February 17, 2026 • 56 mins
Zoe Cooper grew up around parachutes—her parents were skydivers—and by her eighth jump she felt like a pro. Then the parachute ripped. Spinning low, she and her instructor had to cut away and free-fall before a reserve could open. As the ground “was coming up impossibly fast,” time slowed. Zoe made a stark bargain—“I was willing to lose both of my legs in that moment”—yet a calm certainty kept breaking through: “today wasn’t my day.” She walked away without injury and with a revelation about fear, survival, and how the mind protects us when it matters most.
This episode, as harrowing as a failed parachute is, is really more about an almost certain life-or-death moment and how one human’s brain responded to the circumstance.
If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story! Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com We’d love to hear your story!
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Episode Transcript
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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 Zoe Cooper. And the eighth time that
I jumped out of an airplane, my parachute did not deploy.
It's amazing what your brain will do to protect you
in moments of real danger. The intensity with which your
(00:38):
brain can zero in on details to survive. It's just survival.
We've got these little survival machines in our heads, and
it's incredible how easily it can sift out the things
that are not necessary for you in those moments and
distill your experience down into what is necessary. In our
(01:02):
most vulnerable moments, we can be very, very strong, and
we don't need to be overcome by fear. And I'm
sure it's all circumstantial, but in that moment, for me,
I was shocked at the lack of fear. I was
conscious of the lack of fear.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
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
(01:41):
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 is advised.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
My parents were both skydivers. They met skydiving. My dad
was an instructor for a long time, and I think
my mom was just an enthusiast, and they both logged
several hundred skydives. My dad made over ten thousand over
the course of his life, over ten thousand jumps. So
skydiving had always been something that I was brought up
with and something that I was told that I was
(02:23):
going to do. The first time I ever went skydiving
was on my eighteenth birthday, and it was in a
little private plane with my dad and his old skydiving buddies,
and they just strapped me onto a tandem set and
threw me out of a plane. So I very much
enjoyed it. But because I had access to friends of
(02:45):
the family that had been doing it, I never I
never spent the money to go full professional skydiver, you know.
I never spent the money to get certified and do
everything else. But I did go pretty often and I
would go to the drop zone that my parents used
to go to because they still had friends there and
I could get a discount, or at least they would
(03:06):
know who my parents were. So on my birthday, I
believe it was my twenty third birthday, I wanted to
go again. And I had a friend, a local Atlanta
(03:27):
actor friend who had never been skydiving, and he wanted
to go too, so he and I. He and I
got in the car. We drove out to where the
drop zone was. It's about an hour outside of Atlanta,
and he had to go through the whole safety procedure
and he was super, super excited, and I was excited
because this would have been my eighth jump, So I
felt like I got to be the veteran who was
(03:49):
showing somebody how to have a good time and how
this goes, and I got to be the one that
was cool and collected while he was very nervous because
he was jumping out of a plane for the first time.
So Ramsey and I were trying to decide who should
go first. What would be more enjoyable for him to
watch me jump out of a plane or to jump
out first and then be on the ground for me
(04:09):
to meet him there, and ultimately we decided that he
should go first. And the whole time I remember this
so clearly, the whole time we were in the plane
and he was just like smiles ears to ears. He
was so excited and so was I. And he jumped out.
And I was the last one to jump that day
(04:30):
because I had done it before, and because the drop
zone was a place that was familiar to me. Even
though I was going tandem, so I was attached to somebody.
The instructor was letting me play so we could do
rolls in the sky. I would be the one to
pull the rip cord, little things like that that you know,
I've done it a few times at this point, so
(04:52):
so he was happy to let me do those small things.
So we're very cavalier about it. We jump out of
the plane. There was no lead up to it. It
was a very quick thing. We got to tumble around
in the air for a little bit. When it was time,
I pulled the rip cord and the parachute it had
a hole.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
In it when it deployed.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
The small hole ripped open upon impact or upon it deploying,
and ripped really really large so there at this point
there's probably like a six or eight foot hole in
our parachute. Because of the wind that everything else, the
parachute would expand and then it would crumple, and when
it would crumple, we would drop, and then it would
(05:35):
catch another gust of wind and it would sort of
reinflate for a moment, and then it would crumple and
we would drop. Clearly, you can't land this way, so
we had to cut away to our reserve parachute, which again,
this is all somewhat standard, I suppose, I mean, it
shouldn't happen very often, but just to note it, of
reserve parachute is a life saving device. It is not
(05:57):
the same as your regular parachute. It's much smaller, it
can't withstand wind the same way, but it does its
job to save your life. However, by the time we
deployed it, we had to cut away from our main parachute,
and then we had to give that time to clear
before we could deploy it. You can't deploy a reserve
choote immediately because you don't want it to get tangled
(06:18):
in your primary shoot that you just deployed. So we
had to free fall for a lot longer than you
would ever want to, and with the fact that we
had been doing roles and turns and things in the air,
we had already pulled the parachute, probably at the lowest
point that you could pull the parachute. So we're at
(06:38):
this point dropping very fast, and we're way lower than
you should have been. By the time we've pulled the reserve.
We never really got to slow down because our first
shoot was deflating, so we were gaining speed the whole time.
