The Life I Thought I Was Leaving

It was the final semester of my bachelor’s degree. I still had exams to pass before I could finish the qualification that, for years, had been my definition of making it.

I was crossing the street when a car hit me.

My head struck the windshield. I flipped twice in the air and hit my head again on the ground.

I crawled to safety.

There was no philosophical decision in that movement. I had not evaluated my life or reached a conclusion about whether it was worth continuing. I moved away from danger. Whatever part of me could do that was already doing it before I had caught up with what had happened.

A man held me and told me to sit and relax. He told me I had been hit. As I settled on the ground, the urgency in me quieted. I noticed some pain at the back of my head.

Then a woman came and asked me to recite the Quran and say the shahada. I was confused. The people around me could see the broken windshield and my body on the ground. I understood their reactions as preparation for my death, and began to believe that might be what was happening.

I do not know what any of them knew medically. I know how their concern reached me. Other people were looking at a scene whose seriousness I was still trying to grasp from inside it.

While I was waiting for the ambulance, I took out my phone and recorded every password I could remember.

I thought I was going to lose my memories.

The things I was afraid of losing#

The passwords are the detail that stays strange to me.

In a story written afterward, perhaps I should have thought only about the people I loved, or reviewed the important moments of my life, or discovered a sentence that explained everything. Instead, I worried that my memory was going to disappear, and tried to preserve what I could retrieve from it.

Practical information. Ways back into things. Whatever I could remember at that moment.

There is something almost absurd about trying to secure access to accounts while believing you may be leaving the world. There is also something deeply ordinary about it. I had a problem in front of me, or what I believed was a problem, and I tried to do something about it.

Part of me was still making arrangements for a future.

That matters when I remember the relief too. The experience was not one clean emotion. I crawled away from danger. I worried about forgetting. I took action to preserve information. I also felt that the struggle might finally be over. Those things happened inside the same person.

I cannot make them simpler without changing the memory.

The exam I thought I would no longer have to take#

Help took two hours to arrive, as I remember it. I was waiting for the ambulance and the police, with very little understanding of what was happening inside my body.

The degree was still unfinished.

For me, finishing it had been the goal. The bachelor’s degree was the checkpoint that held the promise of having made it through. The remaining exams stood between the life I had struggled through and the achievement I had been trying to reach.

Then, on the ground, I thought I might never have to take them.

I felt relief.

That sentence is difficult because it can sound like a judgment I am making now about whether I should have lived. It is a description of what I remember feeling then. I had been injured, I was confused, and I believed something enormous was happening. I cannot turn that moment into a reliable explanation of death, or even a complete explanation of myself.

But I cannot pretend I felt only fear because fear would make the story easier to tell.

The possibility of the struggle ending had become entangled with the possibility of my life ending. I had wanted so badly to reach the degree that I had difficulty imagining rest before it. For a moment, the obligation seemed to fall away.

The question I carried afterward was larger than whether I had been afraid.

Why had relief become so difficult to imagine inside the life I was trying to complete?

I had met a limit, not an answer#

What is the meaning of life if death seems like a happier place?

That was one of the questions the accident left in my head. I understand why I asked it. I also hear an assumption inside it that my experience cannot support.

I had not experienced death. I had experienced being alive while expecting it. The calm, the confusion, the concern about memory, the relief from exams and struggle: all of that happened on this side of the question.

Whatever that moment tells me, it tells me something about the life I thought I was leaving.

It does not make that life worthless. It makes the weight I was carrying worth examining. There is a difference between wanting the demands to stop and knowing what it would mean for everything to stop. On the ground, those ideas were close together. Looking back, I need to give them room to separate.

Perhaps what frightened me afterward was how easily a goal could become the condition under which I would finally allow myself to breathe. The degree was supposed to improve my life. Yet I could imagine its demands ending only at completion, or in a situation where completion no longer mattered.

There had to be other ways to make living bearable before the work was done.

Surviving left me with the possibility of finding them.

Becker gave the question another shape#

I loved Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death because it made me question how much of what we build is also a response to knowing we will disappear.

In Becker’s account, people seek significance through cultural systems and projects that promise some continuity beyond an individual lifetime. A person can participate in something that will last, leave a contribution, belong to a story larger than the body that must eventually die. These are often described as immortality projects.

That idea makes ambition uncomfortable to inspect.

I can say that I want to understand something because it is interesting. I can say I want my work to help people. Both can be true, while another wish exists beside them: let something remain that shows I was here.

The book gave me a way to ask about that wish. It did not give me permission to reduce every act of love, research, or creation to one secret motive. I do not know how to divide my own reasons that neatly.

But I recognize the question.

After the accident, did growth become partly a way of answering the possibility of disappearance? Did I want to live more fully, or become harder to erase? How often have those desires felt like the same thing?

There is no honest answer available simply because the explanation sounds convincing. I had curiosity before the accident. I had ambition and pressure before it. An event can change the meaning of those things without having created all of them.

Still, Becker makes me look twice at the promise I sometimes attach to a result. The work might answer a question. It cannot guarantee that my existence will remain important to people who have not been born.

That is more than any paper should have to carry.

The body, the memory, and the name#

When does a person truly die?

Is it when the soul leaves the body? When memory disappears? When nobody says the name again? These questions sound close, but they ask about different things. Faith speaks to one of them. Memory and relationship speak to others. I do not have a single answer that settles all three.

The accident made memory immediate. Before I had time to construct an argument about legacy, I was frightened of losing what I knew. My life was inside those connections: people, words, learned things, the means of recognizing what belonged to me. I reached for a device that could hold something outside my head.

