~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell JarI received an Advanced Reading Copy of I Am, I Am, I Am, and after a cursory look I thought, “Hmmm, a memoir told through seventeen brushes with death. That could be interesting.” I had never read Maggie O’Farrell before, so I didn't really know what I was in for: It turned out that I simply loved her voice, her turns of phrase and storytelling craft, and ultimately, this book worked on every level for me. It's not obsessed with death, nor a repetitive drumming of carpe diem, but O'Farrell made me care about her life, made me smile and gasp and cry, and I couldn't be more delighted to have met her in this way. I will definitely be seeking out O'Farrel's fiction.
The train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. 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...If you are aware of these moments, they will alter you. You can try to forget them, to turn away from them. To shrug them off, but they will have infiltrated you, whether you like it or not. They will take up residence inside you and become part of who you are, like a heart stent or a pin that holds together a broken bone.Most people wouldn't have had as many near-death experiences as O'Farrell (and it's a bit of a stretch to think that all of these stories were actual brushes with death; an AIDS test after finding out your boyfriend has been cheating on you isn't really a near miss [but I did wonder if there was something unsaid in this chapter as it relates to the friend O'Farrell cunningly brought along with her to the clinic]), but she uses each story, in chapters long and short, to anchor and explore the stages in her life. The stories aren't chronological – early chapters make tantalising reference to other events; a story about a near-drowning notes that she might have told her friends about the lingering effects of a childhood illness that leave O'Farrell incapable of orienting herself under dark water – and this craftsmanship made the whole a fascinating work. And again, I simply loved her voice:
I have never felt pain like it, before or since. It was edgeless, it was perfect, the way the shell of an egg is perfect. And it was invasive, colonising: it sought, I knew, to take me over, to replace me with itself, like a bad spirit, like a fiend.I don't want to get into any of the specifics, but will end by saying that O'Farrell's memoir is engaging and human; she sounds like someone I would like to meet and I am looking forward to finding her earlier work.
1) In my very earliest memory (I was probably no more than 3), I am lost and cold, walking through thigh-high snow banks. I'm turning in circles, and although there are houses in the distance, I can't seem to make progress towards any of them; each step I take depleting me further of what little strength I have left. I'm crying and the tears are freezing on my cheeks and when I finally surrender to exhaustion and collapse face-first into the pristine snowfield, the cold of the snow tricks my skin into thinking that it's warming up and I am content to just rest in its soothing cocoon. Eventually, someone picks me up and that's the end of the memory (because, obviously, I didn't die out there). Years later, my Mum was recalling that when we first moved into some house in Charlottetown, there were no fences between the back yards and she was scared to death the time she had sent me out to play in the snow, and within minutes, I was lost to her sight. It was my Dad's friend Clifford who had spotted me in a neighbouring yard, and when he ran out to get me, he thought I was the most pathetic sight, laying face-first in the snow, snot and tears and snow crystals caked onto my red cheeks.
2) Also when I was 3, I contracted croupe, pneumonia, and Hong Kong Flu at the same time and I was expected to die of it. I needed to be hospitalised, and I remember that as a terrifyingly foreign experience; all on my own for the first time, not understanding what was expected of me. One night (the first night? some later night when I was nearly all better and should have been expected to care for myself?), needing to pee and having no idea how to leave my bed with its high side rails or where to go, I eventually gave up and just peed the bed. In time, a nurse came in, and when she saw the wet sheets, she very roughly pulled me from the bed and gave me a cold bath in a small metal basin on the floor, muttering the whole time, leaving me to shiver in the punishing water as she changed the linens and lectured me on how to call a nurse if I felt the urge again. Also famous within our family from this incident: when my Dad couldn't get through to our family doctor to get an update on my condition - when he was asked once again to leave a message with an answering service - Dad tore the phone off the wall and threw it down the exterior stairs of our second floor apartment. I always admired that part of the story.