We were going fast. So the way that the rigs
set up is that the person, the professional that you're
skydiving with, is in a harness. They attaches you essentially
(07:01):
to their chest, but so that you can also see
and move around. Okay, I positioned lower than him, so
my feet are lower down than his feet are, my
head is beneath his head, and I'm more or less
strapped to his chest. I did not know this. Instructor.
He was super great. He was really goofy. He gave
(07:23):
me a lot of shit for for not being certified.
He was joking with me about how it's completely unacceptable
to have done eight skydives to still be skydiving tandem,
and in this case, I'm very glad that I was,
but he was wonderful. But when the shoot deployed, that happy,
go lucky attitude that he had completely fell away. He
(07:45):
got very tense. He went into problem solving mode and
just started handling things. He went into, you know, life
saving emergency mode. I noticed it, but I didn't and
I knew what was happening, but I also felt very
helpless to the situation. There was nothing that I could
be doing, and I had to trust that he was
(08:06):
going to just do it. He explained to me right
before we pulled the rip cord that we were going
to have to pull the ripcord and cut away, and
we were going to drop again. And when we did
drop again, we were going to roll because when you
jump out of an airplane, usually you spread out with
your arms and your legs in sort of an exposition
with your belly to the ground so that you're flying.
(08:28):
But because the parachute had already deployed, we were sitting upright,
which means when we drop it again, we were going
to roll in the air because we were not positioned
to be belly down to the ground. So he prepared
me for that, and we did. We rolled and it
was fast and that was pretty scary, and pulling the
(08:49):
second shoot, the reserve chute did straighten us back out,
but it was a sort of rough experience being straightened
back out. And by the time the reserve chute was inflated,
we were pretty low down to the ground and the
wind was not working in our favor. The wind was
pushing us straight down. There was no angle that we
were having, and we were falling very fast, and the
(09:13):
ground is rushing up at you very very quickly when
you do a regular skydive where nothing goes wrong. One
of the things that I've tried to explain to people
before is that it once you're floating, once your parachute's deployed,
(09:37):
you're so high up and you're moving at such a
pace that until a certain point, it doesn't really feel
like the ground is rushing up at you. You really
do kind of feel like you're suspended in air and
the ground is sort of abstract. It's not something that
your brain can super easily comprehen same as when you're
in a plane. You know, but as you're falling, the
ground isn't getting any bigger. For a while until you're
(09:59):
low enough to where you can really start understanding the
speed at which you're falling. With the reserve shoot, the
ground was coming up, and it was coming up fast,
and it felt like it was coming up impossibly fast.
It felt like it was coming up too fast, and
that there was no sense of control, where in my
previous experiences with a regular shoot that deployed successfully, you
feel like you know you're going You're going a little fast,
(10:22):
and it's a little scary, but it's not anything that
doesn't feel like it's within your control. The reserve shoot
felt like the equivalent of I don't know, trying to
jump off a speeding train. I remember in those moments
as we're approaching the trees feeling calm. I was not
(10:43):
feeling panicked. I think that it was a fight or
flight instinct that takes over. I was not afraid, but
I was trying to problem solve. My instructor, who is
behind me, explained again what had happened, and he more
or less said, I'm going to do everything I can
(11:03):
to get us down on the ground safely. I'm going
to need you to stay quiet, and I'm going to
need you to do anything I say to do as
soon as I say to do it without question. By
the way, we're way off course at this point. We're
nowhere near the drop zone, and we were dropping into
(11:24):
farmland that had lots of trees and forest area, and
we were dropping what seemed like directly into a bunch
of trees, which was pretty scary because I didn't know
what was going to happen there. I didn't know if
we were going to get hung up in a tree.
For a moment, I thought maybe I could grab on
to a branch and use that to soften our fall,
because we were coming in so hot, we were coming
(11:44):
in so fast that I didn't I wasn't sure what
the impact would be like. But I also knew that
we were coming in so fast that the idea of
grabbing onto a tree branch would likely mean ripping my
arms out of their sockets. It was not a safe
option to grab anything. I had the distinct feeling like
(12:16):
we were not going to die. There was a very
very clear feeling that this was something we were going
to survive. But in the same moment, I completely and
fully accepted the fact that I was going to shatter
both of my legs and I would probably never walk again.
I was certain of it. There was just no way.
With the angle that we were coming in and the
(12:36):
speed at which we were coming in, there was no
way that I was going to land on the gri
especially because again I'm positioned a little lower than my instructor,
so my feet hit the ground first, and I have
the weight of him on top of me and the
velocity of the fall, so I have all these factors,
and I was certain that my legs were going to shatter. Normally,
(13:06):
when you land on a skydive, a proper skydive, and
you're moving slowly, it depends on the angle at which
you're coming in. But a lot of times, if you're
coming in kind of fast and you don't want to
risk the impact on your legs, you'll stick your feet
out in front of you and you'll sort of glide
in onto your butt. In this case, that also was
not an option. We were coming in too fast and
going into my butt would have meant shattering my tailbone
(13:27):
and potentially damaging my spine. So in this very quick moment,
I was forced to accept the safest thing to do
is to sacrifice both of my legs to shatter my legs,
and at the time, I was working on having an
acting career, and I was like, great, I'll never be
an actor. That's fine, And none of it really deterred
(13:50):
me too much because I was so sure I wasn't
going to die. I was willing to lose both of
my legs. In that moment, I knew that I was
not going to die. I think that that is the
(14:12):
only thing I can say about that is that it's
an instinct. I do feel like there was some cognizance
of the idea that the reserve shoot was doing its job,
but it had slowed us down enough that we would
survive this fall. But we were going fast enough that
it did not feel like there was any option to
(14:32):
get out of it unscathed. But all I can say
is that that was a feeling. I had no other
reason to believe that, because it probably is the equivalent
of We're coming in really fast way above the tree
line when I was having these thoughts, and if a
person were to just jump from that height, they probably
wouldn't survive. Timing was a very interesting factor in all
(15:01):
of this. I have no concept of time for all
of this, and in fact, it felt very, very distinctly
like time stopped and completely slowed down. So what may
have been I mean, typically speaking, if I'm not mistaken,
and again I might be wrong about this, but I
think that usually from the time that you deploy your
parachute to the time that you land is it's pretty short.
