I was driving home in the rain and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I’d just come from my brother’s bachelor party. I was very happy that he was getting married, and he was blissful about the whole affair. The experience had a bit of a dark cloud over it for me though. I’d just gotten a divorce from my wife of four years, and this was the first time I’d had to face the whole family. They were disappointed, I’m sure. They all liked Dawn, my new ex-wife, a lot. They were supportive and happy to see me, but I felt like I’d let the whole world down. The place I was driving back to was a small apartment that was stuffed with the remains of a former life, floor to ceiling. I dreaded walking in the door to what felt like a tomb for my biggest failure.

It was raining lightly, just enough to put a sheen on the road, and traffic was very light. It was nearly 3 am and I had just enough time remaining on the commute home to drown myself in self-pity.

I came over the crest of a hill and saw lights in the road. The lights weren’t moving. As I got closer I could see one car sitting sideways in the road, and another in the middle of the road, both badly mangled. I pulled up to within 100 yards and stopped, being careful to put my pick-up between the traffic and the scene, and got out.

As I got closer still I could see a man hanging by his waist from the window of the car that had been broad sided. It was rusty, old, and was dripping gasoline onto the pavement. The driver had managed to slump out the window and onto the ground while I was getting out of my truck and was sitting on the ground, Indian style. He was a little wobbly, but he was conscious.

Radiator fluid was still draining from the front of the other car, a fairly new sedan. "This just happened," I thought. I looked to the edge of the road and saw a pregnant woman lying on her back, moaning, her husband at her side. She was closest, so I walked to her first. I introduced myself and asked her how she felt. She felt awful, she said. She was awake and alert and had a good strong pulse, though. Her husband also met these criteria so I went to check on the guy sitting on the ground.

When I got to him he had a cigarette in his mouth and he was rummaging through his pockets for a lighter. He was sitting in a puddle of gasoline. A very brief discussion told me he was very drunk but knew where he was and wasn’t hurting anywhere. I asked him to be very still and not to smoke. Satisfied he wasn’t going to incinerate himself or expire in the next few minutes, I returned to the pregnant woman to get a better idea about her condition.

She was still feeling poorly. I checked her pulse again, asked her some questions about her pregnancy and was just thinking what a great thing it would be if an ambulance showed up sometime in the next day or so when I heard a noise. It was a noise I couldn’t identify right away, but I knew it wasn’t something good. I looked up the road, past my tiny pick-up and saw the source. It was the sound of a semi-tractor-trailer sliding on wet asphalt. He was already nearly a quarter sideways in the road. I just stared. My truck, I now realized was much more likely to be slammed down the road into all of us than it was to be of any protection. It was a moment we all have a few times in our lives. It was a moment when I knew some horrible twist of fate was coming our way, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change what was about to happen. Ours is but to watch and wait.

I watched as the truck slid one way and then the other, expecting it to plow through my small pick-up and into us in the next heartbeat. Then something miraculous happened. Somehow the truck flung from the road to the ditch without flipping over and went past us a dozen feet away, mud flying from its wheels. I could see driver’s face as he passed, and I’m sure we were sharing the same open-mouthed look of disbelief. We’d both just narrowly averted what would have been the worst mistakes of our lives, we both knew it, and neither of us could believe it. His truck came to rest in the ditch beyond us and I returned my attention to my patients. The Fire Department, and then the Ambulance arrived. I told them what I knew, and let them take over from there. Rain soaked and still shaken, I got in my truck and drove the remaining few miles home.

The strangest part of the whole ordeal was what happened when I opened my apartment door. Half an hour before I’d loathed the idea of facing what was inside that door. When I finally did, it was wonderful. I was home. I was safe. I was alive.

If the truck driver had taken a fraction of a second longer to react, I’ve no doubt that me and others would have died on that dark road. We’d have been in the paper for a few days. People would have mourned our loss, and we’d have been gone forever. The sort event made being embarrassed about personal failures seem pretty pointless.

The wedding the next day was fantastic. I was surrounded by friends and family who thought I was a great guy, and I was alive and well. I soaked every second of that day up like a sponge, and savored every drop. There are few days in my life when I’ve felt more alive.