3) This is much later - but I couldn't have been older than 7 or 8 - and we were on a rare trip to a beach. I remember it as on a lake (as opposed to the ocean), and although I hadn't done very much swimming before, despite having been born on an island, I was happily running and splashing in the water with my brothers and some other kids; I do know my Dad wasn't there with us. These other kids had blowup toys - like giant blue logs - and they would hold onto them and kick themselves out into deep water and back again. When I was offered the use of one, I happily grabbed on, kicked myself out deep, and when it slipped from my grasp, I began to drown. I'm sure I was panicked at first, but as I gasped for air and failed to keep my head above water, I was struck immobile by what a stupid way this would be to die; I didn't even like the water. And then some hairy man was charging into the waves. And then he was a blur of tan flesh and white spray, and oh, the hair on this man, as he hydroplaned towards me and grabbed me before I could totally surrender. I remember being rather terrified of this hirsute stranger and the way that he slightly crushed me as he hauled me to shore, where my mother was standing at the waterline, frozen in horror with both hands clenched in front of her mouth.
4) Another time that could have ended badly; I'll include it as "what might have been", even if it wasn't deadly in the end: I was a Brownie for about a month at the end of our time in St. John when I was almost 9 (I have no idea why I was signed up right before we left or why I wasn't put in a new troop when we moved to Ontario), but as short as my Brownie career was, I was pretty proud of my little brown polyester dress and silk scarf. It was not long before Christmas and our troop was supposed to gather at the Brownie meeting space to be taken on a bus to an old folks' home, where we'd be carolling. I don't remember how I got there - did I walk or did one of my parents drop me off and drive away? - but either way, I was late and the troop had left and I was standing outside a locked door, crying in the dark, with no idea what I was supposed to do. Just then, a man drove up and asked if I was supposed to be with the Brownie troop and I said yes and he offered to drive me to the old folks' home and I got into a car with a stranger. Of course I knew better and I did it anyway. Happy ending: I was neither kidnapped nor killed as he, the Dad of some other Brownie, drove me to meet up with the rest of the troop.
5) I nearly forgot this one: I had been downhill skiing once in Ontario before we moved, so I was likely overconfident when my phys-ed class in Alberta organised a ski trip when I was fifteen; hadn't I been on a mountain before? (Turns out; no.) I did the bunny run a few times and let my more experienced friends convince me to try something a little harder and I followed them to the top of a real run. We ended up getting separated, I'm sure I was much slower than everyone else, and as I was whooshing down the slope, trying to control my speed with wide turns as I had been taught, I suddenly realised that there seemed to be too many trees around me, it was getting harder to dodge them, and when I noticed the slope dropping off in from of me, I ditched to make myself stop. When I raised my head and leaned forward to see just how steep the slope in from of me would have been if I had kept going, I was peeking my head over a sheer dropoff; a cliff; I was out of bounds and that looked like death.
6) And from much later: Kennedy was in figure skating lessons when she was five, and because she hated skating and was always trying to get out of going, when my inlaws rented a condo up north and wanted us to join them for a weekend, I sent Dave and Mallory ahead with them and said that I'd bring Kennedy up after her lesson. We were driving along the country roads, enjoying the beautiful fall colours that were the point of the time up north, me chatting away happily with my little girl behind me in her car seat. I came over a rise and could see ahead of me a crossroad, and also driving towards this crossing, I could see a car approaching to my right; a car that would surely be stopping at the stop sign that they had, for I had none. Coming directly towards me was a transport truck, making its way to this same crossing down a long hill, and in the seconds that it took me to approach the crossroad, I could see that the driver of the car to my right was looking up the hill at the truck, not quite slowing down for that stop sign; obviously judging if he could blow through the stop sign before the truck made it to the intersection; not wanting to stop and wait at this lonely crossing, and definitely not looking my way. This all happened in seconds: I was nearly at the crossing, the car to my right gunned its engine, I swerved into the oncoming lane, staring down the transport truck, and then turning my head to the right, I looked into the shocked eyes of a grey-haired couple as the old guy slammed on his brakes, and just as I made it past him, I swerved back into my own lane, the truck whistling past me on my left, horn blasting. From the back seat Kennedy piped up with, "What was that?" Nothing honey, all good.