(15:26):
You're not floating for very long, a matter of minutes
at most a couple of minutes at this stage, from
the time that our reserve shoote deployed and were a
bit above the tree line, where we had straightened out
and the ground was rushing up at us and we're
coming down very fast. I do think that if it
had deployed for five seconds, we probably would have been
(15:47):
in a much worse situation than we ended up being in.
But time itself slowed way down. I remember that distinctly
because I was able to form very well thought out
plans of action and to determine in my brain whether
or not they would work. So the whole thought process
(16:10):
of maybe I can grab a tree branch. No, we're
going pretty fast, I think that would rip my arm
sockets out. Well, is that okay? What's better that? Or
my legs? The whole reasoning process of what I can
and can't do and why I can and can't do.
It felt like that was a normal you know. It
didn't feel like my mind was racing. It felt like
I was thinking all of that out at a pretty
(16:31):
reasonable speed, and it must have been faster than that.
I'm sure everything was going very fast, but it did
not feel fast. It felt like everything slowed way, way,
way down. It felt like from the moment that we
had deployed the reserve shoot until the moment we hit
the ground was ten minutes. And there's just no way.
(16:53):
My dad made over ten thousand jumps in his lifetime.
He had to cut away to a reserve shoot three
times in ten thousand jumps, so it's not very common.
The process of cutting away a reserve shoot is not
as cool as in the movies. I wish it was
actually pulling out a knife and sawing through the chords.
But there's a there's a fail safe mechanism in your
(17:15):
in your parachute rig that will just basically do it
for you. You pull a chord and it just unclips
those wires that you're attached to, and then you're free
falling again and again. You have to wait for those
to go away. You don't have to wait very long,
but you do have to wait to be clear of
those before you can pull your reserve shoot, which is
(17:37):
just a different lever. It's a different handle that you pull,
so it's a pretty quick process. The instructor that I
was with was amazing. He was doing everything that you're
supposed to do. He had never had to pull away
to a reserve shoot before, and he had certainly never
had to do it while attached to somebody. But I
(17:57):
will say that in those moments of fallings, I trusted him,
but I also wasn't thinking about him. I wasn't thinking, oh,
I'll let this guy save my life. I was thinking
about how I was going to save my life. It
almost felt like it just did not matter that he
was there in that moment. I'm sure it did matter
that he was there. He's the person that saved my life.
But in those moments where you're dealing with so many
(18:22):
factors that are in nobody's control, the wind, to the ground,
everything else, there's only so much he could do, and
I felt very much like I was going to be
responsible for for whatever ended up happening. Of course, there
was only so much I could do, I couldn't be
the one to pull the reserve shoot. I did not
have the training that he had for emergency situations. But
(18:45):
I will say that the one thing I did do,
which came from years of training at Push Push Theater
in Atlanta, was I am. Since high school, Tim Haberger,
who runs Push Push, had really really strongly pushed physical
stage acting, and we used to do a lot of
(19:05):
things like pratfalls, and we would jump off of platforms
and learn how to fall safely. Falling safely is something
that I had been taught how to do since I
was in high school, and I was never grade at it,
but I had some training in it. So once we
got to a point that felt like the equivalent of
jumping off a box or a very tall probably ten
feet up, I instinctually went into pratfall mode, and I
(19:31):
positioned myself to fall safely, to sort of tumble full.
So when you fall, you don't lock up. You stay
as loose as you can, You let your knees come
up a little bit, and if you can, you fall
to the side. You position yourself so you're not going
to brace with your arms, so that you don't shatter
your wrists, and you just sort of position yourself to
the most well equiped parts of your body to absorb impact,
(19:54):
and you let yourself collapse. It was harder attached to some,
but I do think that that's part of why I
came away with no injuries. That coupled with the fact
that it did rain the night before. We fell into
somebody's farmland and the ground was kind of spongy. No
(20:18):
no legs, brains, no leg breaks, nothing at all. My
feet hit first, but I very quickly let my feet
fold and let my knees sort of come up to
my chest and fell to my side. And the ground
was still wet from it raining the night before, and
I'm sure that helped us. And the guy fell on
top of me, and he was a bigger guy, so
(20:38):
that that that was like the most dangerous part of it,
was having a full grown man fall on top of me.
Maybe not the most dangerous part, the most painful part.
(21:00):
We both just sort of laid there on the ground
in the wet grass, and I think there was a
long moment of silence. It's early ish in the day
and it smells like cows, it smells like farmland. It
(21:24):
smells like farm animals, not in an overwhelming way. There's
still a lot of fresh air, but it smells like
the country. The air is cool, but the sun is
out and you can feel the sun, so there's that
direct sun warmth, but with a cool breeze. I'm in
(21:45):
the shade so and I'm aware that I'm in the
shade from the trees, the shade being a little cooler.
