October 21, 2025 • 45 mins
When Maggie Slepian flipped her kayak on Montana’s Gallatin River, she found herself trapped underwater, fighting to escape a spray skirt she had never practiced removing. In those harrowing moments, she felt time slow down, her thoughts split between terror, sorrow, and love for her family as she faced the possibility of her final breaths. Surviving the accident left Maggie grappling with PTSD, grief, and the loss of the friend who had pulled her from the water. In this episode of Alive Again, Maggie reflects on her journey from an “indoor child” to an outdoor adventurer, the dangerous drive for validation that pushed her into risk, and the hard-won lesson that the people who love you don’t need you to prove yourself—they love you for who you are.
Maggie wrote about her story for Longreads, which you can read here.
Story Producer: Kate Sweeney
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Maggie Slapien. When I was thirty one
years old, I flipped my boat and nearly drowned. There's
a very real finish line here, and that is how
long can a human body survive without breathing. I can't
think of any other time that you're about to die
(00:39):
where you have just a few minutes left and you
know it. In the five years since then, I have
grappled with what it means to have survived and why
I went on the river in the first place.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:19):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener and discretion as advised.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I grew up in suburban New Hampshire as kind of
what I would characterize as an indoor child. I didn't
like the outside. I didn't like feeling too cold, I
didn't like feeling too hot. I was kind of bookish.
I read voraciously, did pretty well in school. I never
felt like I sit in growing up. I had social
(02:00):
issues through high school, didn't have a lot of friends
for all intents and purposes. By the time I was
twenty two and I graduated with an English degree, I
had truly never lived outside of this one town that
I grew up into, New Hampshire, and that went to college.
And by the time I graduated college, I had started
running and I started hiking in the White Mountains in
New Hampshire. I started hiking with my dad, doing day hikes,
(02:24):
and the feeling that I got from being outside wasn't
anything that I'd encountered before. In the ways if you
go from under the tree canopy, because everything's quite treated
in until a certain elevation, to this alpine zone, and
this switch once you get up there happens really quickly
as you keep climbing and the trees go from big, towering,
(02:45):
dense canopies overhead, and then you break tree line and
you can see everything around you. I felt powerful and
I felt good at it, and I felt this sense
of accomplishment, and it was so novel to me that
this whole world existed just a couple hours away. And
I thought, oh my god, I think I found something
(03:06):
I really like, and I think I loved being outdoors.
And I would spend my weekdays in classes thinking about,
like plotting how I could get back out into the
White Mountains and go hiking for the weekend. And so
my biggest dream in my final semester of college was
how do I experience more of this thing that I
found that I loved. Three days after I graduated college,
(03:29):
I packed up my little Sedan and I drove out
to Wyoming to start working in Yellowstone as the horseback guide.
And I never left the western part of the country.
I had been living in those Men, Montana for about
seven years. In twenty nineteen, I really started ramping up
(03:52):
what I was doing outside, and I wanted to do
everything and be really good. I had developed exercise induced asthma,
and in a mountain town like this, at least for
me in my early to mid twenties, your social life
was contingent on your ability to keep up and to
have these skills for different outdoor sports, and I had
(04:12):
a hard time keeping up with my cordio abilities. I
could do it, but my ability to keep up was
just lesser than the community around me, which is all
like a wonderful, supportive group of girls and guys who
just loved to get after it outside. So at this
time in twenty nineteen, I was really getting my foot
in the door to a different activity levels and wanting
(04:35):
to say yes to every invitation and still maintaining kind
of this desire I think that came from childhood and
early adulthood, feeling like I didn't have a strong social
group through high school and even early college, and so
this desire to fit in still kind of ran a
(04:56):
lot of my decision making. A lot of what I
did to kind of counter being a non impressive athlete
was being brave and saying yes to everything. Maybe I'll
be last biking up the trail, but I'll be the
first person to descend because I'm not scared of wrecking
my mountain bike. And so this desire to keep up
was kind of in full force at this point, and
(05:19):
I kind of felt like, Okay, I can do all
the things on land. I'm missing a water sport here,
and so I had picked up this older river runner
boat called a wave sport Frankensteign. It was about fifteen
years old when I got up for one hundred dollars
out of pawn shop. Through it in the back of
my truck. It was made for rolling and tipping. It
had very low stability. It's not a recreational boat. It's
(05:41):
like a long, lean river running boat. One of my
climbing partners and a fairly good friend at that point,
texted me and asked me if I wanted to go
out kayaking. At this point in the spring, I was
just desperate to do anything because spring out here is
pretty icy and crappy and you'll have one nice day
that then it sleeps the next day and the trails
(06:03):
are bad. And I was just going crazy doing my
workouts in the climbing gym and I just wanted something
to do. And so my friend texted and he said,
let's go kayaking, like I want to run this section
of the Gallaton River, and I said, yes, I have
a boat. Absolutely. Canden had been a climbing partner for
(06:24):
the last couple of years. He was really strong. We
would hang out. We want hiking. We are running together,
and he was also kind of tricky to pin down.
I knew I liked him as a friend. I probably
also had a crush on him from the perspective of
he is totally impossible to really get through too. And
(06:44):
so when he did reach out and be like, hey,
let's go to the hot springs, let's go to yoga, like, oh, absolutely,
like an invitation from Canaan. Because he's hard to get
it did not occur to me to say, I'm not
really comfortable running the Gallaton in May. It's not a
beginner friendly section. There's a lot of hazards on the water.
At that time, the water is basically pure snow melt.
(07:04):
The hazards are called strainers, which are these big kind
of debris blockades that get carried down the river. Think
of them like biaber dams. Fast moving water can go through,
but a boat can't. So if you happen to flip
your boat and you get pinned against the strainer, you
are being held in place underwater, and it's just it's
a reason for fatalities on the river, especially for inexperienced people.
(07:30):
But I didn't care. I said, yes, absolutely, so we
pull up in my truck and he starts to unload
the boats, and I walk down to the river, sliding
a little bit in the mud, and for the first time,
I'm kind of seeing that it's moving faster than I
(07:51):
thought it would. And this is the first time where
it had a little bit of doubt in my mind,
like maybe this is not a great idea, and I
don't actually really know how to kayak on a fast
moving river. All of my experience at this point is
reservoirs and calm lakes, and I definitely should it go
(08:15):
boating here. But I'm a good swimmer and I've never
been scared of water before. He had a spray skirt
for me, and the spray skirt is utilized to keep
splashing water out of the boat. And it's basically this
super tight think of like a high waisted skirt with
(08:37):
this big flap of waterproof or highly water resisted in
the uprane that stretches around and so you wear it
around your waist and then you stretch it around the
cockpit of your boat and it blocks water from getting it,
and it also if you don't know what you're doing,
it blocks you from getting out.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Of your boat.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
And so he put the spray skirt around my cockpit,
the cockpit to my boat, pad it over my waist
and got into the boat. And then he said, do
you want to practice pulling it? And I said, I
don't know. It's pretty tight. I'm not sure. I think
I'll be fine because I just wanted to do it.
I was feeling a little bit anxious at this point,
and I just wanted to get on the water, and
I didn't want to not be able to pull the
(09:17):
skirt on land, which was, of course, in hindsight, the
stupidest thing I could possibly be describing right now. But
I didn't want him to seem me not be able
to pull the skirt because it would mean that the
plants would be ruined. He's also a ripper guide and
had done whitewater rescue, and it's hard enough to get
(09:38):
kidin to invite me to do anything. So I'm just
going to go for it because every other time I've
done anything that's always been fine. He's like, okay, he
trusted me. I'd push off the bank into the water,
and right away it's too fast. My boat's being wra
(10:00):
so I decide it's a tippy boat. It's an outdated geometry,
and I didn't have the reflexes to keep it stable,
and I didn't know. Everything I was doing with my
paddles seemed to make it worse, and it was fast,
and I remember looking over at the bank and being like, Okay,
I just want to be out of this boat. I
don't want to do this, and then realizing I actually
(10:24):
can't get to the bank. This is too fast and
I can't risk tipping my boat trying to get out
of this current that I'm I don't have the reflexes
to counter what the water is doing to my boat
because I don't have the experience. It was out of
control and it was too tippy, and the spray skirt
felt like it was suffocating me because it was so tight.
