There are some moments in life that do not simply live in our memory. They mark us. They sear themselves into us so deeply that no amount of time can soften their edges. Years may pass, whole seasons of life may come and go, and still those moments remain startlingly near, as if they happened only yesterday. I have lived long enough to know that most days quietly slip into one another and are eventually forgotten, but some nights divide your life forever. This was one of those nights.

It was a Friday evening in the middle of winter. I had only just finished dinner, and already the darkness had settled heavily outside. The house, which was so often full of voices and movement and life, was unusually quiet. My husband had taken our boys to the barber, and our teenage daughters were both at their part-time jobs. For a little while, it was just me at home with our cat, Simba.

I remember moving about the house, doing small ordinary things, straightening this and that, enjoying the rare silence. I have always loved the fullness of a big family, the noise, the laughter, the little interruptions, the sense that someone is always arriving, leaving, needing, talking, living. That kind of busy family life had never felt like a burden to me. It felt rich. But every now and then, when the house fell still, I could feel the quiet almost wrapping itself around me like a blanket. On that night, it felt sweet. Restful. Almost sacred.

I made myself a cup of tea and put my feet up for a moment, letting the peace settle into me. I can still feel the ordinary comfort of that moment. It is strange now to think how a life can look so calm on the surface, how a person can be sitting in the gentle glow of their own familiar home, completely unaware that the ground beneath their life is about to shift.

After a while I glanced at the kitchen clock and knew it was time to leave. My daughter’s shift at the library would soon finish, and I needed to pick her up. The older the children grew, the more I felt like a taxi service, always driving someone somewhere, but I never really minded. It was such a full season of life. The table was always surrounded, the washing basket was never empty, and there was always someone to listen to, someone to care for, someone to love in the practical everyday ways that mothers do. It was tiring at times, yes, but it was also beautiful. I knew even then, somewhere deep down, that these years would not last forever.

I left in good time, feeling unhurried and relaxed. I turned on the radio, and Smooth FM filled the car with soft familiar music. I was driving my red Ford station wagon along the road, thinking ordinary thoughts, carrying on with an ordinary evening. There was nothing dramatic about me. I was simply a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four, busy with the life entrusted to me. Strong. Capable. Used to being needed. Used to getting on with things.

About halfway there, I noticed a large Sterling prime mover with a semi-trailer in my rear-view mirror. I was in the left-hand lane, and the truck was in the overtaking lane, slowly but steadily coming closer. I was aware of it, but only in the way one notices things while driving. There was no alarm in me. No sense of danger. Just music playing softly, the road ahead, and the familiar rhythm of an ordinary night.

How little we know, as we go about our days, of the moments that will change us forever.

There was no warning that my life, as I knew it, was about to split cleanly into before and after. No voice whispered to me that within moments I would be pulled into one of the most defining experiences of my life. If I had known, would I have driven more slowly? Would I have held my breath differently? Would I have noticed the sky, or the song on the radio, or the feel of the steering wheel beneath my hands? But of course, life does not announce these moments. They come uninvited. They arrive without permission. And when they do, they alter the landscape of everything that follows.

I know now with absolute certainty that I never returned to the life I had been living before that night. Something ended on that road. I still went on living, of course. I still mothered, cooked, washed, loved, laughed, survived. But the life I had known until that moment was gone. From then on, time itself would be measured differently. There was life before the accident, and life after it.

It all happened in a way that felt like slow motion, the kind of terrible slow motion that belongs to shock. The truck I had noticed failed to give way. It clipped the back of my car and kept coming, pushing me aside as it moved into my lane. My small car beside that huge truck felt unbearably vulnerable. I remember the sickening realisation that I was losing control, that my car could not hold its place against something so much bigger, so much heavier, so much more powerful.

Then my car began to spin.

Even now I can hardly bear to think of it. My little car spun in front of that truck like a toy, like something weightless and helpless, like a ball on a roulette wheel. Round and round, again and again. I could not tell you how many times. I only remember the feeling of absolute terror, the terrible unreality of it, the knowledge that I could do nothing. Nothing to stop it. Nothing to save myself. I was no longer driving the car. I was trapped inside disaster, and it felt endless.

Then, in the very heart of that horror, something happened that I have never forgotten. One moment I was filled with terror, and the next, I was flooded with a peace that made no human sense. I was no longer afraid.

Not ordinary peace. Not the kind of peace people talk themselves into. Not denial, not numbness, not confusion. It was something deeper and stronger and holier than that. It was supernatural peace. In what I believed were the final moments of my life, as death seemed to be rushing towards me, I was not seized by panic. I was not even afraid anymore. Instead, I knew with complete certainty that I was ready to meet my Maker. There was no struggle in my soul. No bargaining. No desperate clinging. Only surrender.

