Life can change in an instant

And when it does, you never feel prepared

I write this from my son’s hospital room. He’s not here. An hour ago, they wheeled him into surgery. This is not his first surgery. During his first surgery two weeks ago, I was in no state to be writing anything. I sat in the atrium of an Amsterdam hospital I’d never seen before, with my husband and nineteen-year-old daughter. We were all crying, and had been crying on and off for hours. Ever since 8:06 that morning when a call from an unknown number gave me the address of the hospital and told me my teenage son had been taken there after an accident while cycling to school.

The paramedic who was calling told me my son had broken his ankle. Afterwards, I felt irrationally angry that it was actually so much worse, and they hadn’t told me so over the phone. Though as it is, the last thing the paramedic said as he ended the call was to drive carefully and not rush. Maybe he heard something in my voice. More likely, it wasn’t his first time making a call like this. Terrible things happen all the time. And not everyone gets a happy ending.

I’d like to say that the whole day was a blur, but really I remember each individual moment, though they don’t feel contiguous. It’s like every moment was a disconnected slice of some terrible, alternate world that sits just beneath the membrane of everyday life. We are never more than a breath away from disaster, even if sometimes we let ourselves forget.

The surgery that first day was to repair his broken spine. They told us it needed to happen right away, hours after the accident. Best case scenario, the spine surgeon would be able to move things back into alignment, and the crushed vertebra would click back into place. If that didn’t happen, the neurosurgeon was there and would try to carefully remove the bone fragments without damaging the nerves, a much riskier proposition. They said it could take 3-6 hours, or even more, depending on which scenario prevailed. So we sat in the hospital atrium, the three of us, crying and trying to convince each other to finally eat something. But performing a motion as mundane as eating felt impossible.

Waiting for that call was the longest four hours of my life. And this past two weeks of spending every day in my gravely injured son’s hospital room vastly eclipses any previous life experience. In 2022, for instance, I spent two weeks in the hospital and then months learning to walk again after almost dying of a random bacterial infection. At the time, it was right up there on the list of worst things that have ever happened to me. Next to this, though, I see that it was nothing. A minor inconvenience. A blip. Insignificant next to the enormity of my injured child.

To our relief, when the call came, it was after a little less than four hours. I knew that was a good sign. And they said scenario one had worked perfectly. They’d bolted the vertebrae above and below the injured one into a steel-reinforced bridge to hold everything in place while the bone heals itself. In a year they can take out the hardware, and it should be fine. I couldn’t believe it. Still can’t. From utter devastation to cautious hope, in far too little time for the processing power of the human brain.

How to thank the surgeon who performed this miracle? The bystanders who called the ambulance and sat with my son until it arrived? The doctor who just happened to be cycling by on his way to work, and stopped to give my son expert first aid? All the angelic nurses, who are so kind to him and so willing to speak English to his immigrant mother who’s still very bad at Dutch? I remember this feeling from my first few weeks after I left the hospital: I’m a dead woman walking due to the ministrations of strangers for whom saving lives is all in a day’s work. And my son will walk again too, thanks to them. How to repay the universe for the immensity of this gift?

His ankle surgery today is also delicate. I’m worried out of my mind, as I have been for the past two weeks. I’m also weirdly calm. I don’t know why this is. My therapist says people respond to trauma in a lot of different ways. I’ve certainly noticed myself responding in different ways. In the days after it happened, I had a constant dual timeline playing in my mind. The universe, splitting at the instant of my son’s accident. On one side, an unimaginable world without him. Somehow, I’ve been lucky enough to end up on the other side, in the world where he survived—where he even seems like he’ll be OK, and make a full, or near-full recovery. Although the doctors are circumspect with promises, and it will be a long recovery and rehabilitation.

I still find myself swinging between worlds. I’ll wake in the night, heart pounding, with an awful drop in my heart screaming he’s gone. I pull my weighted blanket over me, count my own breaths in the dark, remind myself my fears are about what only almost happened.

When my children were small, I used to sometimes sneak into their rooms while they were sleeping to make sure I could still hear them breathing. In fact, I kept this up for years, too many years to admit out loud, because I know it’s crazy to worry a teenager might just stop breathing in the night. But in the past two weeks the soft regularity of my son’s breathing from his hospital bed has calmed me, as if all the mitochondria in my body are releasing a collective sigh. Years ago I read that during pregnancy, fetal cells migrate into the mother’s bloodstream, settling in her skin, her liver, the marrow of her bones. Which means some of the marrow in my bones belongs to my son. I think I can feel it, like a quantum entanglement stretched tight between us. He’s in surgery right now, under the competent hands of experienced surgeons, I remind myself. He’s OK. He’s going to be OK.

I’m writing this to distract myself as I wait in my son’s room for him to come out of surgery. My husband is home, rearranging our whole house to accommodate the hospital bed, wheelchair, and other equipment my son will need to facilitate his recovery. I’m watching the rain fall down outside the panoramic eighth-floor window of my son’s hospital room, which feels vastly empty without him. I’m trying not to imagine the vast emptiness he would leave in this world if he left it.

But I know we’re all on a slow march out of this world. For us mortals, time flows only in one direction. Are we thinking about death all the time, even when we don’t know it? Anthropologist Earnest Becker wrote that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” Terror Management Theory grew out of this, a social psychology term positing that everything we do personally and as a society is meant to ward off our otherwise all-consuming existential angst.

I would say this theory resonates with me. When I left my childhood religion in my thirties, I experienced the weird sensation of suddenly not knowing what would happen after death. Mormon theology on the afterlife is robust, so having the magic carpet pulled out from under me was a shock. But the existential dread I felt wasn’t new; I just had a name for it now. And an explanation for the feeling, where before I just thought my Mormon psyche was defective. In some ways, the change was a relief.

It’s a surprise even to me that I don’t miss my religion now, in this time of pain and uncertainty. These days the world feels too strange and immense for any system of belief to capture it. As Chloe Hope said this week in her wonderful Death & Birds,

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me.”

I’ve noticed these days that sometimes listening to her read is the closest I come to praying. But I’m not precious about it. If prayer is the language of your love, I will accept it gladly. If you have a thought, secular or religious, to spare my son in our time of need, I am grateful to you.

I feel suspended right now between terror at what almost happened, pain at my son’s pain, and a curious kind of guilty good fortune. What if this had happened to my son in Gaza? In Sudan? In so many other places where medical care wasn’t minutes away, where a whole trauma surgery team couldn’t spring immediately into action? What if something worse—bad as this is—had happened? This moment, as I write this, there are mothers on this planet grieving children they have lost. What turn of the universe made me one of the lucky ones? They don’t deserve their grief any more than I deserve the precious existence of my son in this world. We all deserve better than we get; and yet, none of us really deserve anything at all. We humans are a strange anomaly in a mysterious universe. All we have is each other, and all we can give is our precious, fragile selves.

Give your own fragile self some grace today, and hold your dear ones close a moment longer. Life can change in an instant, and when it does, you never feel prepared.