The day it fell was the day I died. So, how do I tell this story from the grave? I don’t. I returned. Of course, you won’t believe me until I mention the rainbow, number plate, flowers, woman and her home.
It was just another ordinary day – impatient customers (as New Yorkers can be) a snitchy boss (as bosses can be) and five o’clock couldn’t come fast enough. Out on the freeway and yet another jam-up as everyone needed to get home impatiently, as people the world over do. You can’t push the river, as my Dad used to say, so I pretended to my impatient body that I was relaxed, chilled out.
Toot! Toot! “Hey, lady, get moving!” yelled the driver in a Ford truck, behind me.
Oops, a bit too chilled out, I thought, embarrassed and angry.
“Aah, shut the hell up!” I yelled back through my open window, passing my anger back to him. I took off and screeched to a halt, inches from the car ahead. Now, did I mention that yelling at people never makes them calmer. I should have learned by now.
My car leapt forward, my head flew back, my hands went up and I heard a crick in my neck and a crunch of cars all around. My seat went loose and I realised it had popped out of whatever it was in. It swerved and my head hit the windscreen while my chest squashed itself over the steering wheel.
That’s when the sky fell or, more accurately, I rose into it. I then recalled seeing the whole scene from above – me in my car crumpled between a car and a truck – and no pain at all. I just sort of floated there, watching as more vehicles piled into each other and they all came to a stand-still for miles back.
As they all stopped – some bumping, some not – I could see dense, black vapours of anger vomiting out of them and don’t ask me how I knew it was anger. I just knew.
Then, amid all that black, dense fog arose a rainbow, a magnificent rainbow that started from one car eight behind mine, arced up to the heavens and back down on mine. Don’t ask me how I knew but I just knew someone was praying for me. I suddenly felt so, so peaceful and the anger’s hold dissipated. Don’t ask me how I did but I floated over and took a mental note of the number plate at the rainbow’s start.
When I woke up I was bandaged, tubed, monitored and in pain. With broken ribs, broken hand, broken leg, spinal and internal damage, I was released three months later and then took another three months to be fully mobile.
Somehow, I had retained the number plate and went searching for the owner. I just had to thank her.
The Police Department wasn’t keen to give me the address of the rainbow car, as I called it, but they relented under my insistence and my strange story.
When I knocked on her door and then handed her a huge bunch of flowers, we wept into each other’s shoulders, before I could tell her who I was and what happened. Somehow, she seemed to know, though she’d forgotten the freeway hold-up.
And that’s when I realised the power of prayer and that the sky falling was the biggest blessing I could have received[1].
[1] This is a true story that Caroline Myss told me, a story told to her by the lady who received the flowers six months after praying for whoever was involved in a pile-up on a New Jersey freeway.