I Shouldn't Be Here

No seriously. I really shouldn’t be here.

To be honest, this last week has been a flood of highly unexpected emotions as I am soon going to be in Italy and I’ll soon be back in Naples with some people that I love so, so much. I'll explain.

Though I’ve had an ongoing relationship with my favorite Neopolitans for years, I haven’t been back since one of my dearest ones left this earth in 2012. (Again, I'll explain.)

And then there’s the fact that 3 weeks ago I should have died. Please forgive the rambling that’s about to ensue, but I promise it eventually has a point. Also, please forgive the raw honestly of this post. It's not really very pretty.

On May 24^th I was in Oregon with my family. I had flown in to surprise my mom for a few days and all of us sisters were in one place for a few days—a very rare thing. We went on a hike that Sunday afternoon and enjoyed some Oregon (terrain and) waterfalls and exhausted ourselves over the course of 6 miles. A dinner later we were on our way home.

Dad was driving us home and the rest of were talking while also living up to our millennial stereotype on our phones. Dad is asthmatic, though nothing too abnormal. He started coughing and asked for one of us to pass him his inhaler as usual. His beloved Jeep was happily loaded with gear and women. I think we were all just really enjoying the rare occasion to be together and the beautiful day we’d had.

But in a moment I heard my sisters yelling at my father and I looked up from the back passenger’s seat to the realization that we were on the wrong side of the road and a vehicle was coming toward us. Providentially, we didn’t hit them but then apparently in the next few moments we hit about 5 mailboxes, nose dove into a ditch which caused us to flip, hitting a telephone pole so hard it was irreparably splintered and then we landed sideways into a ditch. (In the interest of full disclosure, the events happened so fast that I can’t say definitively that what I just described was really what happened. No one knows, we've just tried to put it all together.)

The pictures are really hard to look at. I remember sitting in the back passenger’s seat and wondering if my mother had just died sitting right next to me. I’ll never forget hearing my sister’s voice—the first to break through the deafening split-second of silence and watching her pull my dad out of his daze and shouting at us all to “get out of the car!” And then I heard my other sister and then my mom and watched my dad crawl out the mysteriously broken (though none of us got cut) and available sunroof and then followed suit. We then struggled to get my mom out because she had been injured--we later found out it was her clavicle. Thank God, there were so many people that stopped to help. One man checked my ashen mother over to for injuries and called an ambulance. Somehow I had enough consciousness to call my brothers. It’s all kind of hazy, but we rode the he hospital in an ambulance. Seeing my mom in a stretcher wasn’t something I’d ever really imagined before. You just don’t think about that kind of thing until it happens. I hope it never does again.

But replaying this whole thing over and over again grows in me an increasing sense of recognition that there’s no way I should be here right now. Much less all five of us walked away from the scene. I was not only spared my life, but 4 of the most important people to me are also still in my life. There's no non-Divine explanation. None.

Dad's doctor said that what probably happened was that when he took his inhaler, due to the big meal he had just eaten his blood pressure probably dropped drastically after his medication dosed and he blacked out. My Dad has no memory of what happened, and the circumstances that brought about the accident were in no way a result of negligence on anyone's part. This was the definition of a freak accident.

A couple of days later my dad when to retrieve our belongings from the vehicle. He brought back pictures and there a couple of them I can’t get out of my head.

First, my sister Jami who was in the front seat was clearly protected by the airbag, because the windshield was caved in on her side, though not completely broken through. Thank God that windshield didn't go any further.

Then there’s this picture of my seat. I remember leaning forward and the flash of a story went through my mind. I remembered hearing a boy tell a story once of a car crash he’d been in and how it stuck in his mind that the last word he heard his mother say was “Jesus.” I remember thinking that I wanted that to be my last word but also I remember—almost against my will—uttering further…”Jesus save us” and my mother right next to me responding “Yes, Lord, protect us.”

I had curled up forward into a ball while praying, leaning toward the front seat when the car finally stopped flipping. It turns out it was that fetal position that made the moment not fatal. It seems that the telephone pole impact was right above my head, and it caved in the body of the Jeep. Literally inches from the back of my head.

I think until now I didn’t really understand what people meant when they described things they experienced as “chilling.” Now I get it. It was (and still is, kind of) really hard to look at that picture. I actually got cold when I first saw it.

I guess the hardest part is: the acceptance of grace in the fact that I’m still here. That God has some reason for that. Or is it grace? A part of me would have been really glad to go Home. A huge part of me, actually. But, WHY? 

And here's the hardest question right now: Why am I still here and Marco Gemma isn’t???

Marco was one of those people that grabbed you. There was something about him that saw to the core of who you were and still loved you. He was an incredible, extraordinarily special individual. To this day I cannot put my finger on any other solid reason for this but his immense and lifestyle permeating love for God. I spent a solid summer with him in 2005 at the Mulino camp in Caserta, Italy, where I stayed with the Pund family, my aunt, uncle and a few cousins for about 3 months to help renovate a normally bustling summer camp that had been flooded the winter before. Marco came to help because he wanted to “serve God” with his summer. For as much as I love and use words, I don’t really have any to describe the unique little spot that Marco carved for himself in my American heart. It’s really hard to write this. It was Marco that helped my Italian get off the ground. It was Marco that made me think about my dreams and what I really wanted in my life—according to how God made me—and it was really probably Marco that made me consider that the gifting God gave me would not permanently keep me in the States. (Which, I guess, still remains to be seen.)

I was in Italy a couple of times after that summer, and was always missed each other by moments, it seemed. I never got to hear his English, apparently it was impressive.

It was 3 years ago in May. A car accident. I remember getting the news while I was at work and they sent me home—I was a mess. Frankly, I don’t usually have a problem expressing emotions and I really thought that I had properly grieved this terrible thing. But it sure comes in waves, doesn’t it?

I find it interesting that this car accident at home happened right before I’m about to go back to Italy.

I promised all of this has a point. So here it is, though it’s not a very satisfying one: 

I’m struggling with the reasoning behind the fact that I’m still here and Marco isn’t. Facially, it makes exactly no sense at all. I don't get it.

Furthermore, in yet another moment of rawness (please bear with this vulnerable confession), to be honest a lot of the answers that my faith brings to the situation just feel shallow and cliché at the moment, though I know they’re true.

God is good.

God knows why but He doesn’t always tell us.

God sees the whole picture and we don’t.

The list goes on.

A part of me feels guilty that I’m here—even though I have exactly nothing to do with that fact.

It’s funny how you can know all of the things you’re supposed to in your head but still have a terrible war going on in your heart over these questions of fact. It’s astonishing how the heart is so often a much more difficult conquest than the mind.

I get it. In the sense that I get these things in my head. But I’m not gonna lie, I’ve had a lot of tears and trouble sleeping this week. 

I’ll get there. But I’m not there yet. I don't get it yet. I still hear the sound of the car hitting the ground, the mailboxes, the pole…and I can still see Marco sitting in front of me asking what my dream was for my life someday.

It will be good to be back in Italy. I guess I need to go more than I realized.