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My mother often told me that life is a series of close calls, near misses, second-by-second adjustments to a personal doomsday clock. She was seven months pregnant with me when she got rear-ended on the 405, spun into the car in front of her and nearly got trapped in a car fire. A woman pulled her from the front seat and wiped the blood off her forehead. “My baby! My baby! My baby!” my mother screamed. Her baby was fine. Her Camry was totaled.

Five years later my vision turned purple when a peppermint from dinner lodged itself neatly in my windpipe as I sat in the car seat. Suspicious of my silence, my mother pulled over on the side of the road and performed the Heimlich maneuver, bruising my rib. 

When I was eighteen, the month before I moved away for school, the glass door to our shower shattered on me as I pulled it closed. Maybe I yanked it too hard. I still don’t know what happened. It made an awful noise that I must have made worse with my screaming. The metal handle and the glass shards and my blood pooled into a gory mixture at my feet. My mother came running to me, kicked down the door that I had locked. I wailed because I couldn’t tell how deep the glass had cut me. Maybe I had ruptured an artery and this would be her last image of me: a bloody daughter shivering, covering my privates with my hands. She hadn’t seen me naked in a decade. She didn’t know about the stick and poke tattoo under my left breast. My mother helped me out of the tub, and we washed out and bandaged all my shallow wounds. I still have a scar running up the inside of my thigh where the glass unzipped me.

In college: I drank too much and got my stomach pumped, I walked alone up the same exact street thirty minutes before that poor freshman was robbed, I swam in rivers with high bacteria levels, I called a hotline a couple weeks after my mother’s funeral. 

All these close calls, but I only ever died once. I was driving with Jessie asleep in the passenger seat beside me. I didn’t see it coming: a pick-up truck operated by a contractor who had two cell phones. He was taking a conference call on one and playing Candy Crush with the other. The doctors said my heart stopped beating. 

Since the accident, Jessie says I’m different. I’m still here, but there’s less of me, they said one night over dinner. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, pushing noodles around with my spoon. “Recovery has been difficult.”

Recovery is mental as much as physical, which is why Jessie and my therapist have been encouraging me to practice gratitude. Each night I recite a list of what I’m thankful for over and over like a prayer or a talisman. Over time, this orientation of appreciation will help me to stay present. It will help me to be a better partner. It will help me to become the sort of person who focuses on what I have instead of what’s been taken.

I’m grateful to be alive. I’m grateful that Jessie survived too. I’m grateful that I met Jessie, and I’m grateful for their patience and forgiveness. I’m grateful for that woman who sprinted from her car to perform CPR on me. I’m grateful for the settlement. I’m grateful for my physical therapist. 

I never told Jessie that when I was dead, I saw my mother. A little older, the way she was supposed to look by now. Jessie was there too, and we had a baby. We all lived in a small house in the suburbs together. My mother watched our baby on Saturday mornings and whenever the two of us needed to get away for a week. She and Jessie got along well. They gardened together and gossiped about me. We apologized to each other whenever necessary. I felt that we were all happy in a realistic way. Now I know that there’s a universe where we all grow old together; it’s just not the one I woke up in.