Near-death experience

Am I scared of dying? I can talk about it, am fascinated by it, even laugh about it on occasion - but, well, yes, sometimes it strikes me that I'm fucking petrified of it, particularly because I don't hold any consolatory religious beliefs in any kind of afterlife. Every now and then I experience moments of horribly cliched and yet acute existential angst - this life I'm living is temporary, contingent, finite; and every single year, day, hour, second is unrecoverable once it's gone.

Last night I discovered that the younger brother of someone I know back home died in a car crash on 2nd November. His car left the road and ended up submerged in the River Wansbeck, but although he was freed from the vehicle by rescue services, he never regained consciousness and his injuries proved fatal.

I didn't know him, but the news hit me really quite hard.

One evening in November 1996, I was one of five people in a car travelling along the same stretch of road on the way back into Morpeth. Moving to overtake another vehicle, our car skidded on a patch of black ice, spinning one way and then the other across the oncoming lane despite the best efforts of the driver to control it. Everything went into slow motion (it might seem cliched, but it's true), and after spinning for what felt like a minute the car mounted the pavement backwards, crashed through a wooden fence and down a steep embankment where it came to rest against a tree. We had to climb out of the windows as the doors were jammed, and clamber back up the slope onto the pavement. It being the days before mobile phones, we had to stand and wait in the freezing cold silence, the headlights shining at a 45 degree angle up into the air, until help arrived in the form of a passing police car.

Miraculously, aside from very minor whiplash and a few cuts (branches from the trees had smashed the windows in, and we'd got covered in glass), none of us were injured. For days afterwards, I couldn't stop replaying it in my head and thinking about how phenomenally fortunate we'd been, for three reasons. Firstly, there happened to be no oncoming traffic - had there been, we would have been involved in a head-on collision, no doubt about it. Secondly, if the tree hadn't been there to stop the car dead, it would have rolled over at the bottom of the embankment, as it's pretty steep. Thirdly, had the accident happened a little further along the road - 100m maybe - we would have smashed through the fence and ended up in the river.

This guy was not so lucky. RIP.

On a personal level, there are two ways to respond. One would be my initial reaction last night - the thought "If I'd died in that crash seven years ago..." I think I've become a different person in that time. All the good times I've had since then, all that personal development and emotional growth, all the people I've met and come to love - they would all be nothing. For him, in his early twenties, all those possibilities have been denied.

The other way to respond, of course, is to move on from having morbid thoughts and instead see how this refocuses the way I look at my own life. I'm thankful for every minute I've had since that day, and for every experience, whether good or bad. Perhaps, as the old adage goes, you have to come closer to death to truly appreciate what it is to be alive. I only know that that's how I feel today: alive. And fortunate.