Stop Light

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Driving home from some errands yesterday, I exit the expressway and come to a stop at the traffic light. There’s a guy standing there with a sign on my side of the road. He’s of Hispanic descent, mid-thirties, with his right arm in a sling. The only words I can make out on the sign are in large caps. BAD ACCIDENT. 

Now number one, there’s always someone standing there with a sign. Number two, anybody can have an accident, quite possibly a bad accident. Nobody’s immune to the unexpected misfortune of accidents. Some have better health insurance than others. More resources. But tragedy is blind, and can strike any of us, any time.  

Every time I stop at this light to make my almost home left turn, I have a look at who’s there today. There’s always a subconscious do or do not quality to it. Today I reach for my wallet and roll down the window.

The guy steps over with a winning smile. I hand him a bill, we fist bump, and I ask about his accident. 

“Motorcycle.” He says, and raises his shirt to show me a mean looking surgical scar along his spine. Maybe a foot long. 

“But by the grace of God I am still here.”

He smiles that big smile and we fist bump again. It feels like an affirmation. Of being alive.

“I was in a coma for a month. In the hospital for three.”

“I ride a motorcycle.” I tell him.

“And had an accident myself a couple of years ago.”

“Very lucky to have walked away from that one.”

Actually, walked away and straight into an ambulance. It all comes back and I remember going down on the expressway, surrounded by cars on all sides doing sixty miles per hour, exiting, merging. As I hit the pavement and slid down the road all my thoughts were focused on not getting hit by a car. 

“Please Lord please Lord please. Don’t let me get hit by a car.” My brain was saying.

Nobody hit me and several cars stopped, got me up, got the bike up and off the road. Called the ambulance. Kind and thoughtful. The sort of things people do for each other in an emergency. 

So the short version is I got scraped up quite a bit, and broke my pinkie finger. Mostly credit that to having the right protective gear on.

And not being run over. Credit that to something Greater.

But it could very easily have been different.

The light changes and I wish my new friend luck. We fist bump again before I pull away.

“Yeah I love motorcycles man. But it was God that saved me that day. You be safe,” he adds.

The last couple of miles home I think about it, and the encounter sticks with me. My own brief brush with death. His serious months-long bad accident brush with death. It can happen fast, or it can happen slow.

I just finished a moving book, When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi (Random House, 2016) about a young neurosurgeon facing terminal cancer. 

“I began to realize,” he writes, “that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything…The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”

Acceptance of death is an important key to finding joy in life. And meaning. Not an easy realization. I know I’ve taken my time about it. Sometimes it creeps up slowly. Sometimes it headbutts you. But it’s a common denominator we all share. Me, you, my buddy with the sign.    

Do or do not. There is no try.