(10:45):
And I was stressed at this point because I was like, Okay,
I think I can do this, but I don't know,
and this is too fast and oh my god, and
the idea that I'm wearing this spray skirt that is
essentially trapping me in the boat kind of pops right
into my head. I think, Oh, you definitely can't tip
your boat over because you were wearing a spray skirt,
so all these things are already in my head, and
(11:05):
I was like, don't be scared of water. You know
you're a good swimmer. You've never been scared of water before.
Just calm down. It's got to be fine, because that's
always fine. And so we're about ten minutes downriver and
he's behind me, and I hear him yell to stay
to the left, and then I turned around to hear him,
(11:26):
and when I turned back, I was pulled into the
right hand channel and I was heading right towards a strainer,
one of those big damn like blockades of just debris,
like big jagged logs and branches and like dead trees,
and the top of the strainer was this big dead tree.
(11:51):
In a panic, because I didn't have any experience and
I didn't know what to do, I put my hand out,
threw my hand out, I hit the tree super hard,
and my boat flipped. Oh my god, Oh my god,
oh shit, I'm in so much trouble right now. The
(12:13):
water was freezing that it's felt the flood of water
go down my jacket, go up my nose. And I
see that I'm moving really fast underwater. I am upside
down in the boat and the water's really bright because
it's sunny out, and I can see these rocks bouncing,
and I can see the bottom of the river, and
(12:36):
right away my brain starts thinking, okay, your countdown clock
has started. To roll a boat, you snap your hips
really hard into the side of your boat and you
leverage with your paddle at the same time, and that
rolls your boat. I don't know how to roll a boat.
I've never been trained. People take row clinics, they practice
in controlled situations, they practice in pools, so when they
(12:58):
get into situations like this on a river, they can
roll their boat like its second nature. And I don't
have that skill. And so I throw my hips in
to the side of the boat. It rocks a little bit,
nothing happened, still moving down river upside down, but they
don't have a paddle because I have lost it. When
I hit the tree, throw my hips into the boat again,
it rocks a little more. But I'm also using energy,
(13:21):
and so I'm trying to be pragmatic as I'm starting
to panic and thinking, Okay, if you're using this much energy,
you are going to lose more time. I started feeling
that feeling in my chest where you're underwater for too long,
and so I think, Okay, pull the spray skirt and
(13:41):
get the fuck out of the boat and do what's
called a wet exit, where you'll bring your knees into
your chest, you'll push against your boat, you'll release the
spray skirt, and you'll come out upside down and then
pop out of the water. And so I start grabbing
for the grab you but my fingers are really thick
in the knear being gloves, and I'm also underwater, and
(14:02):
I'm really dysory. I did and I have again no
muscle memory, and so I can't find the grab loop
for this unfamiliar spray skirt to release it to let
myself out of the boat. I finally do feel it,
and I have this sense of relief, like, Okay, here's
the grab handle, just pull it and get out of
the boat. And I pull it as hard as I can.
(14:25):
It's not releasing the sprays skirt. It's too tight. I
didn't practice on shore. I don't know what it feels like.
And so my last last resort, because the grab handle's
not working, I think maybe I can just release it
around the edges, but this seal is so tight around
the edges of the cockpit, and my fingers are like
really fat and clumsy, and I'm panicking, so I don't
(14:47):
have the same precision of movement. Nothing's releasing. And then
I really think, Okay, you made your final mistake. This
might actually be the time that you don't make get
(15:11):
and I felt really, really sad. Unless you've been buried
in an avalanche or trapped in a burning building without
knowing if they're going to be rescued, I can't think
of any other time that you're about to die where
you have just a few minutes left and you know it.
(15:36):
The thoughts that you have with enough time to think
about the fact that you are about to die, we're
so much bigger and more impactful than how many tens
of thousands of thoughts to go through her head each day.
And one of those thoughts is your time is actually
running out. And that awareness of it felt like I
(15:58):
had punctured my brain with a nail or something, and
I started just feeling this deep final sorrow. This is
the last thing that I chose to do, and there
is no point to me having done this. I didn't
(16:18):
have to say yes to this. I could have been
at home right now, I could have been at the
climbing gym, lamenting the fact that the trails are still icy,
and my dad had just his cancer had relapsed months before.
My family was already having a really hard time. I
just thought, I did this to them, and what is
this going to do to them? And I just felt
I loved my family and they had always kind of
(16:40):
wondered why I pursued these things, and I thought, I'm
so sorry. I hope that they know that I didn't
mean to do this. Then I thought, one more time,
you have to just try one more time. I throw
(17:01):
my hips really hard, as hard as I can, into
the side of the boat. I'd push with my hands
against the water because I don't have a paddle, and
I can get one side of my face out of
the water that I had this path gurgling terrible breath
of air through one corner of my mouth less. So
(17:22):
the pain of continuing progress of drowning is the steer
you're underwater. We've all been underwater before, and then as
that hour glass goes down, you feel that pressure in
your chest where maybe you have gone down and touched
the bottom of the deepest part of the pool. Or
(17:43):
you've been hunting around because your watch fell, or you're
trying to find your kids ring on the bottom of
the pool, and by the time you find it, you've
been underwater a little too long for how long it's
going to take you to get back up, And you
feel that pressure in your chest as you're ticking up
towards the surface, and you're like, man, I just want
to get to the top of this. And then you
when you break freeing, you can breathe, and then it's
a great feeling. But that feeling of pressure in your
(18:04):
chest without the release is is horrifying. And so that
feeling of pressure in my chest starts a couple you know,
(18:28):
maybe maybe sixty seconds in because I didn't even have
time to take a big breath of air before I
went under. Then that feeling of pressure in my chest
starts to feel like a burning. My eyes start seeing spots,
there's this weird ache in the back of your head,
and then there's this really deep, hollow, bad feeling in
(18:50):
your chest that almost feels like someone's pressing against your lungs,
and adviies they feel like they're being flattened in that feeling,
combined with the terror of knowing that the time has
run out is the last thing that I remember and
(19:11):
feel underwater. And then I open my eyes and I'm
looking at the sky and I'm hearing the river, and
(19:32):
I'm feeling this pressure across my chest and it's Hayden.
He has me in a lifeguard drag that I know
from being a lifeguard, and it's a whitewater rescue carrie
for pulling someone out of the water. I'm staring at
the sky and choking on water and gagging, but I'm
(19:54):
not dead. And it doesn't make any sense because that
nail in my brain, the idea of you are thinking
your last thoughts is still in my brain, and so
I can't quite make sense of what I'm seeing and feeling.
And then I realized he got to me. He pulled
me out of the boat. So I push away and
(20:18):
I swim into the eddy and I dragged myself onto
the bank and just fake, Oh, why God, that it
didn't happen. It didn't happen, You didn't die, it didn't happen.
Those were not your last thoughts. You're not dead. And
he climbs out of the water and just were on
(20:40):
the bank and I'm trying to stand up, because part
of my persona is that I pretend that nothing's wrong. Ever,
so I try to stand up. I try to make
a joke out of it. I can't stand up. My
leg buck while I throw up river water onto the bank,
and I am in shock. I think I can't stop shaking.
(21:05):
We have to get back to the truck. But part
of my desire to be positioned as fearless is to
act light, and so I'm clearly incredibly shaken. I can't
stop shaking. He's shaky, he telled me. He thinks I
was a gonner. He is staring at me, he's trying
to he's looking at my pupils. He's seeing that I'm
(21:26):
in shock. I fake him for getting to me in time.
We walk in silence down this dirt road until we
get to one of the trucks and get to his truck,
and we don't say anything. I think I ask him
if he wants to stop and get coffee on the
(21:46):
way back. I'm determined to not see him affected by this.
And we get a coffee, which is weird, and then
he leaves me on my truck. I can't start my
truck because I once I'm alone in there. I don't
know where the gas pedal is, I don't know where
the break is. I put my foot on the gas
(22:07):
and nothing happens. I realize I have to turn the
truck on. I can't can't in the ignition because I'm
shaking so hard. I finally drive with my hands on
ten and two the twenty five minutes back to my house,
and I just dropped all my disgusting clothing in the entryway.
