Dam, morbid bunch here, and I added to it. Don’t know if this will help, but I don’t worry about life spinning by too fast, and dying, any more…
I went off a sheer cliff sliding out on a wet curve on a 4-wheel ATV, in a rain forest in Costa Rica. I tried too hard to reel it in as the ATM lost traction on the edge, let it go, but too late, I was following it down. Large boulders 40 feet below—they were rounded by the receded river, like VW bugs sitting in mud, a few inches from each other. Any way out? nope. Dam, my kids will be sad when the news gets back. Any possibility of surviving, even if paralyzed and vegetative? Naw, going to smash like a melon, if it hurts, it won’t be for long. Acceptance, thinking about my family and life…bam! It was a virtual rock wall, but a little bump stuck out enough to catch my hip bone, separate a couple of ribs and remove a big swatch of skin as it knocked me away…enough to pause me in air for a split second…and I see a Tarzan vine in front of me, grabbed it. A friend is frantically calling my name from above—it’s too steep for him to see over the edge. Hard to breath from the rib injury, but I squeak out “I’m alright” to calm him, pull myself up hand over hand on the vine, which grew out of the top edge, my friend reached over and pulled me up.
June 2000. Twenty one extra years so far, to see my three grandchildren get born and grow. Every year a gift. I don’t worry about dying now, I live on bonus time. And if I’d been afraid of dying then, I wouldn’t have seen the incredibly lucky, and only possible, way out.
PS—And yes, time slows down, freaky how many things I thought about in what had to under a second. The math: It was about a forty foot drop to the rocks, which should take about 1.6 seconds till splat. I’d fallen 14-16 feet (edge now 8-10 feet overhead when I caught the vine). Just under a second, seemed like 2-3 minutes of thought time. A lot has been written about this phenomenon. A couple of months after the incident I came across a research paper that claimed our sensory input is normally buffered, but under extreme circumstances our brain bypasses that buffer. Not sure how much sense that makes, but to give you an idea of just a fraction of the thoughts I had: When I impacted the bump in the rock face, it paused me mid-air, or so it seemed. Then, I saw the vine, arms-length away. I thought—slow inner monologue—“There’s a vine <pause> I can reach it <pause> grab it”. Then I did. Takes about 7 seconds to say, at the speed I felt at the time. But it had to have been on the order of a tenth of a second, I didn’t drop noticeably during the time (if I’d truly come to a complete stop—unlikely—it’s 0.1s for a ~ 2 inch drop, 0.2s ~8 in, so it’s certianly that or less).