The Most Harrowing Trip of My Life

went out with Aimee this evening.

She drove, and sometimes, her driving scares me a little bit.

It scares me mostly just because she likes to turn in front of oncoming traffic.

The drive was getting so scary, in fact, that it got me reminiscing about how when I was a little girl, my Dad used to scare the hell out of me whenever he was driving.

He used to fall asleep when driving sometimes, and we'd have to scream and wake him up. He also sped a lot.

He had to eventually get insurance coverage from a shady insurance place due to the many points he had on his driver's license.

What made it worse, however, was that my dad had a real bad heart, and he was convinced the whole time I was growing up that he could die at any minute.

His favorite time to remind you of the fact that he could die at any minute was when he was driving down the expressway, going about 90 miles an hour.

He'd turn suddenly, clutch his chest with one hand, look you right in the eye, and say, "You know I could die at any minute, right?"

I was always sure dad was going to die while driving, and take his passengers out with him.

I remember the most frightening drive, however, happened when I was pretty old.

I think it was a year before my father passed away.

He had asked us if we would go to Detroit with him in order to hear a politician who he was campaigning for give a speech.

I told him that I would love to go, and so I spent the night over at his house, and he woke me up at five o'clock in the morning the next day for our trip.

My brother Josh, my baby brother Dougie, and I, piled into the car, put on our seat belts, and had hopes of going back to sleep and then waking up again when we were in Detroit.

Unfortunately, there had been an ice storm in the night, and the roads were covered in a thick sheeting of frozen rain water.

Dad also had just taken his heart medicine, and he claimed he was seeing double because his medicine hadn't kicked in yet.

The doctors had also prescribed another medication to him for his heart that had caused him to break out into an itchy rash.
Later, I cured his rash myself by providing him with a certain lotion that cleared it up.

However, this was before I had cured his rash, and so he still itched.

Anyway, he jumped on the highway, and started driving at about 90 miles per hour.

The roads were so slick that cars whose drivers had lost control of their vehicles lined the ditch alongside the highway.

My dad kept shaking his head, because he said he was seeing double, and then he'd roll his window down and stick his head out the window because he found it refreshing.

His back itched, because of the rash, and so he kept rubbing his back on the seat trying to get to the itch, shaking his head in order to get rid of his double vision, and then sticking his head out the window.

He performed these actions all while going 90 miles per hour down the iced over highway and swerving dangerously near the cars that had landed in the ditch.

I sat in the front seat, in a kind of frozen terror, sure that I would die.

I looked in the backseat where my brother Josh was, and took note of the fact that he had simply covered his face with his hat.

I poked him awake and asked him if he was scared.

"Scared?" He asked, "What are you talking about? I'm not looking."

"Don't you want to know what we hit that killed you?" I asked him. "After we're dead, don't you want to know what ended it all?"

"Hell no," Josh said, "I wanna go out blind. I don't care what dad hits. When I'm dead I'm dead."

I finally couldn't take it anymore, and so I moved into the backseat with my two brothers.

I piled the pillows that I had found in the back all around me, and held my brother Dougie, in order to comfort him.

To calm myself, I just kept chanting, "Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back." Over and over again.

My little brother Dougie, who was about six at the time, asked me if I thought we were going to die.

I told him that we would only die if it was our time to go and meet the angels.

With nothing but sheer luck helping him, and the fact that my dad had some sort a guardian angel protecting him, we actually made it to Detroit.

When I got out of the car, I laid down on pavement in the parking lot, and I thanked God for my life.

I remember, after I quit shaking, I looked up from the ground at my brother Josh and I asked him, I said, "Do you think that God kept us alive through that trip because we have important work to do on the Earth?"

"Yes," Josh said, "We must have some sort of a destiny. Or a life plan, since we made it here alive."

And I was just like, "That's gotta be the truth. Maybe we're supposed to cure cancer."

That trip was the closest I think I've ever come to dying.

It made me appreciate life so much more, because I have looked death right in the eye, and somehow, I still made it to Detroit.