(22:30):
I kind of walk in a daze into my room.
I smell like a river, and I can't take a
shower because the water sound is so scary that I
can't get into the shower, and so I just put
on sweatpants and I take out my computer because I
(22:52):
work remotely for this online publisher, and I start doing
work because I think, Okay, you are not dead, so
you need to be productive, which is insane. And I
answer emails for my work, and I write the weekly
newsletter because I can't. These are things that don't take
(23:13):
much thought. I can't do any editing work. I can't
write any of my articles. I send out a few
text messages to friends, one of whom had told me
to not go on the water that day. She was
a voter, and she said, I don't think you're taking
the gallaton seriously enough. And I texted her and I
said something along the lines of uh huh, almost drowned.
(23:34):
You were right, because I am determined in my head
to make this not a thing. And I am brave,
I am unaffected. Sure I can get into bad situations
and nothing's going to impact me because what I'm known
for is be fearless. And of course she's concerned, and
(23:55):
I'd say, don't worry about it, don't want to talk
about it. Tell a few more friends, send down messages
for a pot luck that I'm posting that I don't cancel,
because again, my reaction is entirely to be unaffected. That night,
I keep jolting awake because I can't breathe. The next night,
(24:19):
I can't sleep through the night because I wake up suffocating,
and sometimes I actually have my face in my elbow
or in a pillow. When you're asleep, maybe you do
the same thing, but you just roll over, you turn
your face up, and you don't wake up because your
body is like bro, I can't breathe with their face
in the pillow, and so you just roll over and
you don't notice. And for me, my body not being
(24:41):
able to breathe because my face is in the pillow
jolts me awake in a panic. I am scared of
loud noises. I'm jumpy. I'm displaying PTSD but refusing to
acknowledge it. I host this pot luck dinner. My strongest
memory from that dinner is being in a daze. And
(25:03):
I've asked friends about this recently, and they say that
I was being my usual avoidance self and I was
pretending everything was fine. They also say I look dead
behind the eyes. At one point, I take some food
scraps out back to put in the crampost bit and
my house is really loud. I have a dozen friends
over for dinner, and when I pull the slider shut
(25:24):
behind me, it goes from loud in my house to quiet,
and it's dark and I have a panic attack, which
was the first one, but there were more to follow.
It reminds my brain somewhere, with that spike driven into
my brain, that I went from above water where it
(25:46):
was loud, because the river is very loud that day,
with how faust it's moving to underwater where it's silent,
and I have a panic attack from hearing it go
from loud to quiet. And the same thing happens when
the shower goes from on to shut off. Even if
there's loud music and I shut the door, anything that
goes from loud to quiet in an instant sends me
(26:08):
into the debilitating panic attack. Over the next couple days
or weeks, friends will try to bring it up to
me because they've been talking amongst themselves. My best friend
out here, Haley, asked me to ride bikes to a
coffee shop because she knows that it's easier than sitting
(26:29):
me down and asking directly to my face, and so
she's peddling. It's you know, it's probably early June at
this point, and she's peddling behind me. We're going to
go work remotely from a coffee shop near my house.
And she brings it up and she asks if I
have any feelings about it, and if I want to
talk about it, and I snapped at her and I said,
I told you I don't want to talk about it.
(26:51):
I know what I did. I know I made a mistake.
And she doesn't ask again, and all this time now
I'm pretending I'm okay, and which of course I'm not.
I call my mom on my way to the grocery
store because I can't sit down and do anything without
a distraction, and I call her through my truck speakers
(27:13):
and I tell her very quickly, I had a bad
accident voting. I didn't know if I was going to
make it. I love you, I'm sorry, I won't do
this again, and I brush over it. She can tell
there's more of the situation that I'm saying, but I'm
again not giving anyone a chance to really get in there.
But in my head, my brain felt like it was
split into two pieces. One of those pieces was where
(27:39):
I had died. The idea that I'm having my final
thoughts is so stuck in my brain that I can't
tell what's real and what's not. And was that a
yoga class with some friends? And I remember we were
in down dog and I'm looking at my hand from
the mat, And then suddenly I'm wondering what flowers did
(28:00):
my mom choose? What did the font on the program
look like for my memorial service? What were the logistics
of it? Did they have the memorial service in Montana
where I live or did they have it on the
East coast? My mom doesn't fly. Did she fly out
to Montana to take care of my stuff? What has
happened to all these things that I own? And who
(28:23):
showed up to my memorial? Did my friends go back east?
All these things are happening in my head during this
yoga flow to excruciating detail. Wondering about the font on
the program from my memorial service. I remember wondering and
hoping that it wasn't a curly cute font, and then
(28:43):
I snapped out of it, and everyone's in child's post
and I'm stilling downward Dog and I'm in yoga and
I'm not dead. And this happens every single day. These
logistics of my death are in my head because I
had those big thoughts that were or that any thoughts
I've ever had, and they were the thought of these
are your last thoughts. My brain has split into these
(29:07):
two places that I don't really tell people around me,
but I realize I've been spacing out, and so I'll
just tell them, oh, sorry, can you repeat that? Or
I'll be on my computer and realize I've just been
staring at it or read the same sentence over and over,
or I'm standing in front of my mailbox with my
mail key lost in the logistics of the impact of
my death. I tell people off handedly that I'm going
(29:31):
to take a role clinic in the spring for the summer,
and I'm going to get back in my boat and
I'm going to become a really good white water boater.
And there's no way I'm getting back in this boat.
Like I've done with a lot of other things, I
just push it down, and I accept that my brain
feels split, and I accept that I'm scared to go
into running water, and that I still flinch when water
(29:52):
hits my face in the shower, and that sometimes I
forget that I haven't died. But for the most part,
I just bury it and becomes another anecdote. Cayden and
I have become much closer. We're never dating or anything.
It's just this understanding of someone else who has been
(30:14):
through this event with you, and no one else was there,
no one else did what he did and rescued me,
and so I have this understandable loyalty and allegiance to
him as someone who has saved me. Caden and I
are both pretty avoided people we both have, you know,
(30:36):
some kind of barrier up at one point that he
just wants to apologize and he brought me on the
river that day and it's it's his fault and I just,
you know, mumbled through a response and tell him that
it's it's fine. I made the choice too. In my head,
I think at some point I am going to sit
down with him and we're going to talk about this
(30:56):
and we are I am going to thank him for
what he did. I'm going to say him for saving me.
But he's still himself and he's still flaky. I keep thinking,
in the spring of the summer, I'm really going to
like tell him what's been going on in my brain
and how hard this has been for me. And once
it's voting season again, like I'm going to take a
role clinic with you know, whitewater trainers at a pool
(31:19):
and a controlled environment, and I'm going to get over
the sphere and then maybe and then I will go
voting again. He was supposed to meet me for this
yoga class that we had planned and he hadn't shown up,
and I was I hadn't heard from you in a
couple of days, and I was annoyed, like, you know,
I care about this person, but he's also so flaky
(31:39):
and it hurts my feelings. And I had a voicemail
from a mutual friend. This is a really nice guy,
and he told me that I should go to the
hospital because Cayden was there and he was about to
be pulled off life support. And I went to the
(32:05):
hospital and he's hooked up to machines and he is
about to be pulled off the machines because he's young
and he's strong, and there he's an organ donor. And
I did at that point thank him for what he
(32:27):
had done for me, but it was too late, and
then he was gone. He was the only person who
(32:51):
was there. And so you go through this traumatic event,
even if you pretend you're not traumatized by it, and
you have one another person who was there, and then
that person is suddenly gone and you cared about them
on every level. What if I had done something different
with him? What if I hadn't been annoyed that he
(33:12):
had bailed on yoga class? What if I had just
gone over to his house? And who knows? So you
have all these ideas that, like, could I have returned
that favor of saving his life that he did for me,
and those thoughts just there in my head all the time.
And it's years and years later, after Caden passed away,
(33:40):
I pushed this accident even further away and now now
no one understood. Nobody was there now four and a
half it'll be five years later. Is really when I
started facing it in therapy where they make me do
terrible things like pretend I'm still underwater in the boat,
the awful thing to go through, and I it's not
(34:02):
a fun therapy session, but I have started confronting it.
