Eleven years ago today, I died.
In eastern Iowa, a motor vehicle accident was reported on the news. A tan Ford Aerostar, Illinois plates, had slid on black ice across four lanes of Interstate 80, slamming into a semi truck three times.
My heart never stopped. My breath never stilled.
I died.
Who I was then was gone at the moment of impact, in an instant.
It was February 18, 1996, and I was seventeen years old, attending Gallaudet University. I was just past West Branch when my daylong trip to my grandfather’s funeral ended. I was wearing black leather slipon shoes, pantyhose, a favorite black and white striped dress from high school, and my glasses.
I showed their tattered remains to my public speaking class weeks later, sitting in a wheelchair.
My father was driving.
I was sitting in the front passenger seat. When I realized what was about to happen, a part of me was curious what a car accident would feel like. Bumper cars, roller coasters, tilt a whirls. Unconsciously, I envisioned it would be like sliding into a ditch, whoopsy daisy, no harm done. A little thrill. An annoyance. There was nothing I could do, nothing I thought I should do.
We slid along in the longest moment minute hour day year decade century of my life.
That moment, that feeling, the terror and exhiliration, was the time in between. The cusp. It was my last moment of savoring what I was like, who I was, what my body felt like, and the trajectory my life had been taking.
It was too long. It wasn’t long enough.
I thought my teeth had been broken, there were so many pieces of glass in my mouth that I didn’t know the difference. I swallowed them all, without meaning to. I was angry my perfect teeth were ruined.
I had woken up that morning in Washington, DC.
I was angry, so angry.
The crunch as my left jaw socket was blown out of its joint by the force of the truck hitting the van into the right side of my jaw.
Slam, spin, slam, spin, slam.
Stop.
The dashboard was onto my legs, above the knees. I couldn’t move my legs, encased in twisted metal. My glasses were gone somewhere.
I was coated with glass and terror.
I connected with my father emotionally for the only time in my life, in the seconds after the van stopped moving.
Fear and shock and clutched hands.
It was cold. It was snowing, not quite dark yet, between West Branch and West Liberty.
I threw away the insurance picture of the totaled van years later, as though doing so could make me forget the image. My suitcase behind my seat, where it had landed after it had flown from the back of the van. Covered with my blood. The suitcase still worked, but it was cast away, because the bloodstain was a reminder.
But still I remembered the bloodstain.
For years I carried the picture around on a daily basis in my bag. I showed it to others, searching for meaning. Waiting for understanding.
X rays all over, nothing broken in the body.
No x rays for the soul.
What would it have shown? What could it have shown?
Living moment to moment.
Struggling. Struggling to walk, to move, to live, to be within the time after.
I wait for the moment when it all ends, when it dawns on me with commingled horror and relief, that all my experiences in the time after were nothing more than seeing my life fly past my eyes, and it is again the instant before the slam, the end.
When I died.
