– by Miriam Da Ponte
A friend of mine once confessed to me, “I’m not saying I’m going to drive my car into a post
myself, one of these days. But if I did get into a car accident and don’t make it? I’d be happy to go, that’s for sure.”
Sometimes I think of when I was ten years old, and my dad left the house in the middle of the night to catch the flight that would take him to see my grandfather for the last time. I soon found out he passed while my dad was still in the air, unreachable. That left me with a grudge. Other times I remember how my mother and brother once spent their flight layover in Istanbul together, the December I turned twelve, and took a picture by the German Fountain in Sultanahmet square. One week later, a bomb went off where they had stood, killing ten innocents. That left me with a question.
Although it is usually not something I can help, I often recall the moment I looked over at my
brother from the passenger seat of the car: eyes shut, head hanging over the wheel, dead
weight of his right foot resting on the accelerator, while traffic before us came to a standstill. That left me without a car. It also left me with a second chance.
Yesterday, I did not know what to think after I reminded my youngest brother to say his daily
prayer for the healing of a man in Ireland my mother knew, a father of five in need of an
operation. He came back to my room a few moments later to tell me he had already died. That left me with a doubt.
That same friend recently cautioned me, I should say, that if things get really bad again, well
maybe he will take matters into his own hands. Take his life into his own hands. Take his life–. He’s told me about the two times he’s tried, and I’m not calling him a liar in any way, but I don’t believe him. I never have. I can’t. I don’t know how to believe him because I don’t know how to believe that I would sit up from my bed, walk out to the kitchen in the middle of the night, and head for the knife in the drawer, to see my mortality pour out of my wrists and onto the cold floor tile at last. Death at the hands of chance, at the hands of fate, at the hands of circumstance, this I might begin to understand. But death at my own hands? I was once asked this question.
