Of me and mortality

About a week ago I was driving myself home when my car was hit by a speeding taxi as I was waiting to do a U-turn. Though the damage was not too extensive to either car or myself – even though both of us were rattled and somewhat bruised and battered around the edges – the incident left me with a feeling of shock and, in some strange way, a new consciousness of my own mortality. In the few seconds that it took for the impact to be felt by all senses, from touch and sound to sight and, finally, outrage and anger, I felt somehow dissociated, as if it was happening to someone else, and that I was just watching from somewhere far above myself and the scene in general. It was only a couple of days later, when the aches and pains and consequences started making themselves felt rather painfully, that I realised just how much could have happened – to me, to the car and to whoever was involved with me.

But no one will let me say anything about it. My friends brush it off, as if it were nothing – which, honestly, is true – though a couple of them are obviously concerned about my well-being. Father seemed more concerned with the damage to the front bumper and number plate than to his only chicklet, who was not just shaken, but stirred into feeling fragile and needy. And my driver was torn between trying to figure out how to make his chariot look better and how far he could go in teasing me about being a typical woman driver who should get out from behind the wheel and stop being a hazard to myself and to the public at large.

For some strange reason, I – and so many others who have been in fairly minor scrapes like this one – need to know the answer to that eternal question: “What if I had died?” It may be macabre, ghoulish or any one of those wonderfully nasty words, but it is something that, if answered, will settle a lot of unwanted and unneeded mental discombobulation. Maybe it is a matter of ego, the assurance that I am important to those who are important to me. I do know what people will say. Father will shrug and ask what he could do apart from just accept it. One close buddy will say “Shut up, idiot!”, while another will tell me “I really don’t want to talk about it.” And a third will insist that he will be upset but that he will have nothing to be upset about, since nothing will happen to me. And the question remains: What if…?

Why is it that people need to know how others will feel if they died unexpectedly? All my friends – and a rather bloodthirsty lot they seem to be – have asked me this at one stage or another in our relationship, and I am always firm about it; I will indeed miss them and be most upset if they left me, but since this is a theoretical discussion, we do not need to go too far with it, right? Am I being squeamish or do I believe by avoiding the issue I will make sure that it does not happen? And what about me? Am I so sure that I may go through an occasional bump or two, but that nothing serious will happen to me? That I have a healthy set of responsibilities to handle and cannot possibly leave them to anyone else, so need to stick around? Or is it that my stars and my palm have said that I will be on this earth in my mortal form for some years yet, so the question is not even relevant?

Whatever the case, I am healing from this particular bump fairly quickly. So is the car. But I still need to know…