Final Hours: Part 2

 2 HOURS: Just finished snacking on some of my favorite foods in the world: soft brie cheese and water crackers with more red wine... After all, I'm dying tomorrow!! My sweetie had them all beautifully plated for me when I got out of the tub...

Two hours left to live... What to do?? My sweetie has gone to sleep so that eyelids can stay open at work tomorrow. My own eyelids are getting quite heavy now too. I find myself contemplating how to spend these final hours again: Ceremony? Writing letters? Making video messages? Blogging? Meditating?

We saw the movie Hereafter. It wasn't quite what I thought it might be, but it was interesting nonetheless. Much of what they peeked into around the whole death thing was aligned with my personal experience. And oh yeah, I almost forgot I was going to share that story about my last dance with death...the head-on collision.

One drizzly, overcast afternoon nearly 12 years ago (in fact, almost to the day: November 6, 1998) while driving on a two-way road from an elementary campus back to the central office of the school district I was working for at the time, I was involved in a high-speed, high-impact head-on collision. Turns out that a high school up the road had just let out after having a big football pep rally. The 16-year-old kid who hit me was driving home with his girlfriend next to him in the front seat and his little sister in the back seat of his pick up truck - an F150. He came up over a big hill going about 70 miles an hour, all jazzed up and having no way to see until it was too late that traffic was backed up to the top of that hill from a light at the bottom.

 Between his young experience, the slick wet road, the line of cars and his speed, he couldn't stop. In that split-second moment of choice, he felt he had nowhere to go but into my oncoming lane...so he did. Yours truly was first in line and WHAM! I looked him straight in the eyes as our vehicles collided, nose to nose. My little Toyota Corolla was no match for his pickup; it was an older model with no air bags (they weren't required in its day). I was only traveling at about 35 or 40 mph yet I learned later that the "speed of impact" is determined by adding our two speeds together, which was at least 105 mph...

It took several seconds (I guess) for my car to stop spinning. When it did, I heard a voice in my head as clear as anyone's say "Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car..." over and over and over again. I listened to that guidance, peeled my face off the steering wheel, unbuckled my seat belt (which saved my life, by the way) and tried to open my door. It wouldn't open. "Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car..." it kept saying. So I started to bump my left shoulder against the car door as hard as I could muster, holding my right hand on my nose to stop the bleeding.

Finally - and I have no idea how long it took - I got the door to open and slowly shimmied myself between my seat and the car metal at my chest. I stepped out of the car, looking around on the ground for some grass to go stand in because I wanted to get off the road. I figured if I was in grass, I would be off the road. I found some grass so I stood in it, cradling my hands under my nose as it bled.

 At some point, a bunch of folks came running over to me in a panic and made me lay down, putting something soft under my head and covering my body with a jacket of some sort because it was damp and cold outside. I remember someone asking me if there was anyone else in the car with me, and when I said "No" they seemed hugely relieved. I noticed that someone was holding an umbrella over my head to keep the rain off because I could see it hovering over me just before my eyes closed.

I never saw the faces of these people; I could only hear and feel them. There was lots of voices and yelling and crashing and panic but I had no idea what was happening. It felt like chaos and I was nervous about being so close to the road with the cars crashing nearby around us. I do remember hearing someone yell "Someone stop those cars from coming over that hill!" And I thought to myself "Yes; good idea. Please do..."

Some lady standing near me asked if there was someone she could call for me. So I told her my purse and wallet were in my car with contact information, and I managed to give her my partner's name and cell phone number, but struggled to give her my parent's phone number before losing the inner connection between my brain and my mouth that allowed me to do so. I fought to stay conscious and form my mouth into each number I was thinking in my brain, loudly enough for this woman to hear me. But my mouth and my vocal chords were no longer in sync with my brain, and it took several tries for me to manage to whisper the final few numbers of my parent's phone number to her before losing the link completely...

I remember having great difficulty breathing because my chest hurt so bad every time I tried to inhale. I breathed quickly and shallowly to keep the air moving into my body but I felt like I was going to suffocate to death. As I laid there struggling to breathe, I thought to myself "This could be it. I could be dying. Huh - so this is what it feels like. My sweetie and Mom are going to be so sad." And I felt totally calm and at peace with the idea...

 And here's where things got interesting. For what felt like a very long time, I was present in two places at one time: part of me was lying on the ground beneath that umbrella in the rain with people encircling me, and another part of me was hovering above that scene, looking down on myself and the crowd. I felt a strange and wonderful urge to go towards something that I could see and feel before me - a sort of energetic portal, I could say. The feeling from that place was overwhelmingly beautiful and all I knew was that I wanted to go there. It looked clear and white and bright with light. I kept trying to go there and thinking that I wanted to go there, but every time I tried, I heard a gentle, loving voice in my head say "It's not time. Go back. It's not your time. You must go back. No. It's not time. You must go back. Go back. No. It's not time..."

I don't know how long that went on. But what I do know is that I felt no fear or pain in that space in between; just pure love and bliss. The only time I felt any discomfort, pain or even fear was when someone would rouse me and I would blip back fully into my physical body for a moment. I remember wanting them to stop doing that but I was unable to tell them that; I remember wanting them to leave me alone so I could die, so I could go there, wherever there was.

 Next thing I know, I'm being roused by some guy who's telling me to open my eyes. He's talking loudly to me and telling me I'm going to be OK in between sentence-by-sentence relays about my condition into what I imagine is a hand-held radio link to the hospital. He tells me I'm being loaded onto an ambulance and taken to a hospital in San Antonio. I can feel my body being loaded onto a gurney and lifted up into the ambulance. I hear a young man's voice say "What's her name?... Good luck Cecilia" as I'm being taken away. Later I realized that was the boy who hit me...

I was very lucky. I escaped with fractures, a broken nose and lots of cuts, scratches, bruises and swelling, but by the grace of the Divine, alive. I had lots of deep tissue damage and would deal with neck, spine and knee issues for years after that but I was alive; I was breathing. I heard later that I had been 2 inches away from being decapitated, the metal on my hood had been so far pushed up into the car from the impact. The first thing the cop said to me when he called at the hospital a few days later was "Little lady, it sure is good to hear your voice after seeing your car" to which I replied "It's good to be talking to you, Sir..."

I'd danced with death one more time and survived it. This time, I'd gotten some juicy information about "the other side." It was a long time before I really sat with all that happened that day, and it was years before I shared my experience of "dying" with anyone.

And now it's time for me to dance with death again, this time, by choice! So off I go...