Forty Minutes Under the Ice and Yet I Came Home

The doctors call what happened to me a resuscitation. My grandmother calls it a resurrection. I have stopped arguing with either of them, because both are closer to the truth than the word accident, which is the only word I had for it before I went under the ice.

I was twelve. The pond behind our road had frozen early that year and we had been skating on it for a week, and on the eighth day it decided it had held me long enough. There was a crack like a rifle, and then there was no ice under me, only black cold water, and the daylight was a jagged white hole above my head getting smaller as the current under the ice carried me away from it.

I fought at first. Then the cold made a strange bargain with me, and the fighting stopped, and something quiet took its place. The white hole vanished. And where it had been there was a different kind of opening, dark and turning, and at the end of it a light, and I moved toward that light without any swimming at all, because bodies swim and I was no longer only a body.

Time did not work the way it works up here. In what could have been a minute or a hundred years, my whole life came up around me, every bit of it, and I was only twelve and so there was not much, but what there was, I felt from all sides. I felt my little brother's worship of me, and how I had sometimes been unkind to him for the crime of being small. I felt my mother the night I was born. I felt a dog I had loved and lost, and it was there, in the light, whole and glad, and it came to me and I put my face in its fur.

And I felt the light asking me, not in words, whether I had loved, and whether I was ready. I was twelve. I did not fully understand the question, but I understood that I did not have to be afraid, and I was not. It was the safest I have ever felt, before or since, safer than my own bed, safer than my mother's arms. I wanted to walk into it.