He laughs first, and then I laughed. And I think
(22:08):
the laughter moment is just that feeling when you are
so overcome by emotion. It's not happy laughter or sad
laughter or grateful laughter or anything. It's just it's just,
I think, a release. It wasn't funny, but we did
(22:31):
come out of it completely unscathed, and it felt like
a relief laughter. And it wasn't a long laugh. It
wasn't like a giggle fit or anything like that. It
was just it was just an acknowledgment of the absurdity
of the situation that we just survived, and a release
of all of the tension of whether or not we
were going to survive it. For me, when I think
(22:59):
of this experience, the moments that stand out the most
are the moment right before going into the tree line,
because I didn't know where the ground was because the
tree line was pretty dense, so I didn't know how
much further I was going to have to fall once
I got past the tree line. So the moment right
before that was very scary, and that was still when
(23:20):
I was questioning whether or not I could grab onto
a tree limb. But it's funny. I remember that moment
above the tree line and the moment specifically of acceptance
that I was going to shatter both of my legs,
and I remember thinking specifically that it was funny that
I was okay with that, and that I was even
(23:43):
a little grateful in that moment because I just knew
that I wasn't going to die, and I felt great.
It felt like a fair trade to me. I was like, sure,
if I'm going to live, I can be in a
wheelchair for the rest of my life. That's fine, I'll
say again. The second moment, this very visceral, is when
(24:10):
I realized that moment of it kicking in that I
needed to fall safely. I needed a pratfall like theater
training and taught me how to do. Was another clear moment,
because then it felt like I had something to do,
where before everything was happening to me, that moment felt
like I had to execute something and I had to
execute it right. So that was a very honed in
(24:31):
moment for me, and those are the two moments I
think of the most. But I do also very specifically
remember the texture of the ground because it had rained before,
because the ground was wet still and it was spongy,
and we happened to land right on the edge of
a farm, so there was trees that we went. We
just got past the trees and then there was a
(24:53):
big open field and we didn't know where we were.
We had no idea how far off course we were,
none of that. And after a moment of laying in
the sort of spongy, wet ground, I got up. He
was very afraid of me getting up, but I got up.
I was fine, He was fine. We were both completely unscathed.
He gave me a hug. He asked if I was okay,
and he said I did a great job. And we
(25:17):
chatted a little bit about whether or not that had
happened before, and we just we were like, okay, we
gotta go, we gotta go find the road, and we
gathered up the parachute he found the He we had
no idea where the other parachute went. I'm sure they
found it eventually, But we gathered up our reserve parachute
and we got out out of the road and we
started walking, and eventually a pickup truck came and loaded
(25:39):
us into the back. They had found us. They'd been
out looking the other the drop zone people had been
out looking for us because they could see from the
ground what had happened. They saw us more or less
where we landed. They came and got us. We were
something like two and a half or three miles off course,
we weren't that far away, and we came and when
I got off the truck and was there waiting for me,
(26:01):
and he was so scared. He was so so scared,
and I mean in the way that any of us
would have been if we just saw our friend's parachute
malfunction and they dropped going a million miles an hour
into the tree line. He was terrified. And he told
me that he looked over to his instructor when our
shoot disappeared, and he said, is she gonna be okay?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
And his instructor just said, oh, fuck. So Randy thought
I was dead. He was so scared and so grateful.
I was very grateful.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
A bunch of people apologized to me, but it was
nobody's fault. It really probably was such a minor tear
that just escalated when the shoot up, and it's nobody's fault,
and I wasn't upset about it. In fact, I was
super grateful that I was with somebody who handled the
whole thing so well. And then it was done, and
(27:03):
that was that. We went home and I called my
dad and I said, hey, Dad, my parachute didn't deploy,
and he said, congratulations. The moment that I knew that
I wasn't going to die is something that that moment's
(27:23):
the thing that sticks out to me more than anything else, specifically,
because I don't know how I knew that. I, like
I said before, I did have somebody with me. I
did have a second parachute that was deployed, but those
things alone weren't necessarily enough to guarantee my survival. And
this circumstance because we were so close to the ground
when the parachute did deploy, and because the winds and
(27:44):
everything were working so far against us, and it wasn't
a matter of I felt safe because of those things.
I didn't feel protected because of those things. I don't
have any other way to say it other than a
crystal clear instinct that today wasn't my day. Today wasn't
my day. It wasn't. It just felt very clear. Even
(28:08):
though all of the physical indicators said today could be
your day, my brain went, no, it's not today, and
I don't have any reason for that. And it wasn't
a decision. It wasn't a will to live. It wasn't
a choice that I made. It was a quick analysis.
It was a hey, Zoe, you might die, and you're
(28:29):
not going to die today. Yeah, you're not going to
die today, so let's figure out what is going to
happen today. And that was actually the thing that happened. First.
