Near-Death Experience (Paul Wiesinger)

This blog is dedicated to a slightly different topic than a normal blog might be. But this is not a normal blog. All too gladly I would write now quite normally about my week. Share my new experiences here and write about our day trips. But this week was not normal. Nothing will ever be normal again. This blog is about nothing less than the sheer cold death that befell me.

The story begins on a very ordinary Tuesday morning. I got up early to avoid being late for work and had my normal breakfast. My perhaps last breakfast as it turned out later. Arrived in the office I immediately started to work. But in the middle of my working shift something strange happened. My colleague Alejandro dropped his pen. The pen fell on the cold dirty floor. Looking back, this was already a harbinger of the devil and a foreshadowing of what would happen to me later that day. As naive as I was, I did not recognize the signs and continued my work as if nothing had happened. Later I went to the beach with my apartment mates, friends and family, Daniel, Lena and Anita before we headed back home.

Exhausted from a long and exciting day, I went into the shower. As absurd as life can be sometimes, it would never occur to me that a shower could possibly be responsible for my passing. Refreshed, I wanted to leave the shower and put my right foot on the cold wet tile floor. And there fate hit me like an arrow right between the eyes. The floor was slippery. Was it due to desperation or stupidity, I don't know, but I put also my left foot on the tile floor to keep my balance. But the irreversible happened and fate took its course. I fell. Suddenly, time seemed to almost stand still, I fell as if in slow motion. In my mind's eye I saw my whole life pass by. I wanted to scream loudly for help but there was nothing. As if frozen, I could not give a cry for help and had no chance to survive. In a last pathetic attempt to save my life, I spread out my arms in the hope of getting a hold of something that would save me from a fatal impact on the ground. But in the end it was also this hopeless act that saved my life. I can neither understand it nor put it into words, but during my fall I somehow managed to get my hands on the bathroom shelf and hold on to it. I was able to avoid death through this hopeless act and escape the afterlife.

I have the unlikely hope that after this traumatic event I can continue my life at least a bit as it was before. Although I know this is impossible now that I have looked death directly in the eye. I have seen what is beyond the border of life and nearly crossed the line. This experience will accompany me until the end of my days.