On frailty

A perilous brush with the end of one’s life ought surely to feature commensurate drama, but that hasn’t been my experience. My near-death scenes have been incongruous or humdrum to the point of comic. One time, John the hamster, who’d been at large for days, was discovered in the middle of the night to have gotten stuck head down in the toaster. Without thinking, I jammed a fork in the toaster thinking to dig him out – but yanked it back just as quickly when it occurred to me that if I died at that moment, in that posture, with a deep-fried hamster by my side, nobody would cry at my funeral. Then, at a cocktail party in the swank Carleton Hotel in Cannes (this is shaping up for some drama!), a sideways chunk of chicken saté sealed my windpipe. Mercifully, as the blacks began to close, at the last second, someone Heimliched me back from the brink. Not, however, Johnny Depp, who I’d heard was attending the party next door, but a wiry little British tax accountant named Neal. (To this day I have a morbid fear of skewered food, and a secret lust for CGAs.)

Most recently, my pants tried to kill me. They had the element of surprise, too, so that when the cuff slid under the heel of my boot as I began my descent of the stairs, I reacted badly. I didn’t, somehow, grab for anything to stop the fall, but instead watched in dismay as both legs shot out rigid in front of me, causing me to go down like a plank of wood, my spine clattering against the wooden stairs.

Heroes take more of a beating before they surrender the ghost. You’ve got to really swing that broadsword. Take their heads right off. Otherwise, they fight on, oblivious to fear and pain, as if the harder they fight, the deeper and more permanently etched in history become their names.

But little me, I cry when I hurt myself. After I fell, I got up off the stairs and went home to bawl. I kept it up for ten minutes. I was truly rattled, and for the next few days my back hurt like stink. Every time I had to get up for something, I had a little sniffle.

But look – the crying is not really about how much it hurts. Ask any little kid. It’s about who’s there to tell you, via a kiss right on the owie, that pretty soon you’ll be feeling better. That although the benevolence of the universe may have momentarily lapsed, you’ll trust it again. You’re not alone. Fate’s not waiting with a knife for you to do something stupid, and if it is, hush now, I’m here.

It’s funny to think how easily we live with trust, probability and the unknown shape of fate, though. Feeling bleak, I sometimes imagine that the next breath I take could be my last – but I’m certain that’s not what I’ll be thinking about when it actually is. I’ll be thinking about doing something with melted cheese, maybe, or whether I should vacuum, and my end will just sidle up and go “Boo!”

Most of us go that way – with kind of a piffle, rather than in epic, glorious battle. In that sense, life is a near-death experience.