It wasn't let's all right, team, let's let's figure out
how we're gonna get out of this. It was, Okay,
you're not gonna die. You're not gonna die. You can
feel that in your heart. You're not gonna die. What
is going to happen? And that's when the analysis starts going, Okay,
you're gonna break both your legs and then I've got
(28:51):
the flash's actual physical like imagery flashes of like you know,
being in a hospital bed and then being in a
wheelchair for the rest of my life. It did occur
to me in those moments, which I think is a
it's hilarious looking back that I did have a very
brief mourning for my acting career up there and in
the sky, which you know I've had. I've since mourned
(29:13):
more completely.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
But I went through just the quick list of what
is going to happen to you, and then the third
thing that happened was, Okay, what's the game plan.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I think this experience showed me that we're capable of
a lot. In moments where it feels like we don't
have any control, we are more capable than we think.
I think the human body and the human brain are
absolutely remarkable because I can get overwhelmed and clouded by
(29:54):
emotion when you know a delivery that I've been expecting
doesn't show up on you know, there are things that
can completely ruin your day and can set things off
on a train of nothing's going right and everything just
seems awful. And yet in these moments where it really
(30:14):
matters and where you may or may not make it,
and everything you've known in your consciousness that exists might
be blinking out soon. It's amazing how clear everything can become.
And I think it's amazing the intensity with which your
brain can zero in on details to survive. It's just survival.
(30:36):
We've got these little survival machines in our heads, and
it's incredible how easily it can sift out the things
that are not necessary for you in those moments and
distill your experience down into what is necessary. And this
is an opinion that I'm about to express, but I
believe that because I knew I wasn't going to die,
emotions became unnecessary and the things that became necessary or
(31:00):
life saving instincts. Whereas I do think that in certain
situations where survival might not be an option that would
make sense to me, that emotion would then become the
defining factor because your brain is going to fledge you
with that in that moment, emotion might be the most
useful thing if there's not a survival option. Who knows.
(31:20):
I don't think that there's Yeah, I don't think there's
an explanation, but fear, elation, sadness, you know, nostalgia. Any
of those things might be the thing that in real
final moments might be the thing that's most useful. The
(31:41):
time slowing down thing was very interesting to me, and
it makes sense, I suppose, when you think about things
like going into the zone in a basketball game or
whatever else it might be. But I don't feel like
nothing that happened to me felt like it was. Everything
was a bit of a surprise. I didn't know how
(32:03):
I would react to any of this. If you had
told me that I was going to jump out of
an airplane and the shoe wasn't in a deploy, I
would imagine that I would be panicking. I would imagine
that I would be I've always I've had morbid fantasies
before about what would you do if you were in
a plane when the plane went down, And I remember
I used to think that I would try to use
my phone to call, or try to get a text out,
(32:23):
or write something down so that if they found my
phone that could be later discovered by my loved ones
that could say, you know, I was thinking of you
in my last moments. I know that's a very morbid
thing to say, but you think about these things sometimes
communication and expressing that I loved you. And I've considered
that in a moment of unplanned emergency death, I would
(32:45):
want to try to get a message out to my
loved ones that I loved them, and that's how I
would want to spend my final moments. But in that moment,
that was not That was not on the table, and
I and I you want that to be on the
table because you want to think that, like, oh, that's
a really beautifu last thing to happen, But it wasn't.
In my experience, it really was just a Hey, we're
(33:05):
going to get out of this? How are we going
to get out of this? For me, it informs the
way I think about death and about how it's amazing
what your brain will do to protect you in moments
of real danger. And again, I know that every circumstance
is going to be different, but I think about it
a lot in terms of actual death. I don't believe
(33:32):
that at the time of this experience that I had
any concept of how I was going to die. I
was not raised with any kind of religion. I was
both of my parents were atheists, and so I was
raised to sort of believe that nothing happens when we die.
(33:54):
And I was raised in a way that of course
we're all going to fear death, but I was I
don't know. But no, I didn't receive or I never
knew how I was going to die at the time.
I have since had premonitions of how I would die.
And it's not in an airplane. It's in a car.
(34:18):
And I hope I'm wrong, But there is an interesting thing.
And I will say that I did think of this
experience when I had that premonition, because the thought that
I had of it was a similar acceptance. It wasn't
(34:38):
a pleasant thought, and again I hope that it's not true.
But when I did have that thought, it was a
flash that came into my mind out of nowhere, completely uninvited,
and it was images of what that those very final
moments would be. And along with it came a distinct
(35:03):
feeling of acceptance. And you know I wouldn't. Happiness is
not on the table here, neither is sadness. There's no
emotion attached to it. It's just a clear It's like
stating a fact, same as you know sky's bluegrass is green.
This is how you go. And again I hope I'm wrong,
(35:25):
because I don't want to go that way. What I
would like to happen is to die at one hundred
and ten in my sleep, you know, but who knows.
But I do think it is interesting that that's the
only other time that I've ever had a completely emotionless
response to the idea of my own death. At the
(35:46):
same time, it's impossible to not think about other people's
near death experiences or other people's actual death experiences, and
I feel very privileged and very fortunate to be able
to say things like I wasn't scared and it's not scary,
because I don't want to. I don't want to suggest
that it's not scary for everyone. I don't want to
suggest that it's not like that in everyone's final moments
that they're they're feeling very zen about it. But in
(36:07):
my moment, I was feeling very zen about it. And
a carry away for me has been that in my
actual final moments, I think I will feel that too,
and which is further bolstered by the fact that in
my pseudo premonition about how I may or may not die,
I feel very zen about it. I don't want it,
but I feel zen about it. There's one overwhelming thing
(36:31):
that I was loved with with this experience that I
love and I'm very grateful for. And I had no
idea that this would be my takeaway, but I think
about it often, which is that in those final moments,
or what could have been a final moment, in those
uncertain moments for me, in that moment, there was no
fear for me. In that moment, there was no fear.
