I was carpooling with my father to work, same as I did every early morning. As usual, I was grumbling to myself, bitter that I had to be going in the first place. It was my first real job out of college, and I missed the days of going to a bar pretty much every night and having no real responsibilities outside of reading a few books and writing a few papers. So, rather than be grateful I had a stable job, or simply happy to be alive, I was bitterly complaining to myself in my mind over the fact that I had to get up on someone else’s schedule. “Well, this is just great… another stupid day at the stupid office… I wish I didn’t have to waste my day there… this is awful… life sucks…” I griped. As I said, only in my mind, as my father would definitely give me a stern telling off if I was complaining, he’s one of the old-fashioned “get a job!” types. Life must not have liked what it was hearing, because I instantly had a “how about you try out death instead?” moment. I kind of felt something bad was about to happen when I turned around and noticed the woman behind us was barely keeping her eyes on the road. We were on the highway, so she was going full speed, and didn’t seem to notice how traffic ahead of her on our exit had slowed to a dead stop. She was too busy yelling at her little brat kid who was bouncing all around the car. My father and I both looked into the mirrors and then shared a quick “oh shit” look at each other that felt like it occurred in slow motion for our upcoming impact. Luckily she noticed, albeit last minute, so she very quickly and, with a look of horror on her face, slammed on the brake, hitting us at about thirty miles an hour instead of the initial 60 or so she must have been going. As cliché as it sounds, time really did slow down, like a lot of movies and whatnot say.
My father always kept a lot of spare change in the front of the car near the dashboard (sorry, my knowledge of car parts is extremely lacking), and the inertia caused it to go flying into the backseat. I remember it going past me in a way that felt so slow it was as if I was underwater and it was gently floating by. I was moving in the opposite direction, my father and I being pushed forward from the whiplash. Luckily we both followed all the “safety first, wear a seatbelt!” stuff they had been imprinting in me since preschool, or I might have been bouncing around just like the brat was before. We both just lay there in shock, too worried that we might have broken something to move.
She ran out of the car, was like “oh my god are you ok” or one of those mandatory phrases. My father, more out of fear I think than anger, answered in a stream of curses that sent her running back to her car. I was too much in a daze to remember who called them, perhaps my father, perhaps her, perhaps a bystander, but I remember an ambulance coming up to the car and putting me on a stretcher. They must have felt they were taking me to the insane asylum. Even though we had just been in an accident that, if she hadn’t slowed down last minute, might have resulted in my death, I was just gazing up at the sun and laughing hysterically. It might have just been the shock and adrenaline rush of what occurred sending me into a fit of nervous laughter, but I am pretty sure it was more just amusement that life felt the need to slap some sense into an ungrateful little jerk who was all grumpy about going to work. It was certainly a lesson I needed. I won’t pretend it was a “near-death” in the extreme of people wandering out in the desert and having to eat their friends to survive, or someone getting a heart attack and repenting when they temporarily go meet the devil or something, but it’s certainly the closest I have come to my eventual demise. It taught me to stop taking things for granted and be thankful for what I got, since it beats the alternative.
