This year, I have found myself in circumstances I would not wish on anyone. Circumstances that have shaken me, humbled me, and brought me to a place of deep reflection. Yet it is often in life’s most painful and unwanted moments that we are forced to stop, to truly look, and to learn what perhaps we would never have seen otherwise.

Earlier this year, I was hospitalised after contracting Covid. There are always two ways of looking at such things, rather like two sides of the same coin. It could be said that I was one of the unlucky ones, one of those unfortunate enough to become gravely ill from it. But it could just as truthfully be said that I was one of the lucky ones, one of those fortunate enough not to die.

Covid wreaked havoc on both my heart and my lungs, and for a time, life as I knew it seemed to hang in the balance.

After spending an evening in the hospital’s resuscitation ward, I was transferred to the high dependency cardiology unit. It was there that I met three other women, all close to my own age. I cannot fully explain what it was about those women, or that place, but something in me was deeply moved. They stirred my heart in a way I had never known before. They awakened emotions so strong and so unfamiliar that even now, looking back, I find it difficult to put them into words. In that room, in our shared frailty, life suddenly looked different to me.

In hindsight, I would say that the cardiology ward became an adjournment room of my life. It felt as though time had stopped. Normal life had been interrupted. Everything familiar had been suspended. The busyness of everyday living, the routines, the plans, the small concerns that usually fill our minds, all fell away. I was left in a place where there was nothing to do but be still, breathe, and face the sobering fragility of life.

There is something profoundly powerful about shared suffering. All four of us had, in one way or another, come to death’s door. All four of us knew, without needing to say it, how close we had come to losing everything. And yet, each of us had been given the chance to go on living. That knowledge bound us together in a way that is hard to describe. Under ordinary circumstances, it might have taken years to truly know one another. But in those few short days, stripped of pretence and held together by vulnerability, we shared a closeness and tenderness I have rarely experienced in life.

We were no longer strangers. We were four women standing in the shadow of our mortality, painfully aware of how fragile life really is.

When I was discharged, one of the ladies looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Jaana, God has given us a second chance in life. Go home, love your family, enjoy your grandbabies, and bake to your heart’s content. Life is short.”

Many people have said many things to me over the course of my life, and much of it has faded with time. But her words did not fade. They entered my heart and stayed there. Perhaps it was because of the place we were in. Perhaps it was because those words had been shaped by suffering, by fear, by gratitude, and by the overwhelming relief of still being alive. Whatever it was, I did not simply hear her words. I felt them. I carried them home with me. They settled deep within my soul.

Life had thrown a curveball. It had stopped all four of us in our tracks. For a little while, everything else had to wait. And then, by grace, we were allowed to return home and continue the lives we had so nearly lost. We were still here. We could still hold our loved ones close. We could still hug our grandchildren. We could still stand in our kitchens and bake bread and make cakes. We could still laugh, love, pray, and sit around the table with those who matter most.

What an extraordinary gift that is.

My new-found friend, in her wisdom and tears, reminded me of something I do not ever want to forget: do not waste the life you have been given. Do not take lightly the ordinary moments. Do not assume there will always be more time.

So often, it takes a life-changing event to make us pause long enough to see what has been in front of us all along. Life is precious. Life is fragile. And even on the hardest days, there are still reasons to be grateful. There is still beauty. There is still love. There is still something sacred in simply being here.

Sometimes we just need to be reminded.