I didn't want to have thrills or be a white
water boat or I just wanted to be invited. This
is the truth, is that I just at that point
five years ago, like being accepted and included and keeping
(34:26):
that adventurous persona just mattered so much to me that
I that it almost killed me. I look at risk
differently now. My risk assessment had been really skewed from
so many close calls and getting away with it. It
is a lot better than it was because I know
(34:47):
what it's like to lose consciousness and think that it's
over because you made a stupid choice to go boat
a sception of water you should to fit on. And
so I say no to things, or I change my mind,
or I turn around because I love my life and
I'm so grateful for it. I called my mom and
I finally cried about it to her, and I said,
(35:07):
I'm this accident from twenty nineteen was a lot worse
than I told you, and here's what it was like.
And I just I love you guys so much, and
I'm so sorry. And she said, the people who care
about you care about you because of who you are,
not what you've done. And I wish I had just
(35:29):
talked to her when it just happened. But that really
stuck with me. So if I was going to meet
myself how many years ago, fourteen years ago, when I
moved out west for the first time and felt the
need to prove myself, I would tell myself that the
people who love you are going to love you for
who you are and not because of how brief they
think you are. And I think I know that now.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Welcome back This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski and Brent Day and I'm
your host Dan Bush, So Kate another amazing story. It's
another story that's fascinating to me because it goes back
into that anthropological need to belong, that need to fit in.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Wow, even when her friend has given her that door
of like, hey, let's do some you know, let's practice
some roles before we get out there.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
And then in this community where people are like showing
themselves to be bad asses, like, she doesn't want to
not be a bad ass. And at one point I
asked her to like, Okay, what do you tell a
young person. Let's say there's a younger you coming in
and you see her doing or a younger person like
you would you say to her? Rights, I'd have tell
them the same thing my mom told me, which is
like you're enough basically, which sounds like kind of a cliche,
(37:16):
but like in this case, yeah, as you say, it
almost killed her, or not to really feel that.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
The need for external validation might kill you.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Yeah, I mean I think it goes into your teens,
goes into your twenties. You know. I think we've all
been in those situations even as adults, where you don't
want to admit what you don't know, and this is
just an example where your life is on the line.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
What's the rednecks last words?
Speaker 5 (37:42):
Yes, but I mean I think it all, you know,
I think it's It's also just one of those things
where it's like the you're enough. It sounds it sounds
so obvious, but it's something that some people you have
to learn the hard way that like you're not going
like you can't like adventure your way out, or you
(38:03):
can't like fake your way through. Like sometimes people just
have to learn, like I have to be okay with
who I am. Being reckless in order to prove myself
to other people is not going to make me feel accepted.
It's just gonna make me dead.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I hope that's something I can convey to my children
so that they wouldn't but they're not. They're going to
do stupid shit, so you know what I mean, Like,
I hope that that's something I could say, Hey, don't
you don't you you're good enough. You don't need to
get external validation.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, And what both of you are saying, I mean
I'm going to say, like, as I was listening to
Maggie Sleppy and tell the story, I'm thinking like you're
like shouting at this this young person like no.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Stop it, no, don't get in this kayak stop no.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And so yeah, some of us do have to learn
the hard way, but I think that most of us
end up having some difficult experience, not to this extreme
of that being kind of like slapped in our faces
at some point, or we hope we would, and to
your point, Dan of like hoping you can like pass
this on to your child. I think about things about
(39:12):
this a lot, like as a parent, like, yeah, I
have this like enormous love for my child. And I
actually remember there was this moment our whole family was
on like this trip for Christmas at my sister's house,
and I had had food poisoning the night before we flew,
and so I was like up all night with food poisoning.
(39:33):
And then we flew anyway, and I had a baby,
and the baby wasn't sleeping all that night that we arrived,
and so I'm trying to nap on this air mattress
on the floor because we're sleeping on an air mattress
like with my baby. This one like the first day
we're here, and there's actually just like a curtain separating
us from the rest of the family in the living room.
So I'm lying there and I'm not really asleep, and
(39:53):
I like roll over at one point, and the baby's awake,
and I'm like, I just want to be asleep.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
I feel so.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Horrible, and I like rolled into I'm I'm shit you
not Amy Pohler's memoir and I was like, just opened
it up. And I opened it up to a random
page and it's this and Amy polar like writes in
the on the in this book, like and so I
say it a younger Amy. That's so I say to
Amy when I when I when I, when I hear
(40:19):
that criticizing voice in my brain, I say, don't say
that about Amy. She's my friend. And I think that's
a cliche. At that point in my life, I'd never
heard that cliche before, and it hit me like lightning.
And that moment on the floor with my child, I realized, like,
holy shit, my mother had ended every phone call with
(40:39):
when I say I love you, I love you more.
And I wass been like, hah okay, bye, mom.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
No she's not lying.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
My mother does love me more? And oh no, And
I turned to my infant child and I think I
love him more than he's ever going to love himself.
And that struck me and it like cold, you know,
I felt this coldness in the pit of my stomach.
Because you want your own child to understand that the
love that you have for them is like as big
(41:08):
as the universe. It's not just you. So that like
I mean, like frankly, so that like when you're gone,
they still feel that and they still know that even
if there had never been to you somehow, and so
like to make somebody see that fact and not just
be like, oh mom, you know, it can take something.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Nature, whether whether you know people say, oh, you're here
for a reason, We're here to experience trauma, to grow,
like the reason we're on planet Earth and in these
bodies and in you know, in this meat avatars so
that we can experience pain. And that's there's you know,
throughout religion and in Buddhism and everything else. It's an
interesting idea, but I'm you know, I don't I don't
(41:48):
know whether that's true or not. But whether it is
true that that's like if there's any any sort of
you know, meaning to our lives, whether that's true or not,
we do do that we do. My kid, I can
tell them a million times, you know, I love you more,
and I can hope the hell that that they're safe,
and I can try to protect them from that. But
(42:09):
they're gonna do stupid shit. They're gonna get hurt. I
just hope they don't die, you know. I hope that
they can can't experience it and get to the other side.
We were just it's funny. We were just in the
men's room, and I was for some reason, I was
reminded of all these lately, all these experiences of me
ever having put my foot in my mouth, or ever
(42:29):
having embarrassed myself, or ever having done something stupid. For
some reason, that was I've been in this weird life
review lately. The weirdest time is at four in the morning.
Be like, why did I say that to them in
the fourth grade?
Speaker 5 (42:39):
You know, I called that the four am special. Yeah,
it's like, oh, it's time.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
When you think about it, Like so much of our socialization,
the reason you do, hazing is a terrible word. When
I was in the Army, goal good natured teasing. You know,
we'd be out on the track, out in the field
and the new recruit comes in and you're like, could
you go over to that other track, which is like
a track is a military vehicle where you have all
your radio equipment. And we'd say, could you go over
(43:07):
to that other track and get us a box of
grid coordinates? Grid coordinator is just a coordinate and map,
And of course the private is like, yes, I'll go
get it, you know, and then they run off and
get it and you have a good laugh, and then
they come back and you go they didn't have any
you know, you see them trying to and then you're
you're like, welcome to the club. Come on, you know,
don't do dumb things. You can always ask ask a question,
(43:28):
you know. I think that's tells you that no, that's
what we would do is question of me. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Because it's a structure where you're in the high pressure
situation where you're not supposed to ask questions and you're
not supposed to, but we kind of came up with
a way of showing you that it's okay to fuck up.
And you know, you ask a dumb there's no such
(43:48):
thing as a dumb We're going to laugh at you.
Avoid the embarrassment by just asking a question when a
question should be asked, and don't get in a canoe
or kayak and let yourself hit the bottom of the river.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Next time I'm alive again, we meet Frankie Mollinix, who's
near death experience in the Australian Pacific transformed their outlook
on life and self sufficiency.
Speaker 6 (44:12):
I just realized I being sucked down the coastline and
all I can see is an outcropping of rocks, and
then I just see ocean. Every moment feels magnified. I
can feel my body getting more and more tired, and
I think it's that pattern too, of like you have
to figure it out.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Don't let anybody see you crack.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
Needing help and not being able to refuse it showed
me what it is to be human.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dukoski and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett. Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio in engineers A Rima L. K
Ali and Nomes Griffin Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka,
(45:06):
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben love It
and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thank you
to Maggie Sleppion for sharing her amazing story. Maggie is
a full time freelance writer based in Montana. For more
information about Maggie, go to Maggie Sleepion dot com. Alive
Again is a production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures.