(36:52):
It was not and I don't say that to sound
like I'm brave. It's that there was too many other
things that I had to think about. And granted I
didn't have a heart stopping moment, and I did have
a reserve shoot and I had somebody with me, so
there my near death experience was in many ways more
controlled than a lot of others. But it was still
uncertain for a while. And in those moments of uncertainty,
(37:17):
my life didn't flash before my eyes. I wasn't thinking
about my loved ones and what I wish I could
have said to them. I wasn't thinking about regrets or
anything emotional. I was thinking about how I was going
to save my life. But it was done without fear.
It was done with complete confidence and I appreciated that,
(37:39):
and I've carried that forward into the idea of in
our most vulnerable moments, we can be very very strong
and we don't need to be overcome by fear. And
I'm sure it's all circumstantial, but in that moment, for me,
I was shocked at the lack of fear. I was
conscious of the lack of fear. And I've taken that
and I've held that, and that's been that's been a
(38:01):
big thing for me going forward and thinking about other
people who I've known who have passed away since, and again,
every circumstance is going to be very different. I'm sure
there that I'm I'm very lucky in that regard. But
the quiet acceptance of things, even the quiet acceptance of
I'm going to shatter both of my legs and I'm
(38:22):
okay with that, was overwhelming. The the the amount of
emotion that was not involved was really really shocking. And
that's something that that I've that's stuck with me. Would
(38:43):
I do it again, I would absolutely And at the
time the day that I the day that this happened,
I would have gone again that same day if you
would let me. And I think that that same day,
I was feeling not invincible, but I was feeling very present,
and I was feeling very very open to experience and
to doing things. I also was feeling very much like, well,
(39:05):
this probably won't happen again, so I should probably get
up in a plane and do this again, because what
are the odds there would happen twice. But I think
that if anything, it has made me, it has made
it a little easier to be present and to accept
things as they are coming, and for a time, I
(39:27):
would say probably made me a bit more adventurous because
of that. I don't think, I'm certain that this experience
made me more comfortable with the idea of my own death.
Of course, I'm still scared of it. Of course I
don't want it to happen. But the major takeaway that
I had from it that I do believe is that
(39:48):
in my final moments, and again I can't speak to
anybody else, but I do believe that in my final moments,
I'll be okay with it. And that was a takeaway
that I got from this experience.
Speaker 5 (40:01):
You can be okay with anything when you're faced with reality,
and I believe that for me, in those final moments,
I'll be terrified leading up to it.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I'll be terrified thinking about it. I don't want it
to happen. I don't like thinking about it, but I
do believe that in those last moments, I'll be okay.
And I think that this experience gifted me with that.
I have, ever since this experience, felt very strongly that
it's our responsibility in life to live it. And because
(40:37):
you don't know when you're going to do something that
might be your last thing, we are not guaranteed anything,
and I know everybody knows that, but it kind of
stares you in the face a little bit when you
come close. And I have absolutely tried to live my
life in a way that's consciously aware of the fact
that I'm going to die, and I think it's it's
(40:59):
been a way wonderful thing to remember always that you
don't know and you can't control, and the best thing
you can do to face your own death is to
live your life.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Welcome back, This is Alive again. Joining me for a
conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story
producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Die And I'm
your host Dan Bush. Let's talk about Zoe Cooper, the
one and only.
Speaker 6 (41:51):
One of my favorite human beings in the right.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
One of the most cool.
Speaker 6 (41:58):
Is really impossible if you the universe Zoe to not
just automatically fall completely in love. She's just like such
a cool, sweet, funny, smart as hell. One of the
best writers I've ever amazing writer, just impressive. Yeah, oh
(42:18):
my god, freaking brilliant. She wrote on that show Teacup
and she she wrote, uh, mantak caves with you and I, Yeah,
that was.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
She wrote on a twelve Ghost, didn't she?
Speaker 6 (42:29):
And she wrote on yep, she wrote on twelve Ghost
thirteen Days Twelve Ghosts episode of Thirteen Days of Halloween.
If I want my work torn apart and put back
together again, I'll send it to Zoe because she is
absolutely brilliant on things like story structure and character and
does not pull punches, which I appreciate give she gives
(42:51):
amazing notes. Yeah. I just can't speak highly enough about
this human being.
Speaker 7 (42:56):
And I had no idea that this was part of her.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Her experience and what happened to her brain in this
heightened this moment of heightened awareness as she's got seconds
to decide how she's going to you know, maneuver in
this situation. That's so fascinating to me. I've got to
go find a neurologist to talk to about these things
like the the experience of time dilation and how that
(43:22):
works in the brain, and the experience of fear and
how your brain could shut off your amignala in times
of hyper awareness when your life is at risk. Her story,
I just you know, when I re listened to it,
I was like, oh my god, this is one of
our best stories.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
Yeah, it's it's really intense, and you know, it does
remind me of another episode that we've done on Derek McManus,
who was the you know, Special Forces rescue guy who
got shot a bunch of times. The way that their
brains worked in those moments seemed so similar.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
To me, so analytical.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
They both just went into problem solving mode and both
had this sense of innate optimism about them in these
situations that like, I've got to get to the other
side of this is going to be totally fine, And
that is incredibly impressive to me, and I wonder if
(44:19):
I'm capable of doing the same thing. Hopefully I'll never
find out hopefully, I, like Zoe said, die in my
bed asleep. At one hundred and ten.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
She came out of this whole experience going, Okay, when
it's my time, there's a possibility because of what I experienced,
and she holds onto this that I will not be afraid.
