Collapse without conclusion

 By request, I'm going to repeat here a personal story which I recently emailed to my sisters.

With only a couple of spelling and punctuation tweaks, repeated here exactly as written therein.

Also, I forgot to recount a very interesting experience that I had the Thursday before Christmas. I had volunteered to deliver treats to Sara's assigned sisters, but had procrastinated. It involved a cookie which was going stale, brooking no further delay, so out I went into the cold snowy night. The previous night had been clear and dry and the next one would probably be so too, but, as our Dad used to say, I had made my own bed, so now I had to sleep in it.

After leaving the first bag on a doorstep, having very carefully climbed three concrete steps, I walked the block to the final delivery point, dreading the two flights of three or four concrete steps each, without a guardrail, that awaited me there.

The paved back alley was slippery, but not as much as the sidewalk later, so I was walking just as carefully as I could. Suddenly, my feet went out from under me and I landed flat on my back. A perfect pratfall. That's how I reconstruct what happened. What it felt like was this. One moment I was making my way with great care along a slippery sidewalk with a slight downward slope. The next moment, something hit me very hard right in the middle of my back. Just as quickly my perspective was different. No longer was I looking down the length of the sidewalk and the two or three houses which separated me from those flights of steps. Instead, I was looking straight up into the dark sky.

Also, I noted curiously, because I was mentally totally calm, that my body had stopped breathing. It was the oddest thing. Not like holding your breath not breathing. Just not breathing. And, it seemed to not be inclined to breathe ever again. Very odd. Making a quick decision, I forced a shallow breath, an unfamiliar action, not something that I often have to do. It hurt like crazy, but that got things going again, and it got less painful. The back on the other hand just ached. 

My fur hat had projected itself three or four feet above where the head had landed, and the bag of goodies was just at the fingertips of my left hand. I carefully and gingerly sat up, collected the hat and package, and got to my feet. Then walked even more carefully, to the foot of the steps. So much time passed going up those steps, one at a time, then another and so on. At the door, I found a place for the bag and set it there, then turned and looked down to the sidewalk. It seemed a mile away. What to do? Ring the doorbell and ask for help? Not my nature. I could do it. Again, one step after another, but terrifying on the way down. Whew, the sidewalk, the slippery sidewalk. Felt unaccountably good to be there again.

Took a different way home, staying level, walking with such exaggerated care that when I reached the corner facing a very slight incline, that I feared, a car stopped. The driver reached over to open the passenger door and asked, "Are you okay?" I told him that I had fallen (using far fewer words that you have slogged through to get here, gentle reader), and he offered me a lift. I accepted gratefully, and painfully bent my body into the shape required by a small car, that normally I wouldn't have even given a thought to. He drove me the thirty or forty feet to the door into our garage. I wasn't going to risk the sidewalk to our front door. And the front steps!

I was so happy to be home. To be alive! You don't think about how good it is to be home until you think you might not see it again.

Sara gave me Bowenwork, and in a couple of days everything was back to normal, and I have mostly taken my blessings completely for granted since. How quickly we forget our troubles.

 Re-reading, I notice wryly that I couldn't resist pulling a moral at the end of the story. I suppose that even true stories and not just fables can be ended in such a way.

When I say, "the end of the story," I don't mean "conclusion." I'm still walking (well, at the moment of this writing sitting down actually, but still breathing).

A factual error (that wouldn't matter), and some omissions. The bag of treats fell into the gutter, so that it was near the end of my right fingertips. I was not carrying my cell phone. In fact my pockets were completely empty, as I had left home quickly for just a couple of minutes and would be within a block of home for the duration of a quick errand. So, not carrying any identification either. Had I expired, who knows how long it might have been before the body was discovered, identified, and returned home horizontally?

Further explanation. Because the panic of a declared pandemic had hit just a few days before our move into this home, we don't know our neighbors. And, symmetrically, they don't know us.

We live at the base of Y Mountain to our East, so the slope is generally down to the West in this bird's eye view (courtesy of a satellite and Google Maps, with annotations added in Skitch):

The green arrow points to the starting and ending point of the journey: the man door into our garage, on the lower level of our home (the front door (between the trees) is on the floor above, so one story higher). The red marker points at the house with the scary steps. The blue dots show the first leg of the journey, which Google Maps said was, "Mostly flat" and estimated at three minutes. Had all gone well, the whole errand would have been completed in well under ten minutes, which is why I didn't take time to load my pockets.

The return leg of the journey was the longer way back around the block* and the orange arrow points to the location where a gentle upward slope begins, and where the kind and perceptive driver offered me a lift. A lift. Laughing now at the thought of accepting a lift for such a short distance! He dropped me off in the alley right by the green arrow, seeming a little surprised himself at the shortness of the ride. But I was so grateful, since he had allowed me to avoid a slippery slope.

It may have been a collapse to the ground, but was not the conclusion of my life.

A collapse without conclusion.

Notes:

"... Sara's assigned sisters." We are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and minister by assignment to others in our Ward**. Normally, you pretty much know everyone in your ward (per Dunbar's number) but because of the isolation of lockdown, today we only know those we are assigned to know.

"Sara gave me Bowenwork," refers to a healing modality which my dear wife has learned (and in which she is certified) which is more effective the earlier it is given after an accident.

*As you can see, "the block" is not block-shaped, nor does the back alley (our 720 North "street") bisect it.

**The larger half of our block was just last Sunday excised from our Ward and assigned to another, non-contiguous Ward some distance away. It is now an island of sorts, ward-wise. And one of the few people we had met, who moved from the island of Oahu, lives therein. So they're once again on/in an island.

"The larger half" haha! an oxymoron, right? One half, by definition just cannot be larger than the other half. Nor can there be more than two of them, but that is a different joke. By "half" was meant one part of the block as cut off by the back alley, which in a normal block would divide it into two equally-sized halves. How flexible is the human mind! (Did you see the moral there?)

[added August 10, 2021] Another experience falling down while walking. More about walking. More near death experiences, one of them while walking.