I’ve been given a great gift, and now I’m trying to figure out how to unwrap it.

I met with the cardiologist the other day, exactly three months after I had an almost-fatal heart attack. He told me, again, how very close I had come to not making it. And he told me as well that if I had gotten to the ER even five minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have made it. And then he added, maybe for the first time, or maybe it was the first time I really listened, that the doctors who feverishly worked on me after I got to the ER thought at several instances I wasn’t going to make it.  

But then, in a reasonably quick segue, the cardiologist began telling me how very good I am doing now, 90 days out. How I have made a “fantastic” recovery and how I can now do pretty much anything I used to do and how my heart is probably as good as it was before the attack and it’s possible, because of the stent they inserted, better than it’s been in a few years.

Maybe not surprisingly, I’m having difficulty then juggling two seemingly contradictory concepts. One is that I almost died yet now I feel mostly normal. The other is that I am … mostly normal but I almost died. How can that be?

The normalcy is all around me. It’s spring now, after the winter of my near-death, everything in glorious bloom and I am going for brisk walks, even jogging a bit (never mind that my legs remain a little wobbly and my breathing a bit labored). I do pushups and squats and I’m thinking of going back to the gym.    

I’m also reading novels, watching television, typing at my laptop, going out to dinner, writing, attending performances, hanging out with friends, eating the occasional pizza. And we’re busy planning a trip to Greece next fall to see our daughter run from Marathon to Athens, the original 26.2-mile path.

That new year’s weekend, that crushing pain in my chest, that mad dash to the ER, are starting to seem almost distant, a story I tell, a dramatic anecdote. It was a terrible, terrifying time, and yet despite it all—or maybe because of it all—I think I want to hold tight to those images. I want to keep remembering those memories.

If I indeed have been given what amounts to this second chance at life, I want to, as a friend gently suggested, now greet each day with gratitude. That’s not easy, particularly on a morning when I’ve had a bad night sleeping. But I want to keep trying, keep telling that story, maybe most of all, to myself.