(45:28):
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
I v e A g A I N p R
O j E c t at gmail dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Maggie Slapien. When I was thirty one
years old, I flipped my boat and nearly drowned. There's
a very real finish line here, and that is how
long can a human body survive without breathing. I can't
think of any other time that you're about to die
(00:39):
where you have just a few minutes left and you
know it. In the five years since then, I have
grappled with what it means to have survived and why
I went on the river in the first place.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:19):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener and discretion as advised.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I grew up in suburban New Hampshire as kind of
what I would characterize as an indoor child. I didn't
like the outside. I didn't like feeling too cold, I
didn't like feeling too hot. I was kind of bookish.
I read voraciously, did pretty well in school. I never
felt like I sit in growing up. I had social
(02:00):
issues through high school, didn't have a lot of friends
for all intents and purposes. By the time I was
twenty two and I graduated with an English degree, I
had truly never lived outside of this one town that
I grew up into, New Hampshire, and that went to college.
And by the time I graduated college, I had started
running and I started hiking in the White Mountains in
New Hampshire. I started hiking with my dad, doing day hikes,
(02:24):
and the feeling that I got from being outside wasn't
anything that I'd encountered before. In the ways if you
go from under the tree canopy, because everything's quite treated
in until a certain elevation, to this alpine zone, and
this switch once you get up there happens really quickly
as you keep climbing and the trees go from big, towering,
(02:45):
dense canopies overhead, and then you break tree line and
you can see everything around you. I felt powerful and
I felt good at it, and I felt this sense
of accomplishment, and it was so novel to me that
this whole world existed just a couple hours away. And
I thought, oh my god, I think I found something
(03:06):
I really like, and I think I loved being outdoors.
And I would spend my weekdays in classes thinking about,
like plotting how I could get back out into the
White Mountains and go hiking for the weekend. And so
my biggest dream in my final semester of college was
how do I experience more of this thing that I
found that I loved. Three days after I graduated college,
(03:29):
I packed up my little Sedan and I drove out
to Wyoming to start working in Yellowstone as the horseback guide.
And I never left the western part of the country.
I had been living in those Men, Montana for about
seven years. In twenty nineteen, I really started ramping up
(03:52):
what I was doing outside, and I wanted to do
everything and be really good. I had developed exercise induced asthma,
and in a mountain town like this, at least for
me in my early to mid twenties, your social life
was contingent on your ability to keep up and to
have these skills for different outdoor sports, and I had
(04:12):
a hard time keeping up with my cordio abilities. I
could do it, but my ability to keep up was
just lesser than the community around me, which is all
like a wonderful, supportive group of girls and guys who
just loved to get after it outside. So at this
time in twenty nineteen, I was really getting my foot
in the door to a different activity levels and wanting
(04:35):
to say yes to every invitation and still maintaining kind
of this desire I think that came from childhood and
early adulthood, feeling like I didn't have a strong social
group through high school and even early college, and so
this desire to fit in still kind of ran a
(04:56):
lot of my decision making. A lot of what I
did to kind of counter being a non impressive athlete
was being brave and saying yes to everything. Maybe I'll
be last biking up the trail, but I'll be the
first person to descend because I'm not scared of wrecking
my mountain bike. And so this desire to keep up
was kind of in full force at this point, and
(05:19):
I kind of felt like, Okay, I can do all
the things on land. I'm missing a water sport here,
and so I had picked up this older river runner
boat called a wave sport Frankensteign. It was about fifteen
years old when I got up for one hundred dollars
out of pawn shop. Through it in the back of
my truck. It was made for rolling and tipping. It
had very low stability. It's not a recreational boat. It's
(05:41):
like a long, lean river running boat. One of my
climbing partners and a fairly good friend at that point,
texted me and asked me if I wanted to go
out kayaking. At this point in the spring, I was
just desperate to do anything because spring out here is
pretty icy and crappy and you'll have one nice day
that then it sleeps the next day and the trails
(06:03):
are bad. And I was just going crazy doing my
workouts in the climbing gym and I just wanted something
to do. And so my friend texted and he said,
let's go kayaking, like I want to run this section
of the Gallaton River, and I said, yes, I have
a boat. Absolutely. Canden had been a climbing partner for
(06:24):
the last couple of years. He was really strong. We
would hang out. We want hiking. We are running together,
and he was also kind of tricky to pin down.
I knew I liked him as a friend. I probably
also had a crush on him from the perspective of
he is totally impossible to really get through too. And
(06:44):
so when he did reach out and be like, hey,
let's go to the hot springs, let's go to yoga, like, oh, absolutely,
like an invitation from Canaan. Because he's hard to get
it did not occur to me to say, I'm not
really comfortable running the Gallaton in May. It's not a
beginner friendly section. There's a lot of hazards on the water.
At that time, the water is basically pure snow melt.
(07:04):
The hazards are called strainers, which are these big kind
of debris blockades that get carried down the river. Think
of them like biaber dams. Fast moving water can go through,
but a boat can't. So if you happen to flip
your boat and you get pinned against the strainer, you
are being held in place underwater, and it's just it's
a reason for fatalities on the river, especially for inexperienced people.
(07:30):
But I didn't care. I said, yes, absolutely, so we
pull up in my truck and he starts to unload
the boats, and I walk down to the river, sliding
a little bit in the mud, and for the first time,
I'm kind of seeing that it's moving faster than I
(07:51):
thought it would. And this is the first time where
it had a little bit of doubt in my mind,
like maybe this is not a great idea, and I
don't actually really know how to kayak on a fast
moving river. All of my experience at this point is
reservoirs and calm lakes, and I definitely should it go
(08:15):
boating here. But I'm a good swimmer and I've never
been scared of water before. He had a spray skirt
for me, and the spray skirt is utilized to keep
splashing water out of the boat. And it's basically this
super tight think of like a high waisted skirt with
(08:37):
this big flap of waterproof or highly water resisted in
the uprane that stretches around and so you wear it
around your waist and then you stretch it around the
cockpit of your boat and it blocks water from getting it,
and it also if you don't know what you're doing,
it blocks you from getting out.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Of your boat.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
And so he put the spray skirt around my cockpit,
the cockpit to my boat, pad it over my waist
and got into the boat. And then he said, do
you want to practice pulling it? And I said, I
don't know. It's pretty tight. I'm not sure. I think
I'll be fine because I just wanted to do it.
I was feeling a little bit anxious at this point,
and I just wanted to get on the water, and
I didn't want to not be able to pull the
(09:17):
skirt on land, which was, of course, in hindsight, the
stupidest thing I could possibly be describing right now. But
I didn't want him to seem me not be able
to pull the skirt because it would mean that the
plants would be ruined. He's also a ripper guide and
had done whitewater rescue, and it's hard enough to get
(09:38):
kidin to invite me to do anything. So I'm just
going to go for it because every other time I've
done anything that's always been fine. He's like, okay, he
trusted me. I'd push off the bank into the water,
and right away it's too fast. My boat's being wra
(10:00):
so I decide it's a tippy boat. It's an outdated geometry,
and I didn't have the reflexes to keep it stable,
and I didn't know. Everything I was doing with my
paddles seemed to make it worse, and it was fast,
and I remember looking over at the bank and being like, Okay,
I just want to be out of this boat. I
don't want to do this, and then realizing I actually
(10:24):
can't get to the bank. This is too fast and
I can't risk tipping my boat trying to get out
of this current that I'm I don't have the reflexes
to counter what the water is doing to my boat
because I don't have the experience. It was out of
control and it was too tippy, and the spray skirt
felt like it was suffocating me because it was so tight.
(10:45):
And I was stressed at this point because I was like, Okay,
I think I can do this, but I don't know,
and this is too fast and oh my god, and
the idea that I'm wearing this spray skirt that is
essentially trapping me in the boat kind of pops right
into my head. I think, Oh, you definitely can't tip
your boat over because you were wearing a spray skirt,
so all these things are already in my head, and
(11:05):
I was like, don't be scared of water. You know
you're a good swimmer. You've never been scared of water before.
