How It Felt to Come Back to Life
Coming back from near-death was a gracious endeavor, but it was also deeply heartbreaking
“Thank God you’re alive,” my mother said to me with tears in her eyes. I lay on a hospital gurney, hooked up to machines that whirred and beeped rhythmically, the acoustic proof that life hadn’t given up on me yet.
In her eyes, I saw the pain she’d been pushing down for days. A mother who gets a phone call that her young daughter is in the ICU and might not make it. A mother who haphazardly throws clothes into a suitcase, who reaches out for the boarding pass as the airline attendant catches the terror in her face, who sits on a crowded plane for five hours staring out the window at the clouds, a full 300 disconnected minutes of not knowing if her little girl is alive or dead.
“Yes,” I said, as the tears streamed down both of our faces. “Thank God I’m alive.”
But it was a lie.
A lie I’ve told for almost a decade, until now.
In that instant, I lied out of respect for what my mother had just been through. But thereafter, that lie protected a sacred truth only I knew. A truth that I didn’t want to share, for fear of sounding irrational or condescending. A truth that eventually became my reason to live more fully — but…
