One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace

I suppose there are easier ways to decide to write a book.

Some people begin with an idea, perhaps a subject they have studied for years.

Others have always dreamed of seeing their name on the cover of something.

That really is not how 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death happened.

In fact, for quite a long time, I am not sure I wanted to write this book at all.

There are parts of 2020 I would rather not revisit, things I still do not completely understand.

There are memories that are really not memories in the normal sense, because I was unconscious when much of it happened. I know certain things because doctors told my family and I know other things because my family later told me. Some things I know because they were written in medical records.

And then there are a few things that belong to a different category altogether.

Grandma’s kitchen.

Grandpa’s garage.

A little girl running back and forth.

And Grandma telling me that I needed to go.

I have spent more than five years trying to make sense of all of it.

Eventually I realized that perhaps I never would.

Maybe making perfect sense of it was not the point.

Maybe the point was simply to tell the story.

That realization eventually became my new book, 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death.

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Before There Was a Book, There Was November 2020

I have written many times on Food For The Way about the autumn of 2020.

Still, whenever I sit down to write about it again, I find myself pausing.

It is strange to write about your own death.

Or, more accurately, the death that almost happened.

I became seriously ill with COVID-19 and bilateral pneumonia. Eventually I was placed on a ventilator.

By November 7, things had become very bad.

A priest was called.

Not just any priest, but one of my closest friends and someone who had become almost a father figure to me.

Because this was 2020 and hospitals were operating under extraordinary restrictions, he could not simply walk into my room, pull up a chair and pray beside me.

Instead, he stood outside.

There was glass between us.

And through that window, while I lay unconscious, he gave me the Last Rites, the Anointing of the Sick and the Apostolic Pardon.

I knew none of it was happening.

That part still gets to me.

There is something profoundly Catholic about the idea that when I was incapable of praying for myself, the Church prayed for me.

When I could not speak, someone else spoke the prayers.

When I could not even understand what was happening, grace did not require my understanding in order to be present.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops explains the Anointing of the Sick as a sacrament of strength, peace and courage for those suffering serious illness.

Those words mean something very different to me now.

They are no longer just words from a catechism, they are real now, they belong to a hospital room; to a priest standing outside a window; my renewed life.

Then Came the Ambulance

Later that evening, doctors made one last effort to save me.

I was transferred by ambulance to another hospital where there was still some hope that ECMO might be an option.

I remember none of it.

Not the siren or the paramedics.

Neither the voices or the equipment.

Nothing.

Somewhere during that ride, my heart stopped.

I was pulseless for roughly five or six minutes.

Even now I sometimes look at that sentence and have trouble believing it refers to me.

Five or six minutes.

I suppose there are people who can read that clinically.

I cannot.

Because I know what was waiting at home.

My daughter and family, an unfinished life.

All of it could have ended in the back of an ambulance on a November night.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, while the people in the ambulance were fighting to bring me back, I was somewhere else.

At least that is the only way I know how to describe it.

Grandma’s Table

I have written the fuller story in The Safest Place I Knew—Even at the Edge of Death.

I was at Grandma’s house.

Not an abstract heaven with clouds and angels playing harps.

Grandma’s house.

There was Grandma and Grandpa.

Grandpa was out in the garage, which is exactly where Grandpa usually was.

There was coffee, the kitchen, and the table.

And there was Elizabeth.

The daughter we had lost a couple years earlier.

She was a little girl, running between Grandma’s kitchen and Grandpa’s garage as though this were the most ordinary afternoon in the world.

That detail has always stayed with me.

It was not dramatic, rather it was the most domestic thing in the world, it was home.

Then Grandma stood up and told me I needed to go.

I did not want to.

That should surprise absolutely no one who ever knew my grandmother.

Nobody wanted to leave Grandma’s house.

But she became firm.

“You need to go now.”

She told me that she and Grandpa would take care of Elizabeth until I came back.

So I left.

I walked outside.

Grandpa was in the garage.

He looked up and waved.

And that was it.

Darkness.

Then, eventually, life again.

I Used to Think Survival Was the Ending

When people tell stories about critical illness, survival often becomes the final scene.

The person opens his eyes.

The family gathers around.

Everyone cries.

Fade to black.

We survived.

The end.

Except it is not the end.

Sometimes waking up is where the hard part begins.

I woke up weak.

Confused.

Dependent.

My body was not the body I had known before.

There were things I could no longer do, so many things I had to relearn.

Entire weeks in which the walls of medical facilities became my whole world.

