SLIDING DOORS
Two curious things happened on September 8, 2014. The first occurred after I dropped my father off at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. He had come from Dallas to visit me and my husband for the weekend, and unfortunately, the day had come for him to go home. After sending him off to his terminal, I decided to drive the scenic route home to southeast Washington D.C. Between Baltimore and the District are two highways: one with numerous lanes flanked by unforgiving, concrete walls and another with two leisurely lanes on each side of a lush median with skyscraping trees in place of a wall. The latter, which is not favored by commuters because of its tendency to quickly gridlock in rush hour, is the scenic route. I was in no hurry, and traffic would not begin for several hours, so toward my home I drove as my dad flew toward his.
With my hair tied up and all four windows of my green Escape rolled down, I cruised in the fast lane, daring to turn my speakers louder and louder until my car shook like a veritable rock concert. It was one of those gorgeous days! The crisp aroma of fall had not quite arrived, but summer’s cloying air had already passed. Instead, the entire atmosphere seemed to be on its toes in anticipation for dressed up foliage and the first bonfires of the season. The in-between, palette-cleansing air blew in and out of my windows prompting hundreds of wisps of my hair to come loose from my ponytail.
Then everything shifted all at once.
I felt the wrongness before I saw it – a sleek minivan about twenty yards ahead of me fishtailing in the right-hand lane. It swung just enough to clip the curb of the shoulder where pavement met grass, and suddenly the car was airborne. It completed a neat roll and disappeared upside-down into the trees and brush. The sight defied all laws of nature. As I pulled to the grassy shoulder of the highway and came to a halt, my thoughts reverted to basic physics and common sense.
Cars are meant to be upright on the road, I told myself. Cars are meant to travel on a straight, paved path. Then, how did the Fast and Furious franchise make their car stunts look so real? These thoughts, inane and untimely, crowded my mind as I grappled with my pulsing adrenaline. A young man with curly, outgrown hair jumped out of a parked car in front of me and jogged toward the trees as I sat with windows still down and music still inappropriately blasting. We made eye contact, his puzzled and mine empty. After the sight we just witnessed, I felt disturbed being the subject of this young man’s perplexity. I wanted to move, and I strangely wanted to tell him that, but the swift chaos of the accident pervaded my body like a blood virus and glued me to my leather seats slick with cold sweat.
Then, like an unbound butterfly I quickly and clumsily began to get out of my car. I slammed the power button on the radio and waited for the windows to roll up at their excruciating pace. Three more people ran into the woods where the overturned car lay in the time it took me to get out and hit the lock button. I could see only the trunk of the car upside down and suspended about five feet off the ground; it was likely held up by newly mangled saplings that now grow bent in perpetual obedience to the chrome and rubber force once subjected on it. The bumper had come clean off and rested on the ground, and a small white cloth, perhaps a t-shirt or towel, hung limply from a tree branch like a weary surrender.
Instead of venturing into the woods, I stood halfway in between my car and the shrubbery to call 911. Only when the emergency operator realized I had no idea what mile marker was closest did I bite my lip and jog into the woods hoping for someone native to the area. There was no mangled body, crying child, or array of blood like I feared. Instead, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman supported by two Samaritans on either side hobbled around the totaled car and toward the highway. She was moaning slightly and had some scratches on her face, but no bones protruded, and no joints looked out of place. Someone managed to tell me the closest exit, Powder Mill Road, and after I relayed as best as I could our location and the condition of the woman, I hung up with the dispatcher and took my place with a group of now eight or nine people on the shoulder of the highway.
“Mijo, mijo,” mumbled the woman as she fumbled with her mangled cell phone. I hadn’t noticed before her purse slung around one shoulder. She wanted nothing more than to talk to her son in those moments, and my heart inexplicably warmed.
As I stood there watching one of the Samaritans produce his own cell phone and waiting for emergency crews, I reflected on my actions in those short minutes; it could not have been longer than five or seven. A relatively healthy woman sat in front of me, but I had been afraid of her fatality. I had been afraid of coming face-to-face with death in those trees. Though she ended up moderately fine save a possibly broken arm and a strained neck, I did see a life for the last time that day.
The last time I ever saw my dad was when he walked inside the sliding glass doors of the airport terminal on September 8. Though I did not realize it until a week later when he unexpectedly passed away, that was the second curious thing to happen, and it is the reason I will never forget that day.
There is a fairly new plot device in Hollywood called sliding doors. It involves placing a character in a situation where a seemingly insignificant choice exclusively alters their fate. A 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie did it with a train, Frasier did it with a choice of outerwear, and Grey’s Anatomy did it with an elevator. Typically the viewer is shown two courses of events: one if the character makes the train, wears the sweater, or catches the elevator, and the other if they miss the train, wear the suit, or do not catch the elevator. Sometimes the ending leaves it up to the viewer which course of action will actually happen, and sometimes a completely different outcome occurs.
Truthfully, I have been tempted to insert myself into my own sliding doors episode. What would have happened if I had done this differently? What would have happened if I had done that instead of this? Would my outcome have changed? Nevertheless, my reality is not producer-funded, script-written Hollywood. My reality is real life. A week after that car accident, my fifty-nine year old father died of a blood clot that originated in his ankle. It was unexpected; it was not scripted; it did not derive from a sliding door. The only sliding doors that exist in my life are the ones my dad walked through at the airport, the ones that ushered him into a wholly different home than I expected.
It is likely I will never fully come to terms with the delicate intermingling of life, death, and reality that day. Closure is slippery. However, I have come to terms with one thing. No amount of hypothesizing my choices will change the outcome of that day or days afterward. The truth is if I done something differently, I might have been the unlucky passenger in a freak car accident, or even worse, I might have missed the car accident entirely. I was reminded of life’s fragility twice in September of 2014. The first reminder, the car accident, made me tell each and every family member and friend how much I love them. The second reminder, my dad’s death, made me grateful I had told him so recently how much he meant to me.
I did not face death on September 8. I witnessed life pulsing richly and stubbornly in both the woman and my dad, and I will continue to live in exactly that way. Though I might not be the first person to run straight to the origin of the chaos, I will be there to help. I will be rich and stubborn with my life. I will impact lives around me in a way uniquely my own. I will be content.
That all sounds a lot better than what if.
