I’ve tried to think of a way to write about what happened without any gore or shock; something sanitized that won’t make anyone else as sad as this made me. And I think I’ve mostly accomplished that. But consider this a content warning. You don’t need to read what comes next to appreciate that life is a short and fragile thing. You can just take my word for it.
A few weeks ago, I was walking down the street with friends. It was a sunny day, surprisingly warm. I had worn a light coat and a big wooly plaid scarf, just in case the weather turned icy again. The street, Geary, one I’ve walked along nearly every day for the last six years of my life, has a sidewalk that is uneven and slanted.
So when the voices behind me stopped, and I heard an awful crack — the unmistakable sound of a bone doing a thing it shouldn’t do — I thought, someone has tripped because this sidewalk is a goddamn hazard and the city of Toronto is a mess filled with potholes and dangerous sidewalks and how is a person supposed to live in a place like this.
Turning, I saw my friends’ friend — let’s call her Heather — face first on the concrete, sloped down, hands by her side. There had been no time to raise her arms to break her fall.
The three of us still upright asked ‘are you alright’ and Heather made a noise that sounded like a laugh. Then she gurgled and the blood began to spread and her body started to shake.
Did you know that when you call 911, someone isn’t always waiting on the other end of the line to answer? There’s a message that can play:
All available agents are busy. Please stay on the line and our next available agent will take your call.
Your call is important to us, they don’t go so far as to say.
I won’t get too into the details — I’ll save those for a therapist one day — but she went from having a pulse, and us moving her into recovery and trying to elevate her head because of the slanted sidewalk, and me pushing her blood-logged hair which was curly and red away from her mouth and nose and saying ‘you’re okay, I’ve got you’ while I waited on the line, to her face turning blue and the sirens howling and the defibrillator buzzing and subsequent involuntary gasps.
At the hospital, I cleaned her blood off of my white sneakers with hand sanitizer and tissue paper. We gave our statement to the police. Her sisters breathed deeply. We waited.
Heather survived, somehow. After they stabilized her heart, we sat in a restaurant and drank stiff drinks and ate decadent food, muddling on as though everything was normal. I ate rabbit. What else is there to do in the face of death but try to be unabashedly alive?
I see her in the lulls between meetings and runs and coffees. In the moments when the barista steams my milk, or when I see the sun starting to set outside the office window, I see Heather’s face so terribly blue, and the undulations of compressions throughout her body. At night, I dream of doing compressions on various bloody and battered friends, my sleeves soaked up to my elbows in blood while I count out one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and. A few cold mornings, I have reached for the scarf the firefighters took out of my hands because it was beyond saving. And I am so glad that of the things to survive that day, it was the girl with the lovely hair and big smile.
Two asks for you, dear friends:
1. Please put a note in your wallet with a phone number to call. Especially you Android users. No one knows how to use your god damn phones.
2. Don’t wait till you’re on the precipice of death to live the life you actually want to live.
For those of you that are wondering, the doctors said that apparently this is just a thing that can happen after COVID. The virus just lives in you and eats at your heart, I guess, until it causes spontaneous heart failure in young people like Heather. So please just take care and put your emergency contact details in your wallet.
Just quietly wiping my eyes despite hearing this story first hand. How do you keep exceeding my expectations when I already have such strong belief in your talent?!?