The Argument with Gravity

Six years ago today, I was sitting in a sauna, the heat rising the way memory does—quietly at first, then all at once. I had come home for Christmas, which meant I had come home to myself, or at least to the version of myself that still believed home could steady a man. I was teaching then, at Hampton University, and teaching has a way of emptying you out. The body learns this before the mind does, so I went to the gym, as men do, believing sweat might restore what the world had taken.

There was another man there, one of those familiar strangers whose name you never learn but whose presence becomes part of the room. We talked the way men talk when they do not expect revelation: about nothing, about the body, about time passing without asking permission. Then he stood to leave. He paused at the door.

There are moments when the world hesitates, when it seems to hold its breath. I have learned that those moments are not mercy. They are warning.

He fell forward, not dramatically, not with any sense of performance, just gravity doing what it has always done. His head struck the wall and then the floor, and the sound was final in a way words are not. It was the sound of something that does not get taken back. Blood followed immediately, as if the body knew before the rest of us did what had occurred.

I knew, or thought I knew, that he was dead.

Death has a particular violence, not only in what it does to the body, but in what it demands of the living. When he fell, I stepped over him not out of cruelty but out of terror, the kind that empties you of feeling and leaves only function behind. I called 911. I spoke clearly. I followed instructions. I did what one does when the soul retreats and leaves the body to manage logistics.

Others came running. A medical professional appeared, summoned by necessity. Hands pressed down, voices sharpened, time bent. I dressed and left, carrying with me the sound of his skull meeting the floor—a sound that would not ask my permission before returning.

Years passed.

One afternoon, in a restaurant, I saw him again, alive, seated with his wife, ordinary in the way survival often is. I approached him and told him that I was the person who had called 911 the day he fainted at the gym. We spoke politely, almost casually, the way people do when they share a moment but not yet its meaning. At the time, I did not understand that we were both survivors of the same afternoon.

And then today, six years to the day, I saw him again.

We were at the gym. He approached me gently, as though aware that memory is a fragile thing. He reminded me of who he was, and then he told me what I had never known: that after he collapsed, he spent seven days in the ICU, seven days hovering between this world and whatever waits when the body loses its argument with gravity.

As he spoke, I stood there listening, aware that I was speaking to a man I had once believed was gone. A man whose death I had rehearsed in my mind for years. A man who had lived, while I carried the echo of his fall as though it were a verdict. Death, I realized, does not always announce itself with finality. Sometimes it merely pauses, long enough to leave a mark on everyone who passes through its shadow.

We talk about God as though God lives only in churches, as though God requires our language or our certainty. But if God exists, and I believe God does, then God exists in the unbearable closeness of death, in the thin margin between breath and silence, in the fact that a man can fall, bleed, vanish from consciousness, and still return.

What struck me was not only that he lived, but that I had learned something without knowing it: that death is not always an ending, but it is always a teacher. It teaches you how fragile the body is. It teaches you how limited your certainty can be. And if you are willing, it teaches you how astonishing it is that we are still here at all.

We are taught to believe that life is guaranteed, that tomorrow is obedient. It is not. Life is a continual reprieve, granted moment by moment, and often without explanation.

Six years ago, I watched a man fall and believed I had witnessed the end of a story. Today, I learned that I had only seen a chapter close. And perhaps that is the lesson, not that death is defeated, but that meaning persists, stubbornly, even in its shadow.

And that, I think, is grace.