On a Wednesday I wonder if Bob Dylan will accompany my mangled form into the afterlife; the following Friday I imagine John Lennon. A week later, surrounded by shattered glass, a rusted guardrail impaling the awful tableau, I’m sure I’ll hear Nina Simone as I draw my final, ragged breath. There are now over one hundred songs on my “untimely death/car crash” playlist, all carefully selected in case I should perish in a macabre tangle of metal and gasoline on southbound M-39.
M-39 is a grey chute of concrete bisecting metro Detroit, a regular part of my commute. It chainsaws through urban decay and development alike, miles of new and crumbling brick, the shoulder a graveyard of discarded Big Gulps and broken 40s and containers for other beverages that never really quench your thirst. Five billboards featuring shark-eyed personal injury attorneys loom across the freeway, and I’m often fearful that their outsized, two-dimensional faces will be the last I see in this life. I can’t do much about what I see here, but the audio element is definitely within my grasp.
“This is beyond morbid,” my husband, G, tells me when I inform him of my playlist. I shrug and add a few Miles Davis tracks, deciding some instrumentals might be nice. Lyrics sometimes devolve into underwhelming choruses: strings of baby or hey or oooh, less than ideal listening for the last moments of life.
“God forbid a stupid remark on some podcast be the last thing I hear before I leave this world!” I say.
This is the crux of it, really. It’s not just the thought of dying in a wreck in suburban grayscale that depresses me, it’s the notion that the soundtrack to my death would be so inane: a movie plug or fake laughter or an ad line punctuating my demise. Imagine a death scene in a movie, but the music isn’t Hans Zimmer or John Williams—it’s the jingle for Auto Zone.
“What song would you want to hear?” I ask G.
He gives me a very sideways stare, hates when I get morbid like this.
“Oh God. I don’t know. Would “Last Kiss” be too on the nose? The Pearl Jam cover? I mean it would have to be Eddie singing…”
“Yes, of course. That’s too literal. Try again.”
I know he’ll either come back with something sarcastic, maybe “Close My Eyes Forever,” or shut the whole thing down. He opts for the latter.
“I can’t think about this. It’s awful! You won’t die in a car crash.” G anoints me immortal, exits the kitchen and the conversation, beer in hand to drown out whatever disturbing images I’ve planted in his mind.
I return to my playlist, shuffle around a few songs, delete one after deciding I wouldn’t want to dissolve into quantum foam during the refrain. Outside a bird chirps, and I think about bird song, about how nice it would be to slip away to such a simple, natural sound.
I wish you could hear birds from the freeway.
***
The motor vehicle trauma patient that comes to our operating room is extracted from the floorboards of their car, somehow tangled up in the accelerator and brake. It’s not clear whether they were the passenger or the driver. We pump over 10 units of blood through their veins but it’s not enough, and they pass away shortly after surgery. I sift though their belongings: one sock, a yellow lighter, a crinkled gas station receipt. Useless junk that has outlived the owner. There is no one there to collect it.
“God willing, they at least had a dog,” someone says.
I’m not sure how the dog makes anything better right now, because if this person did have a dog, but no one in their life that could show up for them, what would happen to the dog? The dog would whimper and gnaw its paws and likely starve away, lonely and abandoned. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does being compacted into the floor of your car, your life taken well before the age at which you pass a mirror and get startled by the older face reflected there, somehow both the strangest and most familiar you’ve ever seen.
***
On a cloudy Thursday commute, I imagine Leon Bridges’ beautiful voice comforting me as I drift in and out of consciousness, the tire of a Mack truck embedded in my driver’s side door. It’s a true needle drop moment, spiraling out of my body, aware only of Leon singing “River.” My soul feels absolved, beatific, electric.
Five minutes later, I pull into the parking garage at the hospital and a see a patient in a gown bent over a pylon, crushing a cigarette out into a yellow concrete wheel stop.
“Got a light?” he asks, pulling another out of a pocket that is supposed to hold a telemetry monitor. I shake my head, wondering how he lit the first one.
