I am not a crier.
Never have been, not even when objects moving at high velocity have collided with sensitive areas of my body. (You’d be amazed, after 45 years, how often this has happened.) Not even when I was told that my cancer had not only returned but had spread throughout my body.
Let me step back for a sec. When you are undergoing cancer treatments, your body clock can go clear out the window. For me, this meant my eyelids blasting open nightly in the hours past midnight. Chemotherapy can also mess with your taste buds, turning your favorite foods and beverages right against you. Suddenly, my three supreme loves — sleep, coffee and beer — had abandoned me. (Strangely enough, I developed a killer craving for bloody Marys, but you try telling friends who drive you to chemo to stop at the liquor store on the way home and see how far that gets you.)
I was wide awake at 3 a.m., watching live coverage of the Formula One Grand Prix of Bahrain (look up the time difference and figure it out) when the car of French driver Romain Grosjean clipped another car, veered off into a trackside crash barrier and exploded into flames.
(I’m not going to bore you with the knowledge that comes with a lifetime of motorsports fandom. Just roll with me when I tell you that, in the 21st century, fire in auto racing is an extremely rare occurrence.)
The car had split in two, rupturing the fuel tank while the part of the car that contained Grosjean wedged itself between the barriers. Something inside me split in two, as well. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. But as Grosjean’s car burned on my television with Grosjean trapped inside, every single raw and real emotion I had worked so hard to suppress after my diagnosis, all the wisecracks and shoulder shrugs and assurances to everyone in my life that I was just fine, broke into pieces just like that car.
I sobbed. Great heaving breaths and a record stuck on repeat — don’t die, don’t die, please don’t die. It was for Grosjean. It was for me. It was raw, unalloyed fear, fear for myself and fear for this French racing driver whom I barely knew. Fear of death and fear of fire and fear of cancer and fear of losing control and fear of being trapped. For every single thing I had done and said since getting sick, the truth was that right up until then, I was not entirely sure if I had more than a general preference regarding being alive. I have walked with severe depression throughout my life, and since childhood, I have lived with a persistent voice assuring me that life would be better without me in it.
Now, in this strange 3 a.m. gumbo of tears and cars and fire, I had reached a decision. So did Grosjean, who was pinned inside the burning cockpit by flaming debris. By his own account, after struggling and failing to free himself, he had resigned himself to the fire.
“There is a moment when my body starts to relax,” Grosjean said in an interview. “I’m at peace with myself, and I’m going to die.”
Grosjean, who still races to this day, has said in multiple interviews that it was in those flames that he saw his two young children. That he decided, as he put it, “It cannot end like this.” And so, with rescue workers unable to reach him through the intense heat, Grosjean put his hands in the fire. As his racing gloves turned from bright red to black, as the protective fireproof material gave way and his hands burned hot enough to require surgery and skin grafts afterward, Grosjean reached into the flames and pulled one foot from the burning cockpit. Then another.
I would love to say life has been peachy since then. It hasn’t, and unlike cancer, finding peace with my mental health will be a lifelong proposition. But I can tell you one thing that’s changed since that early morning watching a race. I keep a gratitude list. On my phone.
And when feelings of depression and abandonment and inadequacy rear their ugly head, I take out my phone and read from a list I’ve titled “Reasons to Reach Through the Flames.”
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