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.

But a farmer had seen me go through. That is the part that makes my grandmother say resurrection. He and two others got a ladder and a rope out onto the ice, and they fished the pond in the cold for what turned out to be forty minutes, and when they pulled me up I was blue and I had no pulse and by every ordinary rule I was gone. But the cold that nearly killed me had also slowed everything down, had held my brain in a kind of amber, and when they got me to the hospital and warmed me and worked on me, my heart, after all that time, started again.

I felt the coming back as a hand. That is the only way I can say it. In the tunnel, just as I was about to reach the light, a warm hand closed around mine and pulled, firm and sure, back the way I had come, and I did not want to go but the hand did not ask. And then there was pain and light and noise and a nurse crying and my mother's face broken open with hope.

I am thirty-four now. I have a brother I am never unkind to. I have a life I do not take for granted, not for one single day, because I spent forty minutes on the other side of the ice and came back to it. People ask if I am afraid of dying. I tell them the truth. I saw where the tunnel goes. There is a light there, and it is warm, and my dog is waiting in it, and one day I will finish the walk I started at twelve. But not yet. There is too much here that I came home for.