My Next Breath: A Memoir

by Jeremy Renner

I believe that the most important thing in life is to take action. Feel everything, consider everything, read, think, ponder, cogitate—all that’s fine. But you have to do something; you have to commit to action whenever you can.

Snowcats (the name is a mix of “snow” and “cat,” for “caterpillar”) are industrial snow removers, invaluable in ski resorts (my model is a 1988 PistenBully, #901, the brand name a pun on the word “piste”).

Breathing was my great anti-stressor.

THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU. The thought comes to me whole, unfiltered, pure. This is the first of the cheat codes this incident creates for me. THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU.

Stress kills more people on this planet than anything; undue stress on the ice that day would have limited my ability to work through the conundrum of how to breathe.

We are all eternally connected, bound by love and the purest parts of our being, bound by shared history and our innate, unyielding, unchanging energy.

(At the time I didn’t realize that I had fourteen broken ribs, a punctured lung, a sliced liver, a broken and dislocated collarbone, and a broken shoulder, all of which contributed to my being unable to breathe.)

I’m the oldest of seven, and there’s a significant age gap across all the kids, so I grew up changing diapers, the whole bit: elder brother, caregiver, the good kid.

My name is Jeremy Renner. I am a son, a father, a brother, an uncle, a friend. Everything else matters not at all. One breath in, one breath out. One breath in, one breath out. One breath in, one breath out. How long can this go on? I am about to find out.

So yes, as I lay there, crushed, smashed, at the edge of death, I still kept thinking, If I can just release this cramp, and get some ice on my eye, I think I’ll be able to walk back to the house.

The reality for me is different. Every breath is dragged from me as if I must carve it out of stone. A stranger holds a towel to my head; my nephew squats, keeping my arm in position.

My job as an actor has always been about immersing myself into somebody else’s perspective.

To this day I think finding out what you don’t want to do is just as important—maybe more important—than finding what you’re good at.

Information is what squelches fear. We are only afraid of the unknown. Ignorance, or lack of experience, is simply a lack of data. Not all information takes away fear, but any amount of it can dampen the insecurities and the killing unknowns of fear.

Though I’d broken more than thirty bones and lost six quarts of blood (I’d find out the true extent of the injuries only later), an even greater danger to me as the minutes dragged by on the ice was hypothermia—in fact I was probably closer to dying from hypothermia than anything else.

Our experiences on earth have little to zero value after death; our DNA is merely the physical code for our bodies, then atoms to cosmic dust, what we bequeath and leave behind, but our spirit remains eternal, free of disease, or addiction, or pain, or time.

Love, here on earth, is our only currency; it is our energy and our existence, and we take that energy with us into perpetuity.

Dying has left me with this simple but imperative thought: Live your life now.

While I was being flown to the Renown Regional Medical Center in downtown Reno, a Herculean effort of evacuation was just starting at Camp Renner.

I would spend six days in the ICU in Reno, then six more in a Los Angeles hospital. And because I only do things I’m good at, pretty quickly I determined that I would be the worst patient ever.

In the coming weeks and months, I would focus on love and how that love kept getting deeper and deeper across my whole extended family.

Did the love keep me alive, or did I stay alive to love? I don’t think it matters which comes first—chicken, egg, who cares?

There’s one word for all this: hope. Hope is what everyone needs to exist in a state of joy and forward motion. If you don’t have hope, you’re going to die or kill yourself. To keep imagination alive, however weakly, is the essence of living a happy and fulfilled life.