The Accident

I have tried to live a life of good, often looking down on those who chose to do evil, chose to hurt, but today as my sobbing cuts pathways through my dirt and blood encrusted cheeks, I realize that I was wrong. My judgment was in vain…

The mountains rose up into the blue sky casting rhythmic songs upon the calm lake below. The road wound along the mountainside, offering spectacular views which take your breath away no matter how many times you have driven it. And maybe that is what happened. The scenery caught his eye, and he failed to see the bend in the road. He had been thrown at least 50 feet from his car, his body lying against a jagged cliff as he looked up into the warm spring sun.

I barely remember getting out of my car and going to his side. But I do remember the feelings. That sickening feeling, when your heart and stomach feel like they need to purge themselves of the bodily cage. The blood pumps through your body so hard and your adrenaline spikes so much that you feel almost helpless to contain it. There was no way this man was going to live, and I believe that he knew it even more than I. I dialed 911 on my phone but knew that it would be a long time before anyone arrived on the high mountain road.

He could barely speak, and when he did I could hear the gurgle of blood in his throat. “John,” he said. The name seemed irrelevant, like he gave it out of custom, even though at this point every custom in the world was pointless.

I lay down beside him and tried to comfort the large man. At first nothing was said. There was no point telling him he was going to be ok, he knew that he wasn’t. Even as we lay there, the sun beating down and blood slowly pooling over my clothes, the life was leaving him. That silence was immense, and then he finally broke it.

“I have never been a good man.” The words were barely legible, forced through the blood that now pulsed out of the corner of his mouth and down his chin. “I swindled, robbed…I hurt people, deeply.” The man had gone from a seeming calm to worried. There was a terror in his eyes which made me even more unsure of what I should say. And so…I said nothing. All I could do was lean across the man and wrap my arms around him. The gurgles continued in harmony with the soft sobs that now wracked his body. I didn’t think he would be able to move, but I felt one of his arms on my back…in his feeble state it was an attempt to reciprocate the embrace. A hug between two strangers trapped in a moment…a moment that seemed like it should never have happened, but did.

My voice finally came to me, with my arms wrapped around the dying man, “It’s ok. You’re not alone.” I don’t know if it was a smile, but there was something…maybe some hint of resolution, or maybe it was a just a moment where he felt fully accepted for one time in his life. A life that was now ending.

His body seemed to relax against mine and his head rolled back. He was gone. Just like that. One moment, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t think to move. And so I stayed embracing that man as I began to weep. To have someone die in your arms, to be the only one there for them in their last moments….for it to be a total stranger and not know what they thought might happen as their last breath left their body…to not know what to say…. But at least he had someone with him.

I don’t know how long I lay there before I felt a pair of hands pulling me up. I must have explained what I thought happened because when I got home I had a piece of paper with the man’s full name on it. Maybe I had asked for it. I don`t know. It took me a lot of time to absorb the events. The incident got filtered through my beliefs, and I tried to make sense of it. Was it random? Was I supposed to be there? That stuff shouldn’t happen! But in the end it didn’t matter…I don’t know why it happened, and I don’t why I was there or why his life was cut short.

It was not until a couple of days later that I got a call. A woman was sobbing on the other end of the phone. Immediately it was clear that it was the mother of the man. He had not been much older than myself, maybe 35 or so. The woman asked for me and I told her that I was with her son in his final moments. “He went calmly,” I explained, “If he was in a lot of pain, he did not show it.”
She sounded relieved. But she followed, “He was not a good man, I loved him, he was my only son, but he was not a good man.” She continued to sob on the end of the phone.

Maybe what I said then had been inside me along, maybe it was the “point” I was trying to get out of this experience…trying to somehow take a violent death, coupled with the most intense emotions I had ever felt – with a stranger no less – into some logical linear reason.

“In my arms, that day, he was a good man. The past didn’t matter. He deserved to have someone show him love, and I believe he felt he received it.”

The sobbing deepened on the other end of the phone. It was several minutes before the mother was able to speak again. “He was never well liked. Always an outcast, and didn’t make friends easily. Maybe the life he chose just made that aspect of himself easier accept.”

I didn’t know.

After a few more moments of the sobbing she whimpered into the phone “I did love him…I…I…I tried to love him.” There was a pause and then the phone went dead.

I stood there with the receiver to my ear for a long time. It wasn’t as if there was a cosmic revelation coming to me but I could not help but feel that this man, John, who showed and received so little love throughout his life, would teach me the greatest aspects of love I could hope to learn.

John’s life was his own, but it impacted me, and it impacted many others. It was not until that experience that I fully embraced that we are all different, we all have different paths, and without those different paths, there would be nothing. The experience with John showed me that the past does not matter. It is this moment that counts, and we can choose do our own good by it, and or we can use the past to shield ourselves from it.

In those final moments, that man placed himself out there, he made himself vulnerable to rebuke in the last moments of his life. He reached out for love one last time, maybe as he had many times before but never received it, but this time he did.

If this man had not been about die, would I have shown him the same love? Would he still be deserving of love? The opportunities I pass up, and the ones I seize every day to show compassion are no different than this. The scene may not be as dramatic, but the emotions and impact are real, and they matter. They sculpt who we are, and what others might become.

John taught me that good and bad, like everything else, share a unity. One exists in concert with the other. John, by the path of his life, gave me a gift and he will never know how immense it is…well… he may know now. The gift was an understanding – I cannot judge anyone for the path they have chosen; this world is just too complex for that. Those that we may view as troublesome, problems, or negative forces, are often our greatest teachers through experience. The world can change in an instant, so can others, and so can we if we just choose to focus on the present moment and do good by it.

Maybe it is true, the bad needs to be there for the good to exist also, but it would seem to me that after I have accepted that, since I still have to act anyway, some good may as well come from those actions.

Maybe, John’s path was as noble as the “saints”…more noble even. He took a low road, a road of ultimate rebuke and through it taught me a valuable lesson. That is only speculation, I knew that man only for a moment, and all I can really, really, truly know about him (not what my imagination conjures up) is that he was another human being, just like the rest of us, trying to make sense of the world in the only he could at each moment in time.

I can’t say for sure if I had an impact on that man in the last moments of his life. I like to think that I did. But I do know that he had a major impact on me.

So to John, know this, that if you did nothing else good in your life, you did good by me, and even though through a seemingly tragic experience know that your life was not a waste. No one’s is. Because of you I was able to show love that up till that point I had bottled up…and I was able to share it with someone who needed it. You were someone who and was willing to go out on limb, lay it out there and hope for a little compassion even in the final moments of what you considered a failed life….

John, goodbye my friend.

~Cory Mitchell