I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of the heart. I am, I am, I am”–Sylvia Plath

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.”

So, writers always talk about hooks that “catch” readers; we have Captain Ahab sailing the High Seas for the White Whale in Moby Dick; Wisconsin Death Trip looks at all these bizarre and horrific murders there and becomes a bestseller. I love love love the hook (and the attractive cover, that helps sell books, too) in this book and can’t imagine that most readers don’t begin thinking of times they have had brushes with death. My quick list is below, and yeah, if she had a blog or website for readers to post their own brushes with death, I would elaborate and post mine, which I began to list even before I opened the book.

This collection of essays by the author tells of times she has almost died, or has had “brushes” with death, though she ends the book with the story of keeping her daughter–who had/has some vicious version of anaphylaxis–alive. Oh, and the childbirth and miscarriage ones! So it’s not about death, so much; it’s not about grief, but near-death. Not all of them are equally compelling, but she’s a good writer, and the telling helps her appreciate life more, instead of her getting paranoid that she is going to die at any moment. Oh, she knows she is going to die, but she knows more acutely as a result that she is alive.

“I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”

“That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”

The best ones include the first one about being stalked by a disturbed guy (who turns out to be a killer) while hiking, two stories related to her survival and permanent damage from childhood encephalitis. This isn’t a perfect book, but it makes one think and feel.

Mine:
1) Burst appendix during surgery when I was seven

2) Bike accident last year where I swerved to miss the rear end of a truck and flew over the handlebars of my bike to face-plant on the sidewalk (I really just got beaten up and lost a front tooth, but as they say, it coulda been worse)

3) Chased by a brown bear in Yosemite at the base camp for climbing up Half Dome (not the face, just up behind it, something many tourists do), in the seventies

4) A few years ago tripped over a short garden fence and my chest was the first things that met the sidewalk, breaking a few ribs

5) In the nineties I had over seventeen tests for a bizarre fast-spiking fever that kept me out of work for three months; Doc, at the end, said: “The good news is that you are alive; the bad news is that we don’t know what you had.”

6) This is not one most people would mention, but it comes up in nightmares still; I was pulling out in traffic from a steep downhill Seattle side-street and a semi was barreling down that busy main street and I got distracted, took my foot off the wheel and inched forward and just barely managed to stop in time before hitting him and killing the whole family. VERY close, trust me, inches. That’s how close, in a car, many people have been, I know, but that is my strongest memory of a driving scare

7) Was beaten up badly in middle school by a gang whose leader I turned in to the principal for his having taken my new bike and smashed it on the pavement. His revenge was to beat me up; my revenge on him was that he accidentally killed himself with his father’s shotgun the following summer.

8) Maybe fifteen years ago the doctor said I was a heart attack waiting to happen; the usual: Overweight, high bp, high resting heart rate, high cholesterol, all that. I became a runner and changed all that.

9) I was on a visit to be considered by a university for a teaching position. They flew me in to O’Hare. But I recall a terrifying free-fall dive in the plane during a storm, with the roughest landing ever, people thrown around the cabin and screaming (as also happens to O’Farrell). Then, on the way back to the airport the engine of the cab I was riding in burst into flames and as he quickly pulled over I dove out of the car (No, didn’t explode, but neither did I get that job; bad karma?)

10) I was at Boy Scout camp in Michigan–Camp Shawondasee near Duck Lake, trying to finish my Rowing Merit Badge. The last thing I needed to do was be fully clothed, swamp the boat and still manage to get it to shore, but I got separated from the boat, it was windy, it floated away, I couldn’t make it to shore with the heavy, wet clothes, and had to wave my hand to the lifeguard and be rescued. I was more embarrassed than scared I was going to die. But it still counts, I could not have swum in by myself.

11) I’m embarrassed about this one, too, and really so, but on that trip where I almost crashed into a semi, above, I also lost my front brakes (yeah, one of my front brakes) on the pass from Grand Lake, Rocky Mountains down to Boulder. Weekend, no gas station anywhere near, family in car. I elected to use my parking brakes (and the three other brakes, I still had them!) to ease my way down the mountain at very, very slow speed, screeching all the way. Stupid, I know. I would delete this because it makes me look like such a jerk to have taken that chance, but O’Farrell is honest, so I will be, too.