What's the Closest You've Come to Death?
essay and poem
Ryan asked me, "What's the closest you've come to death?"
I told him that it was during high school basketball practice in 1984 when a support pole that helped hold the basket to the ceiling broke free, dropped down just a few inches in front of my face, and landed between my feet.
I'd been shooting at that basket with Ricky and he turned away and retched. I looked down at the deep divot in the gym floor. That pole, which weighed at least twenty pounds, would've split my skull in half. I felt dizzy so I walked over to a gym wall and leaned against it for a moment.
Then my teammates and I studied the jagged hole in the gym floor and marveled at my luck—bad for almost dying and good for not dying. And then we returned to playing hoops. We were athletes who wanted to win. And winning takes hard work. And hard work requires blistered feet and blistered souls.
But Coach Smith conducted an easy practice. He laughed and smiled as we all ran at half-speed.
Afterward, he said, "Everybody went pale. I went pale. Even you got pale, Sherman."
I hadn't thought about my near-death in years. So Ryan's question had me remembering that, in years past, I would sometimes drift into a irreal state and worry that the support pole had crushed my brain but that I'd somehow survived and had been in a long term coma ever since.
I'm a storyteller so I'd wonder, inside my imaginary coma, if I'd invented an entire life, invented my sons and wife, invented my friends and my career.
And now, as I ponder that irreal state of the past, I'm proud of myself for imagining a realistic life. I didn't invent a utopia. I'm terrified of utopians. As they've tried to remake the world in their image, utopians have slaughtered millions of people. And, yes, they’ve thrown poets into the reeducation camps and gulags.
So, unlike the utopians, I'd invented a life, a world, that was filled with just as much pain as joy—a world of contradiction and imperfection. Yeah, you gotta challenge the utopians with every story you tell. And, yeah, I'm a poet devoted to telling the story that comforts and hurts.
I dream of the coma where I've been trapped for decades. I dream that my brothers and sister, survivors, are in the room. I dream that these poems arrive—I'm a transcriber— when my siblings lean over my curled body in my hospital bed and whisper "We're here, Junior, we're here, we're here and we won't leave until you find your way back to this trembling world.
Mine was with COVID. I had been so careful, but still contracted it, likely due to my weakened immune system. I was already in the hospital when I was diagnosed, but was sent home. I returned the next morning feeling something was wrong. I laid on a gurney for hours I think as it became harder to breathe. I cried out until someone came. I ended up blacking out and waking up days later in the ICU. I thank God daily for another chance at life.
When I was sixteen, my friends and I were wandering the forest and waterfall near our house. It was November and the leaves had fallen but instead of snow everything had been washed with rain.
Slippery is what I mean.
Even so, the waterfall was more of a slow pour leaving the basin mostly rocks and dirt and a few sizable boulders surrounding a small pool and subsequent stream that drizzled its way to the Mississippi river.
Being young and dumb and reckless, we never once considered the danger posed by the waterfall and the cliffside, and so while we were running around near the cliffside, I slipped on the leaves and slid down over the ledge. Clinging there, I felt ground beneath my feet so I wasn't worried. Even laughed a bit as my friends watched me.
And then I slipped over.
Whatever I felt beneath my feet wasn't enough ground to stop me and so I fell off the cliff. About forty feet. I don't much remember falling because it happened, I guess, too fast, though the doctors said that that was a natural response to this kind of experience. Anyway, I fell backwards through the air and hit the ground beneath.
The wind knocked out of me, but I bounced right back up to my feet, trying to catch my breath while, from above, my friends called out, "Are you dead?"
I wanted to yell back, tell them No, but I still couldn't catch my breath. Pacing the basin, I stared up at where I fell from. I didn't much think about anything except that I couldn't breathe yet and my shoulder hurt a lot. I shrugged my way out of my overcoat and nearly passed out, though it didn't especially hurt. The back of the right shoulder on the coat looked like it had been scraped clean of color. Beside me, a large jutting rock about my height pointed up at the sky and I thought, for a moment, what would have happened had I been broken over that instead of hitting the ground the way I did.
My friends made their way down the steep valley leading to the waterfall basin, trying to figure out if I was all right. I felt fine, which was a sure sign that I was not fine. My friends, dummies that we all were, were at least smart enough to see that I was ghastly pale and unsteady. They said we needed to get help and wait down there.
This was before people generally had cellphones and though my right arm hung limp at my side, I decided we should climb back out and walk back home. Without waiting for them, I ran for the incline and used the trees and brush to climb back up out of the valley. This is something else I don't much remember. One of those moments where your brain shuts down your ability to feel pain because you're too foolish to stop hurting yourself.
As we walked back home, my friends flanking me on either side, one of them told me that the doctors would probably cut off my sweater and shirt to see what was wrong.
"This is my favorite sweater."
"You can get a new one."
Well, I decided I'd save my sweater by taking it off. Once more, I nearly collapsed, my vision going black, but I managed to get my favorite sweater off.
We rang my parents' doorbell and when my mom opened the door I said, simply, "I fell off the cliff."
I spent the weekend at the hospital where I slept probably 80% of the time. No concussion or internal bleeding, but I did break my collarbone. When they were doing the x-rays, I had to hold my right arm up and I remember saying, "I'm gonna pass out," before I collapsed but was caught by one of the nurses, who set me in a chair. That was when I began crying. And I couldn't stop.
"Are you hurt?"
"No!"
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know!"
"Is it just the shock?"
"Uh huh!"
The nurses and doctors began calling me the miracle boy, which was a whole thing to think about on top of everything else. My heart rate kept dropping below 40bpm, which set off an alarm, so my dad set the bed so that I was nearly sitting up, which solved the problem.
People came and visited me, though I mostly drifted in and out of consciousness the whole weekend.
On Sunday evening, I got to go home wearing a sling until my collarbone reknit itself.