What I Learned the Day I Drowned

Who do you love? It shouldn’t take a near-death experience to bring to mind such a basic question.

Shortly after high school graduation, I went swimming in a lake with a small group of friends. A few of us had decided to drive out to a secluded spot in the woods, to a lake we all knew, to celebrate our passage into adulthood. There was a massive floating log tangle out in the middle of the lake, which we swam out to, jumping off it like kids who thought, like most teenagers, that we would live forever. No lifeguard, rescue equipment, boat, or any way to be reached – yet there was no reason to believe anything could go wrong.

That was the day I nearly drowned.

Though I didn’t know it then, this story actually begins a generation before I was born. My mother’s brother, whom I would be named after, had just graduated from high school. His church held a lakeside picnic in honor of all the small farm town’s recent graduates. At that church picnic, during the festivities, my uncle drowned in that lake.

Strangely, though I was his namesake, as I set out for the lake after my own graduation, I had never been told my uncle’s story. Would my life have taken a different course if I had known? I’ll never know. I do know that my own experience at the lake has been a compass point in my life in all the decades since.

After a few hours of jumping off the log tangle, it was time to head for shore. I swam most of the way and then, within sight of the shore, I sank.

I had always been thin and had never floated naturally. After the day’s exertions, I had simply grown too fatigued to make my way to the surface for my next breath. As I sank to the bottom, with more than six feet of water above me, I could see the light of the sun refracting through the flickering waves.

But it wasn’t what I saw that I have thought about for many decades. It was what I heard. As my visual range shrank, I could hear a conversation – and the topic was me. Soft, calm voices.

“He can’t die now. He hasn’t lived yet”

And then, the voices addressed me.

“Who do you love?”

“What have you learned?”

As a seventeen-year-old boy, I had no answer for either question. I hovered near the bottom, as if I were waiting for a verdict. The whole experience felt as if I had opened a wrong door and stepped into a meeting I was not invited to.

I felt the pressure of the water pull me down even more, I reached my arms out and felt a hand grab mine to pull me out. It was my girlfriend. She pulled me to shore, and I staggered to the nearest log and flopped down.

Photograph by Kyrylo Ryzhov / Adobe Stock.

My friends were already chattering again, talking about rides and food and going home, but the questions continued to echo in my head. I didn’t tell my girlfriend, or anyone, what I had just experienced. When I returned home, I didn’t tell my parents either.

I only found out some years later about the death of my uncle and how similar our circumstances had been. My mother would almost certainly have died of grief if she had lost a brother and a son to drowning. So I carried that memory as a kind of silent compass point, a companion or reminder of … I’m still not sure what. I could never put aside that involuntary glimpse into an adjoining reality.

Ever since then, I have felt, or at least acknowledged, a presence, somehow hovering around each one of us – all the time. Some have described a veil that is only rarely lifted. After several decades, I still have very little understanding of what I saw and heard that day, though perhaps understanding is the wrong word. Just knowing there is a reality beyond what can currently be grasped or measured is perhaps the greatest gift of all. Yet beyond this gift, there are also still those questions that always demand an answer.

Who have I loved? My family, certainly, but it seems that I my love should have a far larger, and deeper, reach. Who – or even what – do I actively, deliberately, maybe even sacrificially, love. The way this question was addressed to me, the answer could be no vague abstraction; give names and descriptions: really, who do you love?

And what have I learned? I have read and studied in many realms – from history to psychology, science to business, and much more – but perhaps the most important lesson I have learned is that we, each one of us, is fragile, beautiful, glorious, and not so different from each other – no matter how different our appearances might be.

No matter what we believe, or where we come from, our ultimate source is beyond comprehension. And, no matter how we explain or deny it, we all share a common destiny. Our accents or skin tones or incomes may seem to make a difference, but that glimpse I had across the veil shows me that we all face a common end – which is, however, not an end, nor even a beginning, but some kind of continuance, a transition into what seems to be a not entirely alien experience.

Since that day, as I developed a career and made various life choices, some aspects and choices seemed to me more important than they did to my peers. And others that seemed so important to my peers seemed like a waste of time to me. In short, that single moment tilted my life and flavored it in ways I may never fully understand – at least until I take up permanent residence in my home on what some people call the other side.

“Home” is a peculiar way to describe a place where I have never been. It might not even be a “place,” but it is, in some sense, more “real” than the world I see and touch every day.