When I was 26, I traveled to the upper peninsula of Michigan with my boyfriend to see the fall colors, but we never saw them. An hour after landing at the airport, while driving at the highway speed of 60 mph, a car crossed the center line and crashed into us.
I tried to move my legs to get out of the car, but they were lifeless. I then noticed the sharp pain in my back and realized I had no feeling from the waist down. My back was broken, my spinal cord displaced by 40 degrees. Eventually, I was airlifted to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where the doctors gave me less than a five percent chance of ever walking again.
We all have defining stories that shape our lives. For me, it wasn’t the collision. It was something a nurse whispered before the air ambulance arrived. I was terrified. I knew my back was broken—and I was in excruciating pain.
She whispered: “Imagine you’re floating on a cloud.”
So, I closed my eyes and imagined I was floating on a light, soft cloud…
I don’t know if the nurse was an angel who came to bring me a message, but I once heard an interview with the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo, who said, “When we humans have more than we can bear, the Gods take pity on us and change us into something else.” In those excruciating minutes after the collision, the Gods took pity on me, and I became “something else.” I imagined the lightness of a cloud and I shifted into being a cloud.
This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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