Just calm down. It's got to be fine, because that's
always fine. And so we're about ten minutes downriver and
he's behind me, and I hear him yell to stay
to the left, and then I turned around to hear him,
(11:26):
and when I turned back, I was pulled into the
right hand channel and I was heading right towards a strainer,
one of those big damn like blockades of just debris,
like big jagged logs and branches and like dead trees,
and the top of the strainer was this big dead tree.
(11:51):
In a panic, because I didn't have any experience and
I didn't know what to do, I put my hand out,
threw my hand out, I hit the tree super hard,
and my boat flipped. Oh my god, Oh my god,
oh shit, I'm in so much trouble right now. The
(12:13):
water was freezing that it's felt the flood of water
go down my jacket, go up my nose. And I
see that I'm moving really fast underwater. I am upside
down in the boat and the water's really bright because
it's sunny out, and I can see these rocks bouncing,
and I can see the bottom of the river, and
(12:36):
right away my brain starts thinking, okay, your countdown clock
has started. To roll a boat, you snap your hips
really hard into the side of your boat and you
leverage with your paddle at the same time, and that
rolls your boat. I don't know how to roll a boat.
I've never been trained. People take row clinics, they practice
in controlled situations, they practice in pools, so when they
(12:58):
get into situations like this on a river, they can
roll their boat like its second nature. And I don't
have that skill. And so I throw my hips in
to the side of the boat. It rocks a little bit,
nothing happened, still moving down river upside down, but they
don't have a paddle because I have lost it. When
I hit the tree, throw my hips into the boat again,
it rocks a little more. But I'm also using energy,
(13:21):
and so I'm trying to be pragmatic as I'm starting
to panic and thinking, Okay, if you're using this much energy,
you are going to lose more time. I started feeling
that feeling in my chest where you're underwater for too long,
and so I think, Okay, pull the spray skirt and
(13:41):
get the fuck out of the boat and do what's
called a wet exit, where you'll bring your knees into
your chest, you'll push against your boat, you'll release the
spray skirt, and you'll come out upside down and then
pop out of the water. And so I start grabbing
for the grab you but my fingers are really thick
in the knear being gloves, and I'm also underwater, and
(14:02):
I'm really dysory. I did and I have again no
muscle memory, and so I can't find the grab loop
for this unfamiliar spray skirt to release it to let
myself out of the boat. I finally do feel it,
and I have this sense of relief, like, Okay, here's
the grab handle, just pull it and get out of
the boat. And I pull it as hard as I can.
(14:25):
It's not releasing the sprays skirt. It's too tight. I
didn't practice on shore. I don't know what it feels like.
And so my last last resort, because the grab handle's
not working, I think maybe I can just release it
around the edges, but this seal is so tight around
the edges of the cockpit, and my fingers are like
really fat and clumsy, and I'm panicking, so I don't
(14:47):
have the same precision of movement. Nothing's releasing. And then
I really think, Okay, you made your final mistake. This
might actually be the time that you don't make get
(15:11):
and I felt really, really sad. Unless you've been buried
in an avalanche or trapped in a burning building without
knowing if they're going to be rescued, I can't think
of any other time that you're about to die where
you have just a few minutes left and you know it.
(15:36):
The thoughts that you have with enough time to think
about the fact that you are about to die, we're
so much bigger and more impactful than how many tens
of thousands of thoughts to go through her head each day.
And one of those thoughts is your time is actually
running out. And that awareness of it felt like I
(15:58):
had punctured my brain with a nail or something, and
I started just feeling this deep final sorrow. This is
the last thing that I chose to do, and there
is no point to me having done this. I didn't
(16:18):
have to say yes to this. I could have been
at home right now, I could have been at the
climbing gym, lamenting the fact that the trails are still icy,
and my dad had just his cancer had relapsed months before.
My family was already having a really hard time. I
just thought, I did this to them, and what is
this going to do to them? And I just felt
I loved my family and they had always kind of
(16:40):
wondered why I pursued these things, and I thought, I'm
so sorry. I hope that they know that I didn't
mean to do this. Then I thought, one more time,
you have to just try one more time. I throw
(17:01):
my hips really hard, as hard as I can, into
the side of the boat. I'd push with my hands
against the water because I don't have a paddle, and
I can get one side of my face out of
the water that I had this path gurgling terrible breath
of air through one corner of my mouth less. So
(17:22):
the pain of continuing progress of drowning is the steer
you're underwater. We've all been underwater before, and then as
that hour glass goes down, you feel that pressure in
your chest where maybe you have gone down and touched
the bottom of the deepest part of the pool. Or
(17:43):
you've been hunting around because your watch fell, or you're
trying to find your kids ring on the bottom of
the pool, and by the time you find it, you've
been underwater a little too long for how long it's
going to take you to get back up, And you
feel that pressure in your chest as you're ticking up
towards the surface, and you're like, man, I just want
to get to the top of this. And then you
when you break freeing, you can breathe, and then it's
a great feeling. But that feeling of pressure in your
(18:04):
chest without the release is is horrifying. And so that
feeling of pressure in my chest starts a couple you know,
(18:28):
maybe maybe sixty seconds in because I didn't even have
time to take a big breath of air before I
went under. Then that feeling of pressure in my chest
starts to feel like a burning. My eyes start seeing spots,
there's this weird ache in the back of your head,
and then there's this really deep, hollow, bad feeling in
(18:50):
your chest that almost feels like someone's pressing against your lungs,
and adviies they feel like they're being flattened in that feeling,
combined with the terror of knowing that the time has
run out is the last thing that I remember and
(19:11):
feel underwater. And then I open my eyes and I'm
looking at the sky and I'm hearing the river, and
(19:32):
I'm feeling this pressure across my chest and it's Hayden.
He has me in a lifeguard drag that I know
from being a lifeguard, and it's a whitewater rescue carrie
for pulling someone out of the water. I'm staring at
the sky and choking on water and gagging, but I'm
(19:54):
not dead. And it doesn't make any sense because that
nail in my brain, the idea of you are thinking
your last thoughts is still in my brain, and so
I can't quite make sense of what I'm seeing and feeling.
And then I realized he got to me. He pulled
me out of the boat. So I push away and
(20:18):
I swim into the eddy and I dragged myself onto
the bank and just fake, Oh, why God, that it
didn't happen. It didn't happen, You didn't die, it didn't happen.
Those were not your last thoughts. You're not dead. And
he climbs out of the water and just were on
(20:40):
the bank and I'm trying to stand up, because part
of my persona is that I pretend that nothing's wrong. Ever,
so I try to stand up. I try to make
a joke out of it. I can't stand up. My
leg buck while I throw up river water onto the bank,
and I am in shock. I think I can't stop shaking.
(21:05):
We have to get back to the truck. But part
of my desire to be positioned as fearless is to
act light, and so I'm clearly incredibly shaken. I can't
stop shaking. He's shaky, he telled me. He thinks I
was a gonner. He is staring at me, he's trying
to he's looking at my pupils. He's seeing that I'm
(21:26):
in shock. I fake him for getting to me in time.
We walk in silence down this dirt road until we
get to one of the trucks and get to his truck,
and we don't say anything. I think I ask him
if he wants to stop and get coffee on the
(21:46):
way back. I'm determined to not see him affected by this.
And we get a coffee, which is weird, and then
he leaves me on my truck. I can't start my
truck because I once I'm alone in there. I don't
know where the gas pedal is, I don't know where
the break is. I put my foot on the gas
(22:07):
and nothing happens. I realize I have to turn the
truck on. I can't can't in the ignition because I'm
shaking so hard. I finally drive with my hands on
ten and two the twenty five minutes back to my house,
and I just dropped all my disgusting clothing in the entryway.
(22:30):
I kind of walk in a daze into my room.
I smell like a river, and I can't take a
shower because the water sound is so scary that I
can't get into the shower, and so I just put
on sweatpants and I take out my computer because I
(22:52):
work remotely for this online publisher, and I start doing
work because I think, Okay, you are not dead, so
you need to be productive, which is insane. And I
answer emails for my work, and I write the weekly
newsletter because I can't. These are things that don't take
(23:13):
much thought. I can't do any editing work. I can't
write any of my articles. I send out a few
text messages to friends, one of whom had told me
to not go on the water that day. She was
a voter, and she said, I don't think you're taking
the gallaton seriously enough. And I texted her and I
said something along the lines of uh huh, almost drowned.
