Over the Rainbow

Two days after the bus crash, I died. It was March 1996. A bus traveling at 60 mph had hit the car I was in, shattering my fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and instantly paralyzing me from the shoulders down.

I was only twenty years old, and father to a one-year-old son. I spent the following forty-eight hours at a nearby hospital, on life support in the ICU. I couldn’t speak or breathe on my own.

I survived those two days on a sense of faith, expressed in a mantra: This is just temporary.

I repeated it over and over. No matter what the doctors and nurses were doing to me, or how much pain I was in, I listened to my mind and believed what I kept telling myself: This is just temporary.

After two days, I developed a deep vein thrombosis in my leg. The doctors, fearing that the blood clots would travel to my lungs or heart and kill me, rushed me to the operating room.

The surgery was actually fun: It was the first time since the bus had hit me that I felt alert and could speak.

“I told you this was just temporary,” I declared out loud to myself and everyone else in the operating room. Hearing the sound of my own voice filled me with hope, and since I wasn’t under anesthesia, I talked during the entire surgery.

After the surgery, I remember lying flat on my back in the hospital bed, with Kelly, my older sister, standing beside the bed and talking to me. Her mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear her words. The room dimmed. The machines connected to my body started making awful noises, but I didn’t hear them. I didn’t see my sister run out of the room for help, but I saw a crowd of doctors and nurses rush in and surround me.

I was choking. It felt like I was swallowing an ocean.

Can’t breathe, I thought. I can’t breathe…I can’t breathe!

The saltwater burned my lungs and throat. I couldn’t cough out the ocean, but I needed to. Powerful hands gripped my paralyzed body to keep it from thrashing.

I can’t breathe!

Someone forced a large tube into my right nostril, tearing the skin. I tasted blood on my cracked lips. The new tube plunged into my lungs, with a blunt pain like a sledgehammer hitting a brick wall. A vacuum attached to the tube sucked the ocean from my lungs. The suctioning hurt worse than the choking.

They removed the tube and wiped my face clean, but there was no relief—I was still choking. They forced the tube down my nose again, and I bled all over again, and it hurt all over again.

I shook my head, begging them to stop. This made my nose bleed even more, and the restraining hands gripped me more strongly.

They tried to suction my lungs once more. This time, my heart stopped beating.

Everything turned gray. I was no longer choking; I lay completely still. The machines went silent. The room, everyone in it and all the pain disappeared. I was completely alone.

I was dead.

Wagon wheels from a horse and buggy, and the gears of an old grandfather clock emerged from the gloom. They were everywhere: twisting, turning, floating. Some were far away; others hovered in front of my face for a moment, then flew away like comets into nothingness.

No, no, you’re not dying here, I told myself repeatedly. You’re going to be okay. This is just temporary.

But I didn’t believe myself anymore. Although I was no longer in pain, I was terrified. I’d never felt more alone and helpless in my life. I didn’t want to be in this place–this abyss.

The gears and wagon wheels turned faster and faster, as if trying to pull me deeper into the abyss, where soon I too would fly away like a comet into nothingness.

No! You’re not going anywhere! I kept shouting inside my mind. You are going to be okay!

After what felt like an eternity, the hospital room suddenly reappeared, as if all the lights in a pitch-black space had been switched on. My heart was beating again. A tube in my throat led to a machine that was breathing for me. I searched the room with my eyes, not sure where I was.

I died and came back, I thought. I can’t believe that I died.

No one told me what had happened: I just knew.

The wheels and gears were gone—and I didn’t feel alone anymore. My mom was standing next to my bed, holding a small cup filled with melting ice chips. She dipped a tiny blue sponge into the cup and dabbed my lips with it. The cold was soothing.

I tried to talk, but no words came out, because of the tube in my mouth.

“You had a little setback, but you’re okay now,” my mom told me, dabbing my lips again and looking relieved to see my eyes open.

I couldn’t process what had happened to me. I’d experienced something completely incomprehensible—beyond my mind’s power to deal with. I searched for an escape inside my memories. I needed something familiar, somewhere I would be safe.

I looked at my mom’s pale gray eyes, round face and dark, curly hair and imagined her voice, singing. When I was a child, home sick from school, sometimes I could hear my mom singing in the kitchen while she cooked. Her singing always made me feel better.

My mom rarely sang; I think she was too shy to sing in front of anyone. She’d stop if she heard me come into the kitchen, so I would stay still, not making a sound, and listen as she sang, “Where troubles melt like lemon drops, Away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.…”

I loved her voice: She sounded just like Judy Garland. Occasionally she would stop singing to yell, “Oh, for shit’s sake!” if a splatter of hot oil from the frying pan caught her on the forearm. I’d press my hands over my mouth to keep from giggling.

Those moments in the kitchen were the only times I ever heard my mom curse. “Darn it all” and “Well, gee” were her most heated expressions. After swearing, she’d go right back to singing: “Somewhere over the rainbow way up high….”

And so I fell asleep in my hospital room, with my mom’s voice singing inside my head.