The Life I Thought I Was Leaving

I was in the final semester of my bachelor’s degree when a car hit me as I crossed the street. My head struck the windshield. I flipped twice and hit my head again on the ground. I crawled to safety before I had much understanding of what had happened.

A man held me and told me to sit and relax. As I settled on the ground, the urgency quieted and I noticed pain at the back of my head. A woman came and asked me to recite the Quran and say the shahada. I could see their concern, but I was confused by it. They were looking at the windshield and my body on the ground. I was trying to understand the scene from inside it, and I took their reactions to mean I might be dying.

While I waited for the ambulance, I took out my phone and recorded every password I could remember. I thought I was going to lose my memories.

I had crawled away from danger and was making arrangements for afterward, even while thinking afterward might not exist.

I remember the ambulance and police taking about two hours to arrive. I still had exams to pass. For years the degree had been the thing I needed to reach, and on the ground I thought I might never have to take those exams. I felt relief.

I have difficulty saying that without wanting to explain it immediately. I was injured and confused. I thought something enormous was happening, but one of my reactions was that the struggle could finally stop. The fear of losing my memories was there too. I cannot choose one feeling and make it stand for the whole experience.

Afterward, I kept asking what it said about my life that rest had become so hard to imagine inside it. The degree was supposed to make things better. Somehow I had put relief on the other side of finishing it. For a moment, the accident had seemed to remove the obligation.

I had not experienced death or discovered that it was peaceful. I had been alive, expecting it, thinking about the demands I might no longer have to meet. That left me with a question about how I was living, and the question stayed after the immediate confusion had passed.

I loved Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death partly because it gave me a way to think about what I was asking my work to do. In Becker’s account, the wish for significance can attach itself to projects and cultural systems that seem capable of continuing beyond us. I recognized something uncomfortable in that. I wanted to understand things and make useful work. I also wanted something to remain that showed I had been here.

I had curiosity and ambition before the accident. I do not think it secretly created all my reasons for doing research. But once I had imagined disappearing, the wish to leave something became harder to overlook. A result could be interesting in itself and carry a wish for permanence beside it. Sometimes I could hardly tell which of those wishes was keeping me at the work.

There are questions I still cannot settle. Whether a soul leaves a body is different from whether a person loses their memory, and different again from whether anyone says their name afterward. On the ground it was memory that frightened me. Later I could worry about the name, the work, what might remain available for somebody else to read or use. None of those questions has given me a dependable way to measure a life.

I do not know the names of the people who came toward me after the accident. They stayed, spoke to me and tried to help in the ways they knew. I would miss something important if I decided that the part of a life that matters is the part that keeps its name attached. Their presence mattered to me without my being able to give them that kind of remembrance.

The accident also changed how “later” sounded. I became more protective of my time, less willing to assume I could put the life I wanted after every demand made on me. I still wonder how much of the hardness in some of my boundaries began there. There were other experiences too. I cannot trace every decision back to this one event, although remembering the ground has made it difficult to promise years to something I do not want.

That includes goals I do want. It is easy for me to respond to limited time by giving myself more work. There is always another thing to finish, and it can seem wasteful to rest when I know I will not have forever.

I do not want to survive the belief that I might die and then spend the rest of my life trying to earn the survival.

I still want something of my work to continue. I want someone to find an idea useful, or take a question further than I could. I do not feel obliged to pretend that wish is entirely free of ego. I would like to make something worth receiving. I also want time with people who are here now, and who cannot do much with the promise that I will become available after the next result.

I do not know exactly what I believed would happen when I took out the phone. Some part of the future still mattered to me.

I am still interested in learning, building and understanding, and I have people I want to be with. Some days I can let those things be enough without asking what will remain of them.

I know that I survived, and that the life I thought I was leaving is still something I can change.