Simon Lewis - Rise and Shine: The Extraordinary Story of One Mans Journey from Near Death to Full Recovery

Theyre funny things, accidents, said Eeyore.
You never have them til youre having them.

A.A. Milne,
The House at Pooh Corner

L ike me to show you the Music Center presidents new home? Marcy asked with her bright laugh.

We had met a year and a half before, separately invited to a weekend party at Lake Tahoe, and Marcy was my passenger. When our car reached Magic Mountain on the return trip, I asked her for a date, and after a happy courtship, proposed in her hometown of Phoenix. Married for five brilliant months, tonight was to celebrate our first new car, which we picked up two days before from the Infiniti dealer. My bride was the marketing director for the Music Center, the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, and her bosss new home nearby was an architectural sight.

Lets take a look after dinner, I suggested, hungry after a day in class with USCs graduate film students.

We were headed west on Beverly Boulevard, a major six-lane road that crosses L.A., a few blocks from Farfalle, the restaurant where I threw Marcy a surprise birthday party. Her friends serenaded her from the balcony above the back dining patio, and it was our favorite since.

You never get to make the two decisions of real importance in your life: how you arrived, and when you will leave. We always die too soon or too late, our life complete at that moment. And in that moment, Marcy left. A disabling or fatal injury strikes someone in America every two seconds. On film and television, death usually involves suspense. Some appropriate dialogue, a ticking clock, or an assassin in the shadows as music and editing slowly build to climax. But in real life, theres no foreshadowing, no hint of whats to come. We live our lives in that single moment in which the present becomes our past, perhaps why we call it the present, for there are infinite possibilities within every moment it gives us.

If I paused to tighten my shoelaces before I left USC to collect my wife from work, we would have been twenty feet back and missed the speeding bullet headed toward us. If we caught one more red light on our route, we would have reached our restaurant safely. But in that moment, on that day, I was behind the wheel of a brand new four-door Infiniti, as we drove along a typically busy thoroughfare, those few short blocks from Farfalle.