A Bee Sting Nearly Ended Me and I Saw Everything

I had been stung by bees before. Two, three times over the years, a swollen thumb, nothing more. So when one caught me on the neck while I was deadheading the roses, I swore, I flicked it away, and I went back to my roses. That was the near miss that almost was not a miss at all.

Within a few minutes my lips felt too big for my face. My throat began to narrow, like a hand slowly closing a tap. I got myself to the kitchen and I could not make my mouth form the numbers on the phone. My husband found me on the floor, and he is the reason I am here to type this, because he moved faster than I have ever seen a man move. But before the ambulance came, and while my airway was closing to a straw and then to nothing, I left.

I did not float this time, not the way others describe. It was more that the world thinned out, the kitchen going pale and far, and in its place my life rose up around me like a room being furnished from memory. I saw myself as a girl teaching my little sister to read on the porch steps, and I felt her small pride, felt it as my own. I saw a friendship I had let die out of stubbornness, and I felt the loss on both ends of it, the years we did not have. I saw a stranger I had once driven to a bus station in the rain, someone I forgot the same afternoon, and I felt what that lift had meant to her, more than I had ever guessed.

There was no accusing in it. I keep saying that to people because I think they expect the life review to be a courtroom. It is not. It is more like being shown, very tenderly, the true weight of things you did lightly. And the presence that showed me -- I felt it as pure attention, pure care -- let me feel the good I still had left undone. Not as a threat. As an invitation. There is more, it seemed to say. There is so much more you could still give.

I remember thinking of my granddaughter, who was three, and how I had not yet taught her the songs my own grandmother taught me, and how those songs would simply vanish from the earth if I went now. That thought was a rope. I grabbed it. I said, in whatever way you say things there, I want to go back and teach her the songs.

And then there was a needle in my thigh, adrenaline flooding in, and my throat tore itself open with a whoop of air, and the paramedic's face was inches from mine saying stay with me, stay with me. I stayed.

The doctor said I was minutes, maybe less, from an end that a single injection could have prevented, which is the cruel arithmetic of these things. I carry two auto-injectors now, everywhere, always. But I carry something else too.

Last week my granddaughter, now five, sang one of the old songs back to me, all the words in the right order, in her funny high voice, and I had to leave the room so she would not see me weep. Those songs almost died in a garden with me. Instead they are alive in a five-year-old, and they will outlive us both. I keep the roses. I wear gloves now, and long sleeves, and I watch for bees. But I do not resent that little bee. It showed me, for a few unbearable minutes, exactly how much good I still had left to do, and then it let me come back and do it.