Defining moments that make us

Recently, at a dinner with a group of old friends, Tony raised a glass to toast the 44th anniversary of the day he almost died.

By all rights, he should have died on that fateful summer night in 1966, a night when he was doing the most ordinary thing a 15-year-old could be doing, enjoying a large pasta dinner with his mother and her friend at a quiet neighborhood Italian restaurant in what was then our sleepy little beachside town.

As she told the story again, as she has done many times in the 44 years since that night, it was easy to see emotions clouding her beautiful face. Although I’ve heard the story before, it seems that every time he tells it, new details emerge as memory is dug up.

Before he started reminding us of the story again, I asked if the story has less power now, all these years later, with each telling. He agreed that the power of it has diminished considerably over time, but I could see that telling it again made him go back in time, back to the bewilderment and shock of what happened. It was a profound life change.

Tony was trying to gain weight that summer so he could go out and play soccer. He was looking forward to playing on the team with the other guys he knew from grade school and high school (some of whom were sitting with us on this 44th anniversary night of “Happy to be Alive”).

Tony convinced his mother that he needed a lot of pasta to support his muscle-building mode, so they decided to go out for Italian food. They sat further back in the restaurant at first, but a rowdy crowd nearby prompted her mother to ask for a different table and was offered one closer to the window. The two older women faced the street while Tony had his back to the window and the front door. He never saw what was coming.

A Chevy Bel-Air going 65 mph driven by a drunk failed to negotiate a curve in the road just outside the restaurant, skipped the curb and went through the front windows and door, pushing through walls, furniture and people 40 feet to the business next door. Tony recalls the eerie feeling of lying on his back on the hood of a car, moving through space, accompanied by the unearthly sounds of human voices, shattering glass, and the deafening roar of metal and wood breaking.

He recalled that he couldn’t open his eyes because he had glass shards from the restaurant windows in his eyes. He remembered being put on a stretcher, feeling excruciating pain, knowing his body was broken.

He remembered the questions the paramedics asked him as they tried to keep him conscious on the way to the hospital. He recalled that he was not given pain medication for his broken back because doctors were concerned about a brain hemorrhage.

It was miraculous that no one died in the horrible accident. His mother suffered head injuries but she recovered fairly quickly. Her friend had many internal injuries and she was hospitalized for half a year. Tony was in the hospital for a week and was released in a full body cast that he wore for his first 6 months of high school while his vertebrae were repaired.

Tony never got to play football. Instead, he had to learn about adaptability, the ability to change his way of thinking and adapt to the new way of being. He has dealt with back pain almost daily since that summer night. His innate athleticism allowed him to play competitive tennis for a while, but the aftermath of the accident continued to plague him with back pain. With a heightened awareness of the body he would now have to live with, at 30 he began practicing yoga and found it to be the ideal exercise for him, building strength and flexibility to manage pain.

That accident was a truly defining moment. The definition of who Tony thought was going to change abruptly, dramatically, without warning of any kind.

After Tony’s story, our conversation at the dinner table turned into defining moments. We’ve all had them. Maybe not as dramatic or traumatic as Tony’s, but those moments of suspended reality, when we know at the deepest cellular level that something big has changed for us in that moment.

Or it is about to change, as in the premonition.

Sometimes you don’t recognize a defining moment until it has passed. Other times you feel that everything slows down, in a slow-motion sensation of hyper-awareness that awakens and vibrates your entire being. It is almost as if you enter a process to become the observer of your life, coming out of yourself while still being the experiencer of feelings and emotions, forming a new “reality” as it can be.

No matter what form it takes, one thing is for sure: who you were before the turning point changes infinitely and forever.