In that post that I copied from, I reported a time that a dog would have attacked me if my big brother hadn't intervened and the time my little brother and I started a fire that got out of control in our living room; citing both as examples of "times I nearly died". That's a stretch. In trying to remember more such incidents now, there was the time I was in a car accident on the highway when I was 18 (the responding police officer was surprised to see so little damage to the cars, saying that he was used to discovering fatalities on that stretch of road), but I didn't have a scratch on me, so I guess I didn't "nearly die" that time either. I had to get stitches on my head twice when I was really little - Ken pushed me on some stairs once and I fell out of the back of a Jeep when Dad had us off-roading in the woods - but these weren't exactly brushes with death. Both of my babies had to be induced and were monstrously large because of the extra cooking time; had I been born in an earlier era, I might not have survived childbirth (but if I had been born in an earlier era, I might not have survived my childhood either, so that seems moot.) I have five, maybe six, true near-death incidents; I've never had a weapon pointed at me, I've never experimented with street drugs and nearly OD'd, I've never had the urge to go BASE jumping. I've been cautious and careful, and yet I still know the feeling, "I'm about to die; I nearly did".
And some of my near-misses might just be an indicator of my age; most of those stories suggest that no one was really watching me, and that's just the way it was: Dave has a story about a car accident that could have been fatal because he was little and there were no seatbelts then (Dave would have flown out the windshield as the car flipped into the ditch if Dick hadn't shot his arm out in time to catch him); Kyler - who ran wild as a child in a way that doesn't seem to happen today - has many stories of the falls and fires and crashes that should have killed him; when Ken ran away as a teenager, he laid down in a ditch in the rain, fully prepared to die (not to mention the psycho who picked him up hitchhiking and who tried to take Ken to a trailer in the woods). When I asked Kennedy how many incidents would be on her own "I nearly died" list, she said, "I don't know. That time on the highway with the truck?" So, one near-miss. I will take that as proof that I have done my best to keep her safe and alive; and especially that one time on the highway with the truck.
The will to live is highlighted by near-death experiences, and two contrasting stories I've read recently are brought to mind. In a book I just finished, Life on the Ground Floor, emergency room doctor James Maskalyk writes that during one of his shifts at St. Mike's in Toronto, a construction worker was brought in who had fallen off a ladder and broken his spine. With no feeling in any of his limbs, the man asked Maskalyk if he'd ever regain any movement, and when the doctor had to admit that he had no idea at this point (but secretly thinking that it would be a good result if the man could gain control of a thumb in order to operate a specialised wheelchair and not be totally dependent on caregivers), the man then looked up at Maskalyk and said, "Then, can you just kill me, Doc?" In the business of saving lives, Maskalyk could only shake his head and walk away.
In a similar tale, I read that on the Christmas Eve just past, an eighteen-year-old in Quebec was driving in icy weather, avoiding the slick highways by taking the backroads home, and losing control at an intersection, she skidded into a hydro pole. When she left her car, she stepped onto live wires (her foot "exploded"), and in the biting cold, she spent hours slipping in and out of consciousness, unable to get into her car or start the engine for warmth. After many hours, another car finally came by and the driver called 911, and when she was brought to hospital, doctors determined that the young woman would lose all of her limbs to hypothermia, if she lived. They put her into a medically-induced coma for the pain, and after she was stabilised some days later, they woke her up to ask the question: We can either amputate all of your limbs and you can start a long process of hard and painful rehab, with no guarantees about the quality of life you'll eventually have, or we can put you back into a coma and let nature take its course. Imagine that. One minute you're driving home, the next, a doctor is leaning over you asking if you want him to let you die because you've sustained life-altering injuries. The young woman chose life, "Do the amputations," she said. They put her back into a coma, and went to work.
I can't help but be intrigued by the contrast in these two stories: of course an eighteen-year-old would choose to live; even without limbs, she'd still feel that heart bragging, I am, I am, I am. Hopefully, although I'll never know how that construction worker's story ends, he also found peace with his new circumstances; that his brush with death would lead him to life as well.
