The Current Threw Me and My Grandfather Was Waiting

I have been an electrician for twenty years and I will tell you the truth that we do not say to homeowners: the ones who die are usually the experienced ones, the ones who got comfortable. I got comfortable. I told myself a circuit was dead that I had not personally locked out, and it was not dead, and it reached out and took me.

There is no memory of the shock itself. There rarely is. One instant I had a hand on the panel and the next there was no panel, no ladder, no job site, only a stillness so complete it had a kind of sound to it, a low steady hum that was not the electricity, that was something underneath everything.

I was not afraid. I have tried to explain to my wife how a man can be lying dead on a plywood floor with his heart stopped and feel no fear, and the best I can do is say that fear is a body thing, and I was not in my body anymore. I was above it and off to the side, and I watched my apprentice, a kid of twenty-two, drop to his knees beside me and start pushing on my chest and shouting for someone to call it in. Good kid. He did everything right. I felt proud of him, which is a strange thing to feel about the person trying to restart your corpse.

Then the job site went dim and my life came up around me, all of it, and it did not hurt. I was a boy fishing off a dock with my grandfather, and I felt again exactly how much I trusted him. I was seventeen and I lied to my father about something small and I felt, from his side, how it chipped at him. I was thirty and my wife said yes and I felt her whole heart open, felt it as if it were mine. Everything I had done, kind and unkind, I felt from the other end of it, and there was no judge, only the plain clean truth of what my life had actually been.