Bumps in the road of life keep us awake, thankful

I live for magic moments: those moments that make you realize that life is a gift and ask,… I live for magic moments: those moments that make you realize that life is a gift and ask, “What the hell have you been doing wasting it away?”

Nowadays, I tend to experience these moments quite often. I’m usually the one sitting on the couch, surrounded by tissues, bawling my eyes out because Oprah reunited a Rwandan orphan with her family and then gave every member of the audience a Range Rover. Psychic Sylvia Browne usually makes me cry with every other prediction she gives to the audience members on the Montel Williams Show.

However, it seems that the moments that have the most impact in making us realize that we need to be living instead of just existing often result from moments when life is nearly taken away from us.

I’m terrified of driving in the snow. Having grown up in an area that typically has very snowy winters, driving in the icy weather never bothered me until my friends and I were in an accident our senior year of high school.

We were leaving a friend’s house in the country in a cute, little sports car with tires completely unsuitable for the winter weather. I was in the front passenger seat when we rounded a sharp turn on a back road and started to fishtail out of control. The road didn’t have any guardrails, and one of the last things I remember was a large tree coming right toward my door.

In an attempt to correct the car, the driver jerked the wheel. She only succeeded in turning it so that the tree struck her door, pushing the door in and pinning her hand between it and the wheel. Then the car rolled down the snowy bank into the woods.

I must have blacked out for a second, because when I came to, my seat was broken and the car was upside down, and I thought I had been driving. Thankfully, no one was extremely hurt. However, I was the only one able to get out of the mangled car and up to the road to flag down help.

When my best friend Mike pulled up, he said I was standing on the side of the road in my socks, and my pant legs were soaking wet because I had jumped out of the car and into a stream. I was so shocked, I didn’t feel any of it. It was minus 3 degrees that night.

Talk about a huge wake-up call. That may have been the first time I realized that I wasn’t invincible. And unless you’re Evel Knievel, I think everyone eventually loses the fearlessness they once possessed when they were wee-little.

But does it always take something as serious as personally being placed in a life-or-death situation to make us realize how short life is? Perhaps, but I’d say that having a loved one experience a near-death event can be even more trying because you have absolutely no control over what occurs.

My car accident didn’t scare me nearly as much as my sister’s did. The rest of my family and I were in Alaska when her husband called to tell us that she had flipped her SUV seven times, end to end, on the freeway. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. I was half a world away and unable to be with her. Amazingly, she too was not seriously injured, and the only part of the vehicle that wasn’t completely totaled was the driver’s seat.

My brother-in-law said it shaved at least 10 years off of his life when he drove past the crushed vehicle on the highway on his way to the hospital, not knowing the severity of my sister’s condition.

Shortly thereafter, they shifted priorities and decided to have a child. Career had always come first, but now my niece Ellie does.

My father often says that we have to experience the rough times to appreciate the good. If we didn’t have the bad, sour times, the good times wouldn’t be nearly as sweet.

I think about that every time I pick Ellie up and dance with her in the kitchen. Her name means “light” and “mercy,” and that’s exactly what she is — a light of mercy. She is a constant reminder that life is precious.

So, maybe you’re lucky if you haven’t experienced any bumps in the road of life. But maybe you’re not.

As Robert Schuller said, “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

E-mail Jessica at jrp32@pitt.edu.