Later, the question can become public. What will remain in other people’s heads? Will there be work to read, an idea to use, a reason to mention my name?

I understand the desire to leave something. I also think it can become another way of withholding value from the life already happening.

If being forgotten makes a life meaningless, then most of the people who made our lives possible are being dismissed. We do not know every name behind the knowledge we use, the care we received, or the habits that protected someone before they could protect us.

An effect can continue after its source has been forgotten.

More importantly, some things matter even when they do not continue. A person was hungry, and somebody fed them. Someone was frightened, and another person stayed. The value was present in what happened between them. It does not need an audience centuries later to become real.

I do not know the names of the people who came toward me after the accident. Their presence still belongs to the story of my life.

I cannot insist that remembrance is the measure of meaning without overlooking them.

The noise became harder to justify#

After the accident, I started cutting the noise. I became more deliberate about my goals, more protective of my time, and less willing to let every demand in my environment become a direction for my life.

I still wonder how much of the hardness in some of my boundaries began there.

Once you have imagined that there may be very little time left, the usual justifications for wasting it can sound different. Keep tolerating this. Keep explaining yourself. Finish the obligations first. You can make the life you want later.

Later begins to sound less dependable.

That does not mean every difficult relationship becomes disposable. Other people’s needs are part of life too. Caring for someone can be exhausting and still be exactly how I want to spend my time. Difficulty alone cannot tell me whether an obligation belongs in my life.

But repeated, unnecessary damage asks for years as though years are something I can replace. An environment can consume attention, confidence, and time while making the request to leave it feel like the unreasonable act.

There were other experiences, other lessons. The accident does not explain every decision that followed it. But remembering the ground makes the idea of waiting indefinitely harder to accept.

I began asking more of the goals themselves. What would pursuing this allow me to understand? What would I make? Would I still want the days required to reach it if nobody were watching? A goal needed more than the approval attached to its completion. It had to deserve the part of my life I would spend on it.

That made some ambitions clearer and some distractions easier to recognize. An argument did not become important because someone insisted on having it. An expectation did not become mine because explaining my refusal was tiring. I could care about people without letting every opinion around me choose what I did next.

Something of me that continues#

I do seek a kind of immortality through myself and my work.

I mean the person I become through learning, the understanding I can pass on, and the work someone else might use after I am no longer there to explain it. I want something of the effort to remain available. An idea another person can build on. A question they can take further. A way of thinking that becomes part of how they see.

Becker’s question does not make that desire disappear. It makes me more honest about it. I want to contribute, and I want some part of me to continue through the contribution. I cannot promise myself permanence. I can choose to make something worth receiving.

But the people I care about are here now.

They cannot live on the promise that I will become available after the next piece of work. If every protected hour goes back into a goal, I have made room for my future and left very little for our present.

So making time for them belongs among the priorities the accident sharpened. Being present has to count while it is happening. I do not want someone to inherit evidence that I cared while remembering that I was always too busy to show it.

There is continuity in those relationships too. What we teach one another, what we make easier, what someone remembers about being in our company. But I do not need to turn every shared moment into a legacy project to justify it. I want the time with them because they are alive and I am alive and we can still have it.

More work is not the only possible answer#

The familiar story after an accident is that someone realizes life is short and resolves to accomplish more.

I can understand that response. A postponed ambition becomes urgent. The possibility of never attempting it becomes harder to bear. A person goes back to work with a different relationship to the clock.

But mortality can be turned into a cruel supervisor.

Time is running out. Why are you resting? Why have you not finished? What will you leave behind? The awareness that should make ordinary life more visible can become another reason to postpone it.

I do not want to survive the belief that I might die and then spend the rest of my life trying to earn the survival.

Research matters to me. Understanding matters. Making something useful can justify a great deal of effort. I do not need to abandon those desires to question what I ask them to prove.

What I want to examine is the point where an interest becomes a condition of self-respect. When a day without progress feels like a day without value. When rest needs a defense. When the unfinished work seems to cancel everything that has already happened.

The degree once carried an enormous amount of my future. There will always be another goal capable of accepting the same burden if I offer it.

Death does not have to be the reason to hurry through all of them.

It can be a reason to notice what I keep asking to wait.

The meaning I can examine from here#

I do not think a person has to solve death before they can find meaning in life. Love, curiosity, responsibility, and pleasure can matter before any philosophical answer arrives. But the possibility of an ending changes the questions I ask about how I am spending the days.

It makes me less willing to accept a future in which I am always preparing to live. It makes the demands around me worth examining, including the ones I have learned to make in my own voice.

That examination is still unfinished.

I cannot give the accident a single moral without leaving something out. My body tried to survive. My mind tried to preserve information. I felt relief at the possibility that the struggle would stop. People came toward me and tried to help in the ways they knew. I waited, confused, while the world continued around a life I thought might be ending.

I am here to remember it.

The part of me who reached for the phone was still concerned with access, with remembering, with what might be needed afterward. I cannot know exactly what he understood. I can see that some part of the future still mattered to him, even then.

I want to take care of that future without making it another examination.

I still want to learn, build, contribute, and understand. I also want room in the life doing those things for relief that does not have to wait for a final result. For people whose company requires no proof. For a day that is allowed to matter while leaving nothing publishable behind.

I do not know what it means for a soul to leave a body. I do not know how long my name will remain after I am gone.

I know that I survived, and that the life I thought I was leaving is still something I can change.

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