I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

How should I have articulated to this policeman that I could sense the urge for violence radiating off the man, like heat off a stone?

We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.

That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it.

devastated by the idea that I would have to go home at the end of the week, and this place, these piazzas, these lives, would carry on without me. I wanted to see everything, go everywhere, never to return home.

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”*

I have never felt pain like it, before or since. It was edgeless, it was perfect, the way the shell of an egg is perfect. And it was invasive, colonising: it sought, I knew, to take me over, to replace me with itself, like a bad spirit, like a fiend.

The experiences you live through while gravely ill take on a near-mystical quality. Fever, pain, medicine, immobility: all these things give you both clarity and also distance, depending on which is riding in the ascendant.