But when your head is being bashed from side to side under the force of a waterfall and seconds from death, you don't think about that. You think about surviving. Luckily my father-in-law was on vacation with us in the Smoky Mountains as he saw me slip on a rock into the waterfall and dragged me out moments before going downstream through maximum grade rapids and certain death.
Even afterwards, you don't think about your death, you think about those you left alive. It gives me shivers to the day how close this became to reality in the Maldives. Unbeknownst to me I was inches from a passenger ferry propeller while diving in the Indian Ocean. My buddy seemingly came shooting from 10 meters beneath to drag me to safety.
I've over-reflected the impact to my two sons, my wife, and my mother if anything happened to me. I spent my grandmothers eighties detaching and distancing myself from her just to avoid the pain of unavoidable death.
While in Hungary my family called to ask me to come home. My grandmother was sick, but I could tell from my sisters' voice it was much worse. Otherwise, my mother would have talked to me.
Nothing was said between us when my family picked me up at the airport. Not on arrival or in the car ride home. Just tears. She was 87. Twenty years on and I've not had the strength to recall my memories of her.
But now I do.