All I said was, “Here I am, God. I’m coming home.”

Those words did not come from fear. They came from somewhere deeper than fear. I think now that in that moment all pretence fell away. There was nothing left but truth. And the truth was that if this was my appointed time, I belonged to Him.

The next thing I saw were the bright lights of the truck filling my windscreen. Then came the deafening sound of grinding brakes, and after that, blackness. The truck hit my car head-on, and everything disappeared.

I do not know how long I was gone before consciousness found me again. I came to sitting inside what remained of my car. The pain was immediate and overwhelming. I held my head, convinced it might burst. My left foot was trapped beneath the pedal. The front door was gone. Glass was everywhere, glittering and cruel. The seat had been forced forward, and my head had slammed into the steering wheel.

I remember the shock of realising I was still alive.

Alive.

It is such a simple word, and yet in that moment it felt enormous. I was alive, but I was hurt so badly that I could not even tell which part of me hurt most. Pain seemed to live everywhere in my body at once.

Then, as if they had been sent to me, two men appeared. Tradies, muscular, practical, complete strangers. Perhaps they had simply been driving past on their way home from work. I never knew much about them, and there was no time for names. One of them took charge immediately. He told me they needed to get me out of the car quickly in case it caught fire. I remember sensing their surprise that I was still alive, and their relief when they realised I had been alone in the car.

Each man stood on one side of me and helped me out. I stepped onto the road in nothing but my socks. I have never known what happened to my shoes. It seems like such a small detail, and yet it has stayed with me all these years, perhaps because trauma has a strange way of fastening itself to little things.

I kept drifting in and out of consciousness. The men found a piece of cardboard from the back of their ute and placed it on the ground for me to sit on. It was cold and dark and windy. I did exactly as they told me. I was beyond independent thought by then. Shock had made me childlike, reduced me to simple obedience, one instruction at a time.

As I sat there, I became aware of hard pieces in my mouth. I thought my teeth had shattered. One of the men handed me a bottle of water and told me to rinse my mouth. That was when I realised it was not broken teeth, but glass. There was glass in my mouth, glass in my eyes. Again I obeyed. I poured water into my eyes, trying to wash it all away.

There is something almost unbearably lonely in my memory of that moment. I was sitting on a piece of cardboard on the cold ground in the darkness, broken and stunned, my whole body in pain, my life suddenly unrecognisable. And yet that loneliness was not empty. I remember lifting my eyes to the stars.

So this was not my time.

That realisation came to me quietly. Not in triumph. Not dramatically. Simply as truth. I was still here. The world had not ended, although mine had been violently interrupted. Cars kept driving past, their headlights cutting through the dark, people continuing on their journey home as though nothing had happened. For them, perhaps traffic had slowed for a few moments. For me, time had torn open.

I was later told that my car had wrapped itself around a power pole like a banana, and that the pole had missed my head by just two centimetres. Two centimetres. Such a tiny measure. Such a small mercy. Such a narrow space between life and death.

The police picked up my daughter. The ambulance took me to hospital. And I was carried forward into a life I had not asked for, a life marked by pain, shock, survival, and the long slow work of living after what should have ended me.

I have thought about that night more times than I could ever count. It taught me, in the most brutal way, that all our days truly are numbered. We live as though tomorrow is quietly waiting for us, as though the shape of our lives is ours to manage, but it only takes one moment for everything to change. One impact. One phone call. One diagnosis. One loss. One night on an ordinary road.

A defining moment has a way of stripping life back to its bones. It stops you in your tracks. It shakes you awake. It exposes how fragile we are, how little control we really have, how precious and fleeting every ordinary day actually is.

I cannot honestly say that I have lived perfectly since that night. I cannot say I have treasured every moment the way such an experience should perhaps teach a person to do. I am still human. I still get tired, distracted, overwhelmed, caught up in things that do not matter enough. But I have never forgotten how close I came to leaving this world. I have never forgotten the feel of that surrender, the stars above me, the cardboard beneath me, the strange holy knowledge that my life had been spared.

And because I was spared, I have been given gifts I might never have seen.

I got to watch my children grow up.
I got to see them become adults.
I got to hold grandchildren in my arms.
I got to keep learning, keep softening, keep becoming.
I got more ordinary days, and I know now that ordinary days are among the greatest miracles of all.

There are still times when I struggle to take in the fact that I am here to tell this story. Still times when it feels impossible that I survived it. But I did. By the mercy of God, I did.

And so I carry that night with me still.

Not only as the night I almost died, but as the night I was reminded that life is both terribly fragile and unspeakably precious. The night that left its mark on me forever. The night that taught me that none of us knows how many pages remain, only that while we are still here, the story is not yet finished.