There were nightmares and hallucinations that continued to feel real even after I was awake enough to understand that they were not.

Rehabilitation, isolation, and humiliation.

There was both gratitude and anger.

Sometimes all of those things existed in the same hour.

Survival is complicated.

That is one thing I wish we talked about more.

We celebrate survivors, and rightly so, but surviving something terrible does not automatically make the aftermath easy.

Sometimes the survivor is left standing in the wreckage asking a question everyone else assumes has already been answered.

Now what?

Grace Looks Different From the Other Side

Before I got sick, grace was a word I understood intellectually.

I had studied theology and I knew all the definitions.

Then I almost died.

Grace became less abstract and instead became a nurse sitting beside the bed of a man who could not thank her, a priest outside a hospital window, people praying hundreds of miles away.

Grace became doctors refusing to give up, me waking up, and rehabilitation; the daughter I was able to see again.

And, strangely enough, grace also became weakness.

That part took longer.

I came back wounded.

Some wounds healed.

Others did not.

Some limitations became part of my life.

There was no magical return to the man I had been before November 2020.

For a while I thought healing meant getting that man back.

Now I am not so sure.

The resurrected Christ still had wounds.

Thomas was invited to touch them.

That seems important to me.

Maybe healing does not always erase what happened, perhaps it’s learning that the wound is not the end of the story.

This Is Why I Published the Book

I finally decided to publish these reflections because I began to suspect that the questions I was asking were not mine alone.

There are people sitting beside hospital beds tonight.

Just as there are people learning to live in bodies that no longer work the way they once did.

People who survived something and feel guilty because someone else did not.

There are caregivers who are exhausted caring for people terrified of dying.

People grieving someone they would give anything to see walk through the door again.

Christians who sincerely believe in God and still find themselves asking where He was when everything fell apart.

I do not have seven answers for those people, I have seven reflections.

There is a difference.

7 Reflections From the Edge of Death is not a manual for surviving tragedy.

It is one man’s attempt to look back at the edge and ask what can be learned from having stood there.

You can find 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death on Amazon here.

The Book Is Called From the Edge of Death, But It Is Really About Life

That is the irony of the title.

The closer I came to death, the more interested I became in ordinary life.

Not extraordinary life.

Ordinary life.

Music and family, work, home, prayer, and memory.

A cup of coffee and a conversation you almost did not have.

We spend an enormous amount of our lives waiting for the important part to begin.

Maybe when I get the new job or when I retire.

When we take the trip, when the kids are older, maybe next year.

Nearly dying taught me something I should have understood much earlier.

This is the important part.

Right now.

The part we call ordinary because we do not yet understand how much we will miss it when it is gone.

More Pages

There is a strange feeling in holding a book that exists only because you lived long enough to write it.

I have looked at the cover of 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death and thought about that more than once.

There was another possible version of November 2020.

The priest could have come and said the prayers.

My heart could have stopped.

And that could have been the end.

My daughter might have grown up with photographs and my family might have told stories about me in the past tense.

Food For The Way would never have existed in the form it does today.

This book would not exist.

Instead, somehow, I got more pages.

That is how I increasingly think about survival.

More pages.

Not unlimited pages.

Just more.

None of us knows how many remain.

I certainly do not.

But today there is another one.

7 Reflections From the Edge of Death Is Available Now

This is probably the most personal little book I have written.

It grew out of some of the darkest days of my life, but I do not think it is a dark book.

At least I hope it is not.

I hope it is a book about what remains when so much else has been stripped away.

Faith.

Family.

Memory.

Love.

Grace.

And the almost unbearable beauty of being given another day.

Read 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death on Amazon

If you know someone who is recovering from serious illness, caring for someone they love, grieving, struggling with questions about suffering, or simply beginning to think differently about the fragility of life, I hope you will consider sharing the book with them.

And if you have been reading Food For The Way for a while, thank you.

Many of these reflections began here.

In many ways, you have been walking this road with me.

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Continue the Journey

You can read more of the story in:

The Safest Place I Knew—Even at the Edge of Death

Grandma’s Kitchen Table: The Safest Place I’ve Ever Known

The Blood That Never Failed: A Sacred Heart Reflection

Or visit Food For The Way for more reflections on faith, family, music, memory, suffering, history and the places where all of them meet.

There is one thought I keep coming back to.

Perhaps reaching the edge does not mean the story is over.

Sometimes there is another page.

Sometimes there is another morning.

And sometimes the greatest grace of all is simply being here to notice it.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.