That your mind is this wonderful machine that is built
for survival and it's built to protect you. So she
took hope in the idea that you know, when it's
her time, she might be able to also not have
(44:50):
that fear, so it won't be a horrific sort of
fear that goes along with that. She said, Now, these
conditions are specific to what happened to her, and these
circumstances are not all circumstances, but just that she had
gone through this and had this experience of fearlessness or
not even fearlessness, there just wasn't It wasn't about fear
at all. It was about survival mode. Just the way
(45:12):
she integrated these experiences into how she sees her future
and how it sort of made her even more willing
to take some risks, I think, is what she said.
Speaker 8 (45:20):
I thought it was amazing how her theater training is
what saved her.
Speaker 7 (45:24):
Saved by theater training.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yes, for the first time in history.
Speaker 6 (45:29):
I think half of the people on this call have
actually worked with Push Push, the theater that she was talking about.
I think if if any theater's training was going to
save your life.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
Mm hmm, yeah, learning how to take a pratfall is
way up there.
Speaker 6 (45:46):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 8 (45:47):
We've had a couple of stories like this, I can't
think of them off the top of my head, where
the thing that that person was really into is a
thing that came back in their moment and help them,
Like like Dwayne Meadows talking about his knowledge of marine
biology when he was stuck in the tsunami in Thailand,
(46:09):
you know, like where I know what's coming because I
have this thing I've devoted my life to and it's
helping me in this last moment. And Les Cochrane her
experience as a diver helped her survive the fires in Lina.
And a lot of these stories too are you know,
there's stories about people on the brink of death. But
(46:30):
what I've found is a lot of these stories are
really about the thing that that person loved the most,
you know. So it was really interesting to see how
Zoe about her theater experience and her her love of acting,
and you know, and the recognition that she may not
be able to act if if she crushes her legs
in this fall. You know, I just think it's it's
really it's always been interesting to me how much the
(46:52):
way the person lived their life comes comes comes out
in these final these what could be their final moment.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Right Like Derek McManus, who was shot for teen times,
he's langlare, He's like, well, I might be a gold
medallist now because you know, in the Paralympics. And then
and then Zoe's like, oh, well, I guess I'm gonna
you know, I'll never be an actor again, but okay,
I'll make that bargain.
Speaker 6 (47:14):
And now she's a fantastic writer, right.
Speaker 8 (47:17):
Or there's she people like Drew Cybert who are like,
I'm going to take this experience of being a paraplegic
and I'm going to go on to get my law
degree and help veterans who have lost the benefits that
have been guaranteed to them because I understand what they're
going through. You know, I just think it's really interesting
how how in that moment they can they can see
their future, you know what I mean, Like not only
(47:39):
and Zoe knew she was going to survive that, which
is another interesting thing.
Speaker 6 (47:43):
She's like, no, no, I'm going to get through this.
Speaker 8 (47:44):
It's just how am I gonna adapt after.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
All the bargains that she was making on the way
down in the split seconds, like it must have been
just maybe ten seconds in that last little bit. But
timeslod and stretch, which I guess they say is mostly
a memory effect, not a real time yeah obviously, but.
Speaker 7 (48:01):
It's it's how your brain is recording everything, not how
you're literally experiencing it.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Right, and you you're recording, you're taking in so much
more information in a short period of time that you're
clocking all of that. And then so when you play
it back, of course, it seems like more than Yeah,
when you play back in your mind, it seems like
more than you would in a normal experience.
Speaker 7 (48:20):
Feel normally, we're just not recording that part or that fast.
Speaker 6 (48:26):
The brain is so weird in that way. Yeah, it's
you know, it's so similar to uh, I when you
learn what deja vu really is. Uh It's it's when
you're the part of your brain that that makes memories
is the one that's like, your lord, you seem to
(48:47):
know what this is. Can you explain this better?
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Yeah, you've explained it before. Can you explain it for
us again?
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah? Okay.
Speaker 7 (48:52):
So deja vu is this thing where essentially the part
of your brain that is telling you what you are
currently experiencing gets a little bit miswired and it kind
of punts whatever is happening in front of you into
the this is a memory part of your brain and
then like like like you are like, oh, this has
(49:14):
happened before.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
No, it's just your brain miswire.
Speaker 6 (49:18):
Yeah, it's just a processing error. Yeah, which you know,
it's cool to know that, but also kind of a
bummer to take the manage it away.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Can you guys imagine making bargains like the way she
was making a bark. She's like, Okay, well I guess
I'll I'll lose my acting career, but and I'll lose
my legs, but I'll live, so okay, And she's like
becoming okay, like the things you're willing to shed off,
the layers you're willing to drop away as you're approaching
the inevitable crash.
Speaker 6 (49:51):
You know.
Speaker 7 (49:51):
I think she went through all the stages of grief
in like seven seconds, Ye blasted through them and was like, well,
all right, that's fine. Damn right.
