Have you ever cheated death?

On Saturday morning, my childhood friend Josie called to tell me she had narrowly escaped death. She was to travel to Nairobi with a group of teachers for a wedding. They had initially planned to travel together, but she decided to travel earlier to have time to catch up with me and another friend. She agreed with her colleagues that she would meet them at the wedding venue.

Her voice was shaky. She spoke as though she needed to convince herself that she was indeed alive. She told me her phone started buzzing at 3am on Saturday. People in her professional circle, and some family members, knew she would travel for that wedding and so expected her to be in that ill-fated vehicle.

“Daisy, I would probably be among the dead. You would be mourning me,” she said. For a brief second I tried to imagine my life without her, and to imagine that she had been in that vehicle, but my brain refused to paint that picture. I steered the conversation instead to the other people in the affected family; what the plans were for the wedding, and how they were planning to handle the bride on her big day, now overshadowed by such a devastating event.

Listening to Josie’s account took me back to an experience of my own. I, too, have had to confront the unsettling realisation that I could easily have been among those who lost their lives in a tragic accident.

I had attended an academic conference in Burkina Faso in early 2019. That remains one of the most memorable trips of my life thus far. I travelled alongside important academic mentors who had initiated me into the world of academia. I also got to celebrate my birthday in the sky, and it was a very joyful time. Exactly a week later, news of an air disaster broke. The details of the ill-fated flight, including the airline, flight number, route and departure time, matched those of the flight we had taken seven days earlier. In other words, if the conference I had travelled for had happened a week later than it did, I would have been on that flight!

I thought I was the only one dealing with the shock until I received a call from one of the people I had travelled with. She asked if I had heard the news. I said yes without asking “which news” because I knew the news she was talking about. We were both quiet on the phone. The trip the Sunday before was still fresh in our minds, and we needed to confirm that we were indeed alive. As more details of the plane crash emerged and we learnt of its uncanny resemblance to our own flight just seven days earlier, our shock deepened. I followed every update on that crash, and for weeks I shared condolence messages anywhere I saw a post about the flight. For personal closure, one of us said she had to actually do a tribute post to the families of those who had lost loved ones.

Like mine in 2019, Josie’s emotions seemed to move from gratitude for being alive to a sense of guilt. She wondered if perhaps she should have persuaded her colleagues to travel with her when she did.

My friend and her colleagues had bought beautiful wedding dresses. And like many of us when we attend weddings, they had planned to make memories and celebrate with the family as the bride was ushered into holy matrimony.

But as is the way of death, every plan was rudely disrupted. My friend had to travel back home immediately. The plan we had for her to spend a few days with me after the wedding was disrupted, and that space was taken up partly by the shock and partly by the urgency of what she had to do back home. Perhaps one of the strangest things about narrowly escaping death is that life continues, but you do not necessarily return to it as the same person. You carry the knowledge that things could have turned out differently.

Have you ever cheated death? How did you deal with the aftermath?

The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG. [email protected]