There are golden days. Days which glow in our memories with a warm amber; days that etch themselves onto our hearts and pump life through our bodies; days that, when we close our eyes, we can see flash before us, like photo slides in old projectors.
The day I almost died was one of those days. Almost.
I can close my eyes and picture my wife, Aislinn, smiling over our morning coffee. She’s having decaf because she’s pregnant. The summer sun is pouring in on horizontal stripes over the coffee table, and birdsong floats in through the open windows.
Church starts soon, so my wife is doing her hair and makeup, and our bathroom is warm from plugged in straighteners or curlers or something—I don’t know. I’m sipping at my second cup of coffee, and then it’s time to go. She’s in a blue-and-white striped linen dress. You can see the bump of her belly, our little guy, and we’re walking out of our apartment to the car, smiling, hand in hand.
Idyllic. Postcard kind of stuff.
Church is that summer slow: people on vacations, shorter sermon, everyone trying to keep cool. It’s one of those services you take for granted, normal and ordinary and routine, and when it’s done, we’re off for lunch. Aislinn has a craving for pad thai, and our favorite place in the city is on the water.
When I close my eyes, the photo slide flashes, and I can see my wife’s bright blue eyes. I can see her hair falling over her shoulders in little waves. There are plants hanging on the patio, and the summer heat loosens the air-conditioned tightness of our skin, our plates of noodles steaming. And with my eyes closed, I can hear our laughter as we talk, dream, and imagine what it’ll be like to have our first child, to be a mom and dad.
Aislinn is getting that late first-trimester sleepy, so when we’re done with our lunch, we drive home. She takes a nap, and I read. I watch afternoon fall into evening in the stretching shadows of the trees outside; the warm honeys of late day fill the room.
Aislinn wakes, and as we settle down to watch a movie, we start kissing—the joy of everything that life is, that it might be, expressed with our lips and bodies. I stand up, taking off my shirt, but then I have to clear my throat. I feel something on my tongue. I reach in, and when I pull my fingers away, they’re covered in blood.
My wife looks at me and her eyes widen. I run to the bathroom and cough into the sink, frothy red pouring from my mouth.
“Call 911!” I sputter. She’s already dialing.
I scramble for the waste bin, and my wife tells me no ambulances are available.
We run out of the apartment to our car, me cradling the garbage can, coughing and spitting phlegm and clots and bright red. I can smell the tin. And my wife drives, praying out loud, “Oh God, please, no …”
She runs a red, horn blaring, and when we get to the emergency room, she rushes inside, one of my oversize shirts draping her, telling a nurse we need a doctor. I’m still coughing, and the bin has a pint in it.
They wheel me into a room, and I can hear them over my spitting, over the beeps of machines, calling to rush the emergency doc to my bay. While we’re waiting, my wife has her hand on my head and shoulder, and she’s praying, crying, the bump of her belly brushing my arm.
A nurse asks me questions about the pain, my family history, and puts an IV in. I’m rushed to a CT scan, and they send my blood away to be tested. They take an x-ray, and they tell me they’ll update me on the results.
And then we wait, the two of us. Well, three, if you count the baby.
There are days, unforgettable days, etched into our bodies and minds. This was one of those days.
We wait there, in that chasm between joy and despair, between the golden hope of a firstborn son and the dark shadows of the valley of death. And we wonder why.
O God, why?
I pray, whispering, as I walk to the bathroom—every breath a reminder that something is wrong, every cough still streaked with blood.
Lord, I don’t want to die. Inhale. I want to see my son. Exhale.
The next few days are a blur. My mom flies out, and I go through every test, trying to find some diagnosis. I have scans and procedures and have to be intubated, then put on a ventilator.
“You’re scheduled for an angiogram,” my pulmonologist tells me, “to map out the artery systems in your lungs.”
That first angiogram is for the mapping. The next three are to save my life.
I have to be awake for these surgeries. They cut into my femoral artery and send a catheter up, and when they get all the way into my lungs—to the arteries that burst—they tell me to hold my breath while they embolize the ruptures. I have to be awake because, as it turns out, you can drown in your own blood.
Aislinn stays with me every night, and every night we weep and pray for an answer—a diagnosis, some pathway forward, a reason why.
Lots of things fall into place when you face death. All these things at the edges of life—muddled questions, doubts and fears, hopes and dreams—they crystallize. Everything gets illuminated by a clarity that only desperation brings.
I stare at my wife as she naps because she was up all night, and I think about all that we wanted out of life—and how fleeting it all is, a breath in the wind.
And Jesus speaks to me there on that bed, telling me I’ve been blind to how much I’ve needed him.
Right now, I think, my every breath depends on you, and I might not get another one. But a month ago, I needed you just the same. And there, at the edge of life and death, clarity sets in.
Each day, 34 years at that point, was a gift—whether I realized it or not, whether I gave thanks for it or not. With my eyes closed, with the sound of death’s tattered robes billowing, all that really matters is how much I need Jesus.
Hot tears run rivers down my face, and I pray for a miracle.
Aislinn sits up. She looks at me with sad eyes and reaches for my hand. There’s no trumpet sound, no opened heavens, no audible voice, but in that moment, there’s a bit of calm. In between the beeps of the monitors, Aislinn and I feel some semblance of rest. There are no answers, no diagnoses, no promise that things will get easier—only a peace that passes understanding.
I couldn’t place it then, but I can now. Jesus healed a blindness in me that day while I lay dying. I had been unable to see the beautiful, ordinary, everyday gift of life. While my outward body was wasting away, inwardly, I was being renewed. New eyes. I passed through blindness to the hazy cloud; to a glass, dimly. And one day, I will see face to face.
I was in that hospital for 21 days. I lost over two liters of blood and almost died three times. At the end of those three weeks, I signed my release papers.
It’s been on my mind every day since then that my life is a gift from Jesus, one I might not have had—a gift enjoyed most deeply in relationship with the giver.
And on my mind every day, when life feels boring, or I lose my temper, or I have some excuse for apathy and cynicism, I remember: To live is Christ. If I remain in the body, then all I have is by him and for him.
If I close my eyes, even now, there’s a flash of a warm August sun. I’m holding my wife’s hand, and we’re walking together out the sliding doors of the hospital.
Our car pulls up to take us home. And my wife and I, we drive off together, back into a holy, ordinary life.
Idyllic. Postcard kind of stuff.
Josh Nadeau is an artist and writer from the West Coast of Canada. He writes at Every Day Saints and is the author of Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Every Day Saints.
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