There is an invisible club out there, a web of people who have undergone the same transformative experience.
We escaped death.
Some of us survived a crash or accident; others, criminal violence. Me, I was in a freak hiking mishap. But one way or another, we nearly died — but didn't.
On Aug. 6, two young women who survived a Lake Michigan sailboat tragedy joined our numbers. They were rescued after spending nearly five hours in the cold water. One of the two young men with them drowned; the other is still missing.
As the young women go on with the lives they so nearly lost, they will make their own paths through shock, grief and the task of making sense, and possibly meaning, out of what happened.
They will join those who already have.
Laura Maychruk, of River Forest, was stabbed in the back 10 times by a man who attacked her on a street in Washington, D.C. Maychruk, then 27 and working as a researcher for the Tribune, was so close to death when she got to the hospital that emergency room doctors rushed into the parking lot and cut open her chest while she was conscious to insert tubes in her collapsed lungs.
But she survived. And then she upended everything.
She returned to Chicago, quit her Tribune job here, opened the Buzz Café in Oak Park and turned it into a center of the village's community life. She rethought her intention not to have children; she and her husband now have four.
"It changed so many things in my life," said Maychruk, now 40. "The decisions I made from then moving forward were totally based on different things.
"It is so valuable that you can really grip how wonderful your life is and how important every minute is. I'm so thankful."
So is Bill Lipsit, of Niagara Falls, Ontario. In 2001, he and his father and a friend survived after their scuba dive boat sank off the Gulf Coast of Florida. They spent 46 terrifying hours floating with a few life preservers and bumpers in shark-infested, stormy waters before they were spotted by a search plane.
Between praying and tilting his head back to drink rainwater, Lipsit re-evaluated his life. Up to then, it had been a somewhat wild one; he had spent his time after work drinking with buddies instead of with his family.
But there in the water, "literally all I could think of was my wife and my kids," said Lipsit, 46, manager of a trucking company. "It's amazing how quick it can open your eyes when you're staring at death. You look at your life and realize how stupid you were."
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