“No.” I tell him. “You’ll have a hard time finding one around here.”
***
Jimmy Cliff dies on a Monday. I’m not driving anywhere but I listen to Jimmy Cliff on my walk. I wonder if more people are listening to him right now because he just died, and if all that listening actually makes him more alive somehow. A pink plastic bag whips out of a trash can and flutters across the sidewalk. For a moment I think, it’s Jimmy Cliff! Not the bag, but maybe the wind moving the bag, the perfect arc of it.
***
“Is there a new album out or something we can listen to?” I ask G as we head to Detroit, a date night, the promise of delicious cuisine in the near distance. The skyline appears on the horizon and green and white highway signs zipper overhead.
“No, not really,” he says, tossing me a look. “But you’ll like this podcast.”
There are comedians on the podcast, and it is a podcast I like, but my mind momentarily creeps off into darker corners. He turns on his blinker and crosses seamlessly into the left lane, laughing at a well delivered line. The sound of it pulls me back to the interior of the car, our buckled-in bodies, my ring making an impression on the bare skin of my knee.
“What do you think you’ll order?” I ask him. But what I mean to say is, “So long as you are by my side we can listen to Weird Al, or Conan, or whoever, and I will die happy.”
***
We perform numerous surgeries on a patient with a shattered pelvis, ruptured bladder and eviscerated spleen. This person is alive but will never walk again, and because no head trauma was sustained during their accident, they are acutely aware of this and other sobering facts.
***
Of course I want to hear “Ripple” as I pass away, my body ejected from my vehicle, my neck at acute angles on the concrete. I’m not sure if I should add this song to my playlist though—my sister’s song. The one we played over and over after she died from metastatic colon cancer. We’d tucked ourselves next to her body, listened to “Ripple”and all of her favorites.
“Just add it!” I can hear her say, her gorgeous, sonorous laugh echoing around me. “The Dead are all about sharing!” I picture an angelic Jerry Garcia next to her, nodding.
They are so right.
I add “Ripple” to the playlist and cry, imagine her cradling my broken body the same way I held her own: like it was the world’s rarest treasure. Like I’d never let go.
***
On a Sunday it seems only appropriate that Jeff Buckley, earth angel that he was, usher me out of this realm to the tune of “Hallelujah.” I have been smothered by my airbag, utterly suffocated, concussed. There are still a few random synapses in my brain firing before the lights go out, just enough to hear his voice, enough to wonder if there is a heaven, or I if am still on Earth, and whether or not they are really just two sides of the same ancient coin.
***
“I was there when it happened, so I have video footage. He flew off the motorcycle and over the boat trailer, landed on the other side of it. I thought he was a goner.”
The police officer on the phone with me, detailing the accident, was on the scene when my dad was struck by a guy hauling a boat trailer through the Sonoran Desert. At first, it’s all I can think about— the fact that this guy was hauling a boat in the desert. I can picture it clearly: my dad, a leather clad rag doll, pinwheeling over the boat, landing next to a saguaro cactus or a piñon on the other side.
“Thank you for being there, for responding,” I say, my hand almost too shaky to hang up the call.
G, my brother, and I focus on my dad, supine in his hospital bed. The fact that he only suffered a serious concussion, some mild facial trauma and a few broken ribs almost makes me want to injure him more. I want him to realize how miraculous it is that he survived, and with so little damage.
“We just don’t see this for motorcycle accidents,” I tell him. “We just don’t.”
He’s looped up on pain killers, tangled in IV lines. A heart monitor displays his cardiac function in reassuring digital wave forms.
“I’m special!” he laughs.
It’s both the drugs and his personality, thankfully intact, triggering the laughter, which triggers me to cry and my brother to shake his head. I swipe salty tears from my cheeks, soaking my shirt cuffs. In the near distance I hear a code alarm, someone asking for the crash cart. For a second I have to remind myself it’s not my turn to jump on someones sternum, compress their heart, send electric volts though their body. My only concern is the hearts in my immediate proximity. This is considerably more terrifying, in a way.
