Nineteen years ago today, I stood at the gates of eternity.

Not metaphorically. Not in some dreamy, poetic sense. I stood there — suspended between breath and no breath, between the beating heart and silence. Between earth… and heaven.

The cord of life has always been fragile — delicate as silk, invisible as breath. Mine thinned to almost nothing. A whisper. A thread unraveling in the dark. There was no more holding on. No more slack to save me. Just the hush before everything gives way.

And yet — somehow — I was given more time.

That night, as my car spun helplessly across the road in front of the semitrailer, the knowing came — not with panic, but with eerie stillness. Time slowed. The world faded. And deep within me, I understood: this is it. My time had come. The story of my life was reaching its final lines. Yet in that moment, I felt total peace. No fear. No resistance. I knew where I was going. God was waiting for me with open arms. I was not alone. I was going home.

I remember the headlights — the blinding lights of the semitrailer filling my windscreen. No time to cry out. Just light… and then blackness.

When I woke, I began to tremble.

My car had been crushed, hurled and wrapped like a paper twist around a concrete power pole. The semi had struck and pushed my car as if it were nothing — a roulette ball spun wildly by fate. And my head… they told me later it missed the pole by no more than two centimetres. Maybe less.

Two centimetres.

That is not luck. That is something far greater.

I trembled because I knew I shouldn’t be alive. I trembled because I had seen the threshold. My soul had hovered there, weightless and ready. But instead of stepping through, I was called back — to life, to pain, to breath, to all the unbearable and beautiful things that still awaited me.

I was 39. My youngest child was ten.

Had I died that night, I would have missed everything. The growing-up. The weddings. The first cries of grandchildren as they entered the world. The whispered “I love you”s, the tears, the laughter. I would have missed the ache of loss too, and the breaking that only life brings. But it all would have been gone. All of it.

Instead — I stayed.

Nineteen years later, I still tremble. Not out of fear. Not from trauma. But with reverence. With awe. With the quiet, soul-deep understanding that this — this ordinary, flawed, precious life — is extra.

Today, I drove myself back to the place of the accident. That stretch of road is my sacred ground. I can’t drive past it without remembering the weight of the truck, the spin of the car, the shattering glass and surrender. I can’t pass it without knowing that’s where God was waiting for me. That’s where I left… and was sent back.

Some people say moments like this change the course of your life. But I believe that moment became the course of my life. Everything after was shaped by it. Everything since has been lived in the shadow of mercy.

I’m older now. Slower. Softer in some ways, tougher in others. I’ve laughed a lot. I’ve cried more than I expected. I’ve let go of people I thought I’d have forever. But I’ve had the chance to let go, because I was given the chance to stay.

This life — it isn’t perfect. It isn’t painless. But it’s mine. And it’s extra.

I know what I would have missed. And that knowing sits in my chest like a glowing ember, quietly burning with gratitude.

I still tremble.

But I live.

And I go on.