Eighteen years ago, we almost lost our youngest son Forest in a car accident involving black ice, three kids and me in a van, and the only spot on the road that led to a deep ditch. Our van plunged, flipped and spun around, ejecting five-year-old Forest through the broken window to land about ten feet away. He was unconscious, his jaw broken in multiple place, and his brain bleeding in three spots. But through superb and swift medical care (including being life-flighted to Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City), the love and prayers of an immense community, the healing work of our friend Ursula, and pure luck or grace (depending on how you see it), he made it through with only the need for a new permanent front tooth.
Today, I’m drawn toward the number 18, anniversaries, and grace. In Judaism, C’hai means 18, the letter C’hai, luck, and life. I’ve worn a C’hai around my neck since my mother gave it to me 17 years ago during my cancer treatment (another “there but for grace” experience), reminding me to remember how much I love this life. Anniversaries can be similar talismans, circling us back to the same position of the sun however many years have passed. All these talismans can fortify us for the moments that feel like the opposite of miraculous, tapping us on the shoulder to tell us how little we know about what is possible, even against all odds.
Which leads me back to grace and the end of a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “There But For the Grace,” in which she writes:
So you’re here? Straight from a moment still ajar? The net had one eyehole, and you got through it? There’s no end to my wonder, my silence. Listen how fast your heart beats in me.
Whatever eyehole we get through, whatever accident disease or heartbreak, can surely feel like a moment of grace, a shining and shaky moment as if we were just spit out by the whale (like Jonah in that biblical story) on the shore, our hearts beating as fast as the life force.
There’s no rhyme or reason for why some survive such close calls and others don’t. Being in pediatric I.C.U. with Forest 18 years ago put us in the middle of families rejoicing and families grieving — I will always remember how the teenage parents of a toddler who died were suddenly wrapped in the arms of two dozen teenage friends, plus ample family members, all holding each other and crying in the waiting room. I’m eternally grateful that a week after we arrived at the hospital, we got to pull a red wagon out of the hospital, packed with gifts, balloons, and our laughing five-year-old, ready to go home. Yet I know there’s something I can never explain about why grace lands one place and not another.
What remains, 18 lucky years of life later, is a funny, compassionate, smart, and very happy 23-year-old man quick with his phone to show me quirky cat videos when I’m down and to call us regularly just to ask how we are. I think of him and all the grace that continues to unfold because he’s here, and there’ s no end to my wonder.
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