***
There’s a good possibility that it might take awhile, after my car rolls over and into the median, for me to expire. Perhaps I’ll need something familiar and soothing to get through those difficult final moments, and “Let It Be” seems like a gentle mantra, a reminder to breath and let go as whatever blood I have left rushes to my head, my body suspended in physical and spiritual limbo.
***
“You know the couple from the accident this past weekend? The husband died but she lived. But she doesn’t know he’s gone yet because she’s still intubated,” my co-worker tells me. I find it suddenly impossible to swallow my sandwich. I spit the bread into a napkin.
“Jesus. That’s awful.” I scroll through my phone, dash off an I love you type of text to G.
I eat the rest of the sandwich, then I go to the locker room and lie on a bench and try to feel less of everything. I close my eyes but there is something on the back of my eyelid, a lash or a speck of dust. I tell myself that if I cry it will flush away, but I don’t cry. I just lay there and stare at the overhead lights, listen to the hum of them. Someone runs the faucet in the bathroom and complains about water spots on the mirror, and all I can think is, water spots? Are you fucking kidding me?
***
Sturgill Simpson sings “All Around You” and suddenly I don’t feel so alone as I glimpse the crescent moon through my cratered windshield. It’s a golden wink, God’s own eyelash, a cosmic comma reminding me that this is just a pause. It’s like I can reach out and touch it, and then blissfully, I do.
***
My friend loses someone suddenly and we talk about which is worse—the trauma of a sudden loss or the anguish of a slow one. I have both versions. My sister, slow; my mother, fast: a spontaneous carotid artery dissection. I tell my friend about the nightmares I used to have about my mom being buried alive, about her walking around our house covered in insects and dirt.
“It’s because your brain didn’t know where to place that attention or love,” she says.
“So it conjured images of my mom as a zombie, some kind of undead person?” I say.
“Yes. A mombie,” she tells me.
“A mombie?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
I tell her that it does.
Where do you put love when the object of it is lost? It’s like having a hundred sweaters and no drawers, so you just wear all of them, the heat and weight of it simply too much to bear.
***
Rumor has it you’re more likely to be in an accident close to home, but I’m doubtful. I go rogue and ignore the crash playlist, listen to whatever the algorithm serves up. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” comes on. I can’t get the image of Tom Petty as the Mad Hatter from the music video out of my head; the giant purple top hat, the small black sunglasses. God help me if someone blows this red light and the last scene that warps through my brain is background singers in black and white checkers, Alice as a sheet cake, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers eating her skirt.
***
“You know I hate traveling without you!” I tell G. I fold my clothes into tight rolls, arrange and rearrange them in my suitcase, fuss with items buttoned into tiny plastic compartments.
“You’ll be fine!” he pulls me into a reassuring hug, freeing a bottle of shampoo from the vice grip of my hand.
“You’ll take Jodi’s chimes down?” I ask, referring to my sister’s wind chimes, the ones I always put up on her birthday and take down on the day she died. They were a surprise gift from her, sent while she was still undergoing chemotherapy.
“I always do,” he says.
It’s a habit now for me to travel home to northern Michigan, to be with my dad to mark the day. G takes care of this small ritual while we dip our toes in Lake Michigan and spill our tears in the sand.
There is no wind today. I step outside and walk across the cool lawn, reach for the chimes, send my fingers running across the small steel cylinders. They perform their random dance, the tones curling around me like enchanted smoke.
This is it, I think. This is what I’d want to hear. Then I hear a kid laughing next door, birds tittering in the Chinese elm, G’s voice, calling me from the house. Our patio door is a neat box of light behind me, music tumbling through the screen. I open my mind and trap it all inside, this gorgeous flash of staggering, perfect sound.
Just in case.
*Details pertaining to patients and medical scenarios have been intentionally withheld and/or fictionally altered so as not to reflect any actual persons, but rather composite blends of many trauma patients I have cared for over the years. As such, any similarities to real persons or circumstances is entirely coincidental.
