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.

And then my grandfather was there. Fifteen years in the ground and there he was, in his flannel shirt, younger than when he died, and he smelled like pipe smoke and river water and he took me by the arm the way he used to when I was small and about to do something foolish. He did not scold. He just looked at me with those pale eyes and I heard him, not with my ears, say: not today, boy. You have got people. Go on back now.

I did not argue with my grandfather in life and I did not argue with him there. I felt myself pulled backward and down, fast, and the hum rose into a roar, and the roar became my apprentice's voice, and the plywood floor came up hard under me, and my chest was on fire, and I was alive, coughing, blinking at a circle of scared faces.

The paramedics said my heart had stopped and the CPR brought it back. They said I was lucky my apprentice knew what he was doing. I bought that kid dinner every week for a year. I lock out every circuit now, personally, no matter who tells me it is dead, because I have felt what comes after getting comfortable, and I have also felt, thank God, that it is not the end.

My grandfather sent me back to my people, and I have not wasted the time he gave me. I coach my son's team. I take my wife dancing even though I am bad at it. And every fall, when the air smells like woodsmoke, I think about a flannel shirt and pale eyes and a voice saying not today, boy, and I say back to him, quietly, thank you, and I mean it with everything the current gave back to me.