(23:34):
You were right, because I am determined in my head
to make this not a thing. And I am brave,
I am unaffected. Sure I can get into bad situations
and nothing's going to impact me because what I'm known
for is be fearless. And of course she's concerned, and
(23:55):
I'd say, don't worry about it, don't want to talk
about it. Tell a few more friends, send down messages
for a pot luck that I'm posting that I don't cancel,
because again, my reaction is entirely to be unaffected. That night,
I keep jolting awake because I can't breathe. The next night,
(24:19):
I can't sleep through the night because I wake up suffocating,
and sometimes I actually have my face in my elbow
or in a pillow. When you're asleep, maybe you do
the same thing, but you just roll over, you turn
your face up, and you don't wake up because your
body is like bro, I can't breathe with their face
in the pillow, and so you just roll over and
you don't notice. And for me, my body not being
(24:41):
able to breathe because my face is in the pillow
jolts me awake in a panic. I am scared of
loud noises. I'm jumpy. I'm displaying PTSD but refusing to
acknowledge it. I host this pot luck dinner. My strongest
memory from that dinner is being in a daze. And
(25:03):
I've asked friends about this recently, and they say that
I was being my usual avoidance self and I was
pretending everything was fine. They also say I look dead
behind the eyes. At one point, I take some food
scraps out back to put in the crampost bit and
my house is really loud. I have a dozen friends
over for dinner, and when I pull the slider shut
(25:24):
behind me, it goes from loud in my house to quiet,
and it's dark and I have a panic attack, which
was the first one, but there were more to follow.
It reminds my brain somewhere, with that spike driven into
my brain, that I went from above water where it
(25:46):
was loud, because the river is very loud that day,
with how faust it's moving to underwater where it's silent,
and I have a panic attack from hearing it go
from loud to quiet. And the same thing happens when
the shower goes from on to shut off. Even if
there's loud music and I shut the door, anything that
goes from loud to quiet in an instant sends me
(26:08):
into the debilitating panic attack. Over the next couple days
or weeks, friends will try to bring it up to
me because they've been talking amongst themselves. My best friend
out here, Haley, asked me to ride bikes to a
coffee shop because she knows that it's easier than sitting
(26:29):
me down and asking directly to my face, and so
she's peddling. It's you know, it's probably early June at
this point, and she's peddling behind me. We're going to
go work remotely from a coffee shop near my house.
And she brings it up and she asks if I
have any feelings about it, and if I want to
talk about it, and I snapped at her and I said,
I told you I don't want to talk about it.
(26:51):
I know what I did. I know I made a mistake.
And she doesn't ask again, and all this time now
I'm pretending I'm okay, and which of course I'm not.
I call my mom on my way to the grocery
store because I can't sit down and do anything without
a distraction, and I call her through my truck speakers
(27:13):
and I tell her very quickly, I had a bad
accident voting. I didn't know if I was going to
make it. I love you, I'm sorry, I won't do
this again, and I brush over it. She can tell
there's more of the situation that I'm saying, but I'm
again not giving anyone a chance to really get in there.
But in my head, my brain felt like it was
split into two pieces. One of those pieces was where
(27:39):
I had died. The idea that I'm having my final
thoughts is so stuck in my brain that I can't
tell what's real and what's not. And was that a
yoga class with some friends? And I remember we were
in down dog and I'm looking at my hand from
the mat, And then suddenly I'm wondering what flowers did
(28:00):
my mom choose? What did the font on the program
look like for my memorial service? What were the logistics
of it? Did they have the memorial service in Montana
where I live or did they have it on the
East coast? My mom doesn't fly. Did she fly out
to Montana to take care of my stuff? What has
happened to all these things that I own? And who
(28:23):
showed up to my memorial? Did my friends go back east?
All these things are happening in my head during this
yoga flow to excruciating detail. Wondering about the font on
the program from my memorial service. I remember wondering and
hoping that it wasn't a curly cute font, and then
(28:43):
I snapped out of it, and everyone's in child's post
and I'm stilling downward Dog and I'm in yoga and
I'm not dead. And this happens every single day. These
logistics of my death are in my head because I
had those big thoughts that were or that any thoughts
I've ever had, and they were the thought of these
are your last thoughts. My brain has split into these
(29:07):
two places that I don't really tell people around me,
but I realize I've been spacing out, and so I'll
just tell them, oh, sorry, can you repeat that? Or
I'll be on my computer and realize I've just been
staring at it or read the same sentence over and over,
or I'm standing in front of my mailbox with my
mail key lost in the logistics of the impact of
my death. I tell people off handedly that I'm going
(29:31):
to take a role clinic in the spring for the summer,
and I'm going to get back in my boat and
I'm going to become a really good white water boater.
And there's no way I'm getting back in this boat.
Like I've done with a lot of other things, I
just push it down, and I accept that my brain
feels split, and I accept that I'm scared to go
into running water, and that I still flinch when water
(29:52):
hits my face in the shower, and that sometimes I
forget that I haven't died. But for the most part,
I just bury it and becomes another anecdote. Cayden and
I have become much closer. We're never dating or anything.
It's just this understanding of someone else who has been
(30:14):
through this event with you, and no one else was there,
no one else did what he did and rescued me,
and so I have this understandable loyalty and allegiance to
him as someone who has saved me. Caden and I
are both pretty avoided people we both have, you know,
(30:36):
some kind of barrier up at one point that he
just wants to apologize and he brought me on the
river that day and it's it's his fault and I just,
you know, mumbled through a response and tell him that
it's it's fine. I made the choice too. In my head,
I think at some point I am going to sit
down with him and we're going to talk about this
(30:56):
and we are I am going to thank him for
what he did. I'm going to say him for saving me.
But he's still himself and he's still flaky. I keep thinking,
in the spring of the summer, I'm really going to
like tell him what's been going on in my brain
and how hard this has been for me. And once
it's voting season again, like I'm going to take a
role clinic with you know, whitewater trainers at a pool
(31:19):
and a controlled environment, and I'm going to get over
the sphere and then maybe and then I will go
voting again. He was supposed to meet me for this
yoga class that we had planned and he hadn't shown up,
and I was I hadn't heard from you in a
couple of days, and I was annoyed, like, you know,
I care about this person, but he's also so flaky
(31:39):
and it hurts my feelings. And I had a voicemail
from a mutual friend. This is a really nice guy,
and he told me that I should go to the
hospital because Cayden was there and he was about to
be pulled off life support. And I went to the
(32:05):
hospital and he's hooked up to machines and he is
about to be pulled off the machines because he's young
and he's strong, and there he's an organ donor. And
I did at that point thank him for what he
(32:27):
had done for me, but it was too late, and
then he was gone. He was the only person who
(32:51):
was there. And so you go through this traumatic event,
even if you pretend you're not traumatized by it, and
you have one another person who was there, and then
that person is suddenly gone and you cared about them
on every level. What if I had done something different
with him? What if I hadn't been annoyed that he
(33:12):
had bailed on yoga class? What if I had just
gone over to his house? And who knows? So you
have all these ideas that, like, could I have returned
that favor of saving his life that he did for me,
and those thoughts just there in my head all the time.
And it's years and years later, after Caden passed away,
(33:40):
I pushed this accident even further away and now now
no one understood. Nobody was there now four and a
half it'll be five years later. Is really when I
started facing it in therapy where they make me do
terrible things like pretend I'm still underwater in the boat,
the awful thing to go through, and I it's not
(34:02):
a fun therapy session, but I have started confronting it.
I didn't want to have thrills or be a white
water boat or I just wanted to be invited. This
is the truth, is that I just at that point
five years ago, like being accepted and included and keeping
(34:26):
that adventurous persona just mattered so much to me that
I that it almost killed me. I look at risk
differently now. My risk assessment had been really skewed from
so many close calls and getting away with it. It
is a lot better than it was because I know
(34:47):
what it's like to lose consciousness and think that it's
over because you made a stupid choice to go boat
a sception of water you should to fit on. And
so I say no to things, or I change my mind,
or I turn around because I love my life and
I'm so grateful for it. I called my mom and
I finally cried about it to her, and I said,
(35:07):
I'm this accident from twenty nineteen was a lot worse
than I told you, and here's what it was like.
