Aug. 16--There is an invisible club out there, a web of people who have undergone the same transformative experience.
We escaped death.
Some of us survived a crash or accident; others, criminal violence. Me, I was in a freak hiking mishap. But one way or another, we nearly died -- but didn't.
On Aug. 6, two young women who survived a Lake Michigan sailboat tragedy joined our numbers. They were rescued after spending nearly five hours in the cold water. One of the two young men with them drowned; the other is still missing.
As the young women go on with the lives they so nearly lost, they will make their own paths through shock, grief and the task of making sense, and possibly meaning, out of what happened.
They will join those who already have.
Laura Maychruk, of River Forest, was stabbed in the back 10 times by a man who attacked her on a street in Washington, D.C. Maychruk, then 27 and working as a researcher for the Tribune, was so close to death when she got to the hospital that emergency room doctors rushed into the parking lot and cut open her chest while she was conscious to insert tubes in her collapsed lungs.
But she survived. And then she upended everything.
She returned to Chicago, quit her Tribune job here, opened the Buzz Cafe in Oak Park and turned it into a center of the village's community life. She rethought her intention not to have children; she and her husband now have four.
"It changed so many things in my life," said Maychruk, now 40. "The decisions I made from then moving forward were totally based on different things.
"It is so valuable that you can really grip how wonderful your life is and how important every minute is. I'm so thankful."
So is Bill Lipsit, of Niagara Falls, Ontario. In 2001, he and his father and a friend survived after their scuba dive boat sank off the Gulf Coast of Florida. They spent 46 terrifying hours floating with a few life preservers and bumpers in shark-infested, stormy waters before they were spotted by a search plane.
Between praying and tilting his head back to drink rainwater, Lipsit re-evaluated his life. Up to then, it had been a somewhat wild one; he had spent his time after work drinking with buddies instead of with his family.
But there in the water, "literally all I could think of was my wife and my kids," said Lipsit, 46, manager of a trucking company. "It's amazing how quick it can open your eyes when you're staring at death. You look at your life and realize how stupid you were."
Afterward, he stopped being stupid. He quit drinking and smoking. He reacquainted himself with his wife and two children. He became an active churchgoer.
"I've got a great family life now," he said. "We've been blessed beyond what you can imagine."
Actually, I can imagine.
I was 17 when I sat on a boulder on the rim of the Grand Canyon to take in the spectacular view. The boulder rolled, breaking my hip and pelvis.
But far more dangerously, it caught my leg and dragged me toward the edge of the canyon. And it would have rolled off the edge and taken me with it, but for a little pinyon pine sapling growing up from beneath the rim. The boulder hit the skinny tree -- and stopped.
I was left inches from the edge of the canyon, so close that when rescuers arrived they would not walk out to me for fear of starting a slide; they pushed the stretcher to me instead.
But I had survived. The tree had saved me.
You can draw a bright line between my life before the accident and after it -- from slacker to worker, from indifferent to eager, from taking life for granted to being amazed by it. For 37 years, every joyous event, every human connection, every walk through woods has been sweetened by my gratitude at being alive to experience it.
We were given an incomparable gift, we members of this club that no one wants to join. In the churning water, in a mirror in the ceiling of the ambulance, in the deep gash of the Grand Canyon, we saw how everything could have ended for us.
And then we lived.
Presumably not everyone sees it as a gift. Some survivors grapple with grievous injury and survivor's guilt. But there are those of us who have emerged deeply grateful, not just for our survival, but for our near-deaths.
"It's the best thing that ever happened to me," said Maychruk.
"I thank God every day," said Lipsit. "It's a great blessing."
May the two women who survived the recent lake tragedy someday see it so.
bbrotman@tribune.com
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