One single moment

What can happen in a single moment that affects your life profoundly?

An accident? A crime? Winning the lottery? Love at first sight?

Last Wednesday, my husband David came home and found me sprawled on the floor, unconscious, in a pool of blood.

I had fallen headfirst down the stairs and cracked my head open.

He yelled at me to wake up! then scooped me up to St. Michael’s Hospital where a doctor stitched up my head. I hadn’t looked at the floor or a mirror during all this, so when the doctor asked how much I bled, I couldn’t say. Dave answered, saying, “It was like ‘Law & Order’ blood.”

Sure enough, when I got home and looked at my beautiful 120-year-old floor, I saw that it was covered in my blood, just like my hair, my face, my shirt, and my coat. There was a trail of blood leading down the steps to the garage. There was blood on the headrest of my car too.

The last thing I remember is that the towels weren’t dry yet and I was walking back downstairs to my kitchen. I’d gone to check the laundry.

When we got home from the hospital and climbed the steps to go to bed, we discovered my slippers on the landing, which must have flown off as I flew down the stairs, and right next to them was a little purple cat toy.

The accident made me wonder what might have happened if I fell an inch in another direction, or if my neck snapped. I could be paralyzed or even dead. All because I went upstairs to check on my laundry. Such a banal way to go. I didn’t think I was risking my life walking down the stairs.

I must have an angel on my shoulder and so in a strange way, despite the stitches in my head and a cracked rib, I am very grateful for the experience. It has reminded me that anything can happen in a moment.

I’m also grateful that I lived so the coroner wasn’t called in to determine, “death by cat toy.” Looking down from heaven or up from that other place, I would have died all over again from the humiliation of being named a Darwin Award winner.

Writer C.S. Lewis once said, “The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.”