What's the Closest You've Come to Death?

personal essay

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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 but 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 decades. So Ryan's question had me remembering that, in years past, I would sometimes drift into a unreal state and worry that the support pole had indeed 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 fictional coma, if I'd invented an entire life, invented my sons, and wife, invented my friends and my career.

I’d wonder if I’d invented all the loss. All the wakes and funerals. All my failures. All my foolishness. All those moments when I lacked courage. Lacked compassion. Lacked hope.

I didn’t invent a world free of war. Or free of crime. Or free of mental illness. Or free of poverty and hunger.

As I ponder that unreal state of the past, I'm proud of myself for imagining a realistic life. I didn't invent a personal or world utopia. I'm terrified of utopians. As they've tried to remake the world in their image, utopians have slaughtered hundreds of millions of people.

So, unlike the utopians, I'd invented a life, a world, that was filled with just as much pain as joy. Yeah, no matter my condition, I'm devoted to telling the story that hurts.

 I dream of the coma
where I've been trapped

for decades. I dream
that my mother

and father are still
alive. I dream

that these poems
arrive

when my parents
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."