‘This is an Emergency’: Life After a Near Crash

Fearful flier Katherine Friedman was traveling from Los Angeles to Cancún when the airplane began to plunge. “Yes, my heart is pounding through my fingers and my pupils feel as if they are about to burst, but the sense of panic, the urge to scream or cry, is absent. There is no instant replay of my life. No existential secrets are revealed to me. Could the moments before death really be this banal?” she writes in a New York Times ‘Modern Love’ piece.

She continues:

I feel a deep and penetrating sadness for our parents and my sister. A wave of empathy for our friends when they hear the news. But I know life will go on for them. They have no choice. And so, in a falling plane, over the sand-coated Mexican canyons, I look out the window into the endless orange afternoon, and I wait.

The pilot, of course, levels the plane, but the impact of the incident lingers with Friedman. Her terrific story about post-plunge life chronicles unexpected changes in her relationship with her husband and in her outlook on life.

“If my imagination had tried to prepare me for dying in a plane,” she writes, “it had not prepared me for living through a near crash.”

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