13. Edwidge Danticat

“Had I plunged backward and landed headfirst on the concrete, I might have been at least brain-dead.” – Edwidge Danticat

            Life changes in an instant, runs the cliché. Or, as Edwidge Danticat reminds us, sometimes life ends in an instant. Or, other times, as Danticat also calls our attention to, life does not end or change in an instant but, disaster averted, continues on exactly as before with only a small measure of awareness gained to alter our daily thinking. She’s talking about near-death experiences, though not the kind that involve floating toward a white light or seeing your life flash before your eyes—she hasn’t experienced those. Rather, she’s thinking of the more mundane near-misses, where you take one false step and nearly meet your end. You’re shaken up for a minute, then, generally, you move on with your life and don’t think much about what almost happened.

            Danticat’s “close-calls”: nearly crashing a malfunctioning car into an oncoming garbage truck, almost slipping backwards off a snowy apartment stoop, being a passenger in a car heading the wrong way onto a highway entrance. My own near-death experiences have been equally mundane, so much so that, although I know I’ve experienced my share, I have a tough time recalling more than a few. There was the time when I, maybe ten, instinctively sat myself down on the top of an escalator rail in a department store and my dad, just as instinctively, pulled me right off. There were the several times when I almost walked out into the path of an oncoming car. There was the moment when, on a subway platform, I leaned my head out to see if the train was coming, only to realize I was looking in the wrong direction, a fact I realized just in time to pull my head back before the train came bolting through. (I was wearing headphones so I didn’t hear anything.) These close-calls, though, were, like Danticat’s, not enough to make any kind of lasting impression on me or to change my thoughts or behaviors. (Except for taking more care when wearing headphones.)

            But, perhaps, they did leave more of an impression than I thought. “Some of those close calls happen so quickly we barely notice them,” Danticat writes. “Others are so intense that they change the way we think not just about living but about constantly being close to dying.” While my brushes with death would certainly appear to fall in the former category, it seems impossible that they haven’t left some sort of subconscious trace, an increased subterranean awareness of the fragility of life. For some people, such as the woman Danticat once sat next to on a plane who refused to change seats so that, in the event of the inevitable crash, the authorities would be able to properly identify her body, this awareness is a constant presence. For the rest of us, it would be too much to go through life paying continual attention to the threat of annihilation that hounds us at every turn. Yet some awareness of this end might be useful, not to scare us into inactivity but to add a needed perspective to our daily lives. Whether this awareness remains on the subconscious level or is more overtly acknowledged, as in Danticat’s carefully considered meditations, it is neither useful nor possible to banish mortality entirely from our thoughts. Clearly, though, if we’re not to end up death-spooked and macabre like Danticat’s airline passenger (or our next door neighbor, our co-worker, that guy who works at the CVS…) some balance is needed.