. Everyone responds differently, and not necessarily virtuously.

Saintliness or great humility and wisdom are not automatically dispensed just because you fucked up and almost got yourself killed. It takes a certain personality type to make the best of such dire situations; conversely, it takes a certain personality type to manipulate the situation as justification for being a miserable and unhappy person.

Death knocked.

And still, it took me a long time to walk away from the door.