And I just I love you guys so much, and
I'm so sorry. And she said, the people who care
about you care about you because of who you are,
not what you've done. And I wish I had just
(35:29):
talked to her when it just happened. But that really
stuck with me. So if I was going to meet
myself how many years ago, fourteen years ago, when I
moved out west for the first time and felt the
need to prove myself, I would tell myself that the
people who love you are going to love you for
who you are and not because of how brief they
think you are. And I think I know that now.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Welcome back This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story.
Producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski and Brent Day and I'm
your host Dan Bush, So Kate another amazing story. It's
another story that's fascinating to me because it goes back
into that anthropological need to belong, that need to fit in.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Wow, even when her friend has given her that door
of like, hey, let's do some you know, let's practice
some roles before we get out there.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
And then in this community where people are like showing
themselves to be bad asses, like, she doesn't want to
not be a bad ass. And at one point I
asked her to like, Okay, what do you tell a
young person. Let's say there's a younger you coming in
and you see her doing or a younger person like
you would you say to her? Rights, I'd have tell
them the same thing my mom told me, which is
like you're enough basically, which sounds like kind of a cliche,
(37:16):
but like in this case, yeah, as you say, it
almost killed her, or not to really feel that.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
The need for external validation might kill you.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Yeah, I mean I think it goes into your teens,
goes into your twenties. You know. I think we've all
been in those situations even as adults, where you don't
want to admit what you don't know, and this is
just an example where your life is on the line.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
What's the rednecks last words?
Speaker 5 (37:42):
Yes, but I mean I think it all, you know,
I think it's It's also just one of those things
where it's like the you're enough. It sounds it sounds
so obvious, but it's something that some people you have
to learn the hard way that like you're not going
like you can't like adventure your way out, or you
(38:03):
can't like fake your way through. Like sometimes people just
have to learn, like I have to be okay with
who I am. Being reckless in order to prove myself
to other people is not going to make me feel accepted.
It's just gonna make me dead.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
I hope that's something I can convey to my children
so that they wouldn't but they're not. They're going to
do stupid shit, so you know what I mean, Like,
I hope that that's something I could say, Hey, don't
you don't you you're good enough. You don't need to
get external validation.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, And what both of you are saying, I mean
I'm going to say, like, as I was listening to
Maggie Sleppy and tell the story, I'm thinking like you're
like shouting at this this young person like no.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Stop it, no, don't get in this kayak stop no.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
And so yeah, some of us do have to learn
the hard way, but I think that most of us
end up having some difficult experience, not to this extreme
of that being kind of like slapped in our faces
at some point, or we hope we would, and to
your point, Dan of like hoping you can like pass
this on to your child. I think about things about
(39:12):
this a lot, like as a parent, like, yeah, I
have this like enormous love for my child. And I
actually remember there was this moment our whole family was
on like this trip for Christmas at my sister's house,
and I had had food poisoning the night before we flew,
and so I was like up all night with food poisoning.
(39:33):
And then we flew anyway, and I had a baby,
and the baby wasn't sleeping all that night that we arrived,
and so I'm trying to nap on this air mattress
on the floor because we're sleeping on an air mattress
like with my baby. This one like the first day
we're here, and there's actually just like a curtain separating
us from the rest of the family in the living room.
So I'm lying there and I'm not really asleep, and
(39:53):
I like roll over at one point, and the baby's awake,
and I'm like, I just want to be asleep.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
I feel so.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Horrible, and I like rolled into I'm I'm shit you
not Amy Pohler's memoir and I was like, just opened
it up. And I opened it up to a random
page and it's this and Amy polar like writes in
the on the in this book, like and so I
say it a younger Amy. That's so I say to
Amy when I when I when I, when I hear
(40:19):
that criticizing voice in my brain, I say, don't say
that about Amy. She's my friend. And I think that's
a cliche. At that point in my life, I'd never
heard that cliche before, and it hit me like lightning.
And that moment on the floor with my child, I realized, like,
holy shit, my mother had ended every phone call with
(40:39):
when I say I love you, I love you more.
And I wass been like, hah okay, bye, mom.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
No she's not lying.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
My mother does love me more? And oh no, And
I turned to my infant child and I think I
love him more than he's ever going to love himself.
And that struck me and it like cold, you know,
I felt this coldness in the pit of my stomach.
Because you want your own child to understand that the
love that you have for them is like as big
(41:08):
as the universe. It's not just you. So that like
I mean, like frankly, so that like when you're gone,
they still feel that and they still know that even
if there had never been to you somehow, and so
like to make somebody see that fact and not just
be like, oh mom, you know, it can take something.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Nature, whether whether you know people say, oh, you're here
for a reason, We're here to experience trauma, to grow,
like the reason we're on planet Earth and in these
bodies and in you know, in this meat avatars so
that we can experience pain. And that's there's you know,
throughout religion and in Buddhism and everything else. It's an
interesting idea, but I'm you know, I don't I don't
(41:48):
know whether that's true or not. But whether it is
true that that's like if there's any any sort of
you know, meaning to our lives, whether that's true or not,
we do do that we do. My kid, I can
tell them a million times, you know, I love you more,
and I can hope the hell that that they're safe,
and I can try to protect them from that. But
(42:09):
they're gonna do stupid shit. They're gonna get hurt. I
just hope they don't die, you know. I hope that
they can can't experience it and get to the other side.
We were just it's funny. We were just in the
men's room, and I was for some reason, I was
reminded of all these lately, all these experiences of me
ever having put my foot in my mouth, or ever
(42:29):
having embarrassed myself, or ever having done something stupid. For
some reason, that was I've been in this weird life
review lately. The weirdest time is at four in the morning.
Be like, why did I say that to them in
the fourth grade?
Speaker 5 (42:39):
You know, I called that the four am special. Yeah,
it's like, oh, it's time.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
When you think about it, Like so much of our socialization,
the reason you do, hazing is a terrible word. When
I was in the Army, goal good natured teasing. You know,
we'd be out on the track, out in the field
and the new recruit comes in and you're like, could
you go over to that other track, which is like
a track is a military vehicle where you have all
your radio equipment. And we'd say, could you go over
(43:07):
to that other track and get us a box of
grid coordinates? Grid coordinator is just a coordinate and map,
And of course the private is like, yes, I'll go
get it, you know, and then they run off and
get it and you have a good laugh, and then
they come back and you go they didn't have any
you know, you see them trying to and then you're
you're like, welcome to the club. Come on, you know,
don't do dumb things. You can always ask ask a question,
(43:28):
you know. I think that's tells you that no, that's
what we would do is question of me. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Because it's a structure where you're in the high pressure
situation where you're not supposed to ask questions and you're
not supposed to, but we kind of came up with
a way of showing you that it's okay to fuck up.
And you know, you ask a dumb there's no such
(43:48):
thing as a dumb We're going to laugh at you.
Avoid the embarrassment by just asking a question when a
question should be asked, and don't get in a canoe
or kayak and let yourself hit the bottom of the river.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Next time I'm alive again, we meet Frankie Mollinix, who's
near death experience in the Australian Pacific transformed their outlook
on life and self sufficiency.
Speaker 6 (44:12):
I just realized I being sucked down the coastline and
all I can see is an outcropping of rocks, and
then I just see ocean. Every moment feels magnified. I
can feel my body getting more and more tired, and
I think it's that pattern too, of like you have
to figure it out.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Don't let anybody see you crack.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
Needing help and not being able to refuse it showed
me what it is to be human.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dukoski and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett. Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio in engineers A Rima L. K
Ali and Nomes Griffin Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka,
(45:06):
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben love It
and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thank you
to Maggie Sleppion for sharing her amazing story. Maggie is
a full time freelance writer based in Montana. For more
information about Maggie, go to Maggie Sleepion dot com. Alive
Again is a production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures.
(45:28):
If you have a transformative near death experience to share,
we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at
Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l
I v e A g A I N p R
O j E c t at gmail dot com.
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