Speaker 8 (50:00):
Yeah, I would say there are no atheists in a
fox hole, and a lot of that is just people going, Okay,
I'm about to die?
Speaker 6 (50:06):
What what?
Speaker 8 (50:07):
What deal am I going to make with whatever force
there is? That With Zoe it was herself to make
to make myself to get out of this situation. You know,
how am I going to adjust my life to whatever
reality I'm going to be living in when I come.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Out of this.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
I love how she described the moment when they realized
that they were unscathed and they were in this wet
field that was kind of spongy and helped absorb some
of the impact. And then she described the laughing, not
because it was funny because but just because it was
this huge release, yeah, from all of the heightened stuff,
Like she couldn't be emotional during the moment to moment,
(50:46):
split second decisions that was rapid firing through a brain
of taking in information, figuring out how to you know,
which choices to make as quickly as possible, and then
all of a sudden, when all that was gone, the
emotions just flooded in and they came out as laughter,
just this release. That was kind of a beautiful moment.
Speaker 8 (51:02):
It's amazing that how long does it take to jump
from a plane and land of the ground, Like maybe
a minute in twenty seven seconds, and it took her
thirty minutes to tell the story, you know, like that
much went on in that short period of time. And
I think I remember you telling me that you weren't
quite sure that this story would fit the format of
the show. I'm not quite sure why, because it seems
(51:25):
to fit it perfectly. You know, it's like, how are
you going to reckon with this moment? But so much
of it it wasn't about like how does it transform
your life after the moment. It was just like so
much went into telling the story of what happened in
those in that minute twenty seven seconds or however long
it takes to I'm going to look up on Google
it takes to jump out.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I was wrong, No, I think I was just early on.
I was just kind of it was my first story
and I was like, this is not an actual clinical
near death experience where there's an out of bout experience,
you know, And I was I was thinking more in
terms of, you know, how does somebody undergo massive trauma,
bodily traumas and things like that. And I was sort
(52:06):
of searching for what the show was. And now I've
gotten to a point here at the end of season
one where I'm like, oh, I know what the show is. Yeah,
it's it's just about all things that have to do
with being human when you're pushed up against the edge
of life, you know, so it's about being alive again.
And this did inform her sense of agency going forward,
(52:27):
and still does.
Speaker 8 (52:28):
I just looked it up and it said a skydive
usually takes five to six minutes with approximately fifty seconds
in free fall, so she would have had four to
five minutes of this terror.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
No, she they pulled the shoot after being able to
tumble for three or four minutes. So when they pulled
the shoot and it started to fail, they only had
about a minute left.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Jeez.
Speaker 7 (52:48):
Yeah, because that four to five is a lot of
drifting and yeah.
Speaker 8 (52:54):
And you fall faster when there's no parachute.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (52:57):
I also was it was interesting to me she talks
as many of our interviewees talk about wanting to reach
out to family in this scary moment about having about
feeling that connection to loved ones and wishing that there
was a way that she could reach out, which a
reminded me of Aaron's story of getting his arm crushed
(53:19):
in the canyon and how he used his you know,
not literal but like technological connection to his loved ones
through his camera as like a psychological lifeline in those moments.
But also it was kind of funny because like Zoe
was not alone, she was physically connected to another human person,
and in a way that in a lot of our
(53:39):
stories people are very alone in those moments. And I
don't know, it's just it's so interesting to me because
like she talks about both feeling glad, feeling like logically
comforted that he's there because he knows what he's doing
and he's an experienced dude, but also how she still
felt very much personally responsible and kind of on her own,
(54:00):
and that she wasn't even really thinking about him, and
so like that part of the psychology, I was like, huh,
Like even, yeah, like we are all truly alone.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
Kind of one of those moments.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
Next time I'm Alive Again, Australian Star Group officer Derek
McManus was shot fourteen times in under five seconds and
left bleeding on the ground for nearly three hours while
a siege raged around him.
Speaker 9 (54:31):
And I'll always retain this sense of optimism no matter
what happens to me. And my body is closing down,
He's still firing continuously. Well, it's pounding through the bricks.
And then I don't know if you know guys in
the Special Forces, but we have a slightly bigger ego
than the average person, and that ego kicked in and
while I'm lying on the ground my body's closing down,
(54:52):
I start thinking to myself, I'm damn good at basketball.
If I can add something to what they're already doing, well,
we may make the Paralympic finals, may end up with
a gold medal.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Special thanks to Zoe Cooper for sharing your story. Zoe
is a film and TV writer and director based in
Los Angeles, California. Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney,
Brent die Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbau. Music by Ben Lovett,
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
(55:27):
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. Kali
and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka, Brent
Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Alive Again is a production
of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have
(55:48):
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 ve 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 Zoe Cooper. And the eighth time that
I jumped out of an airplane, my parachute did not deploy.
It's amazing what your brain will do to protect you
in moments of real danger. The intensity with which your
(00:38):
brain can zero in on details to survive. It's just survival.
We've got these little survival machines in our heads, and
it's incredible how easily it can sift out the things
that are not necessary for you in those moments and
distill your experience down into what is necessary. In our
(01:02):
most vulnerable moments, we can be very, very strong, and
we don't need to be overcome by fear. And I'm
sure it's all circumstantial, but in that moment, for me,
I was shocked at the lack of fear. I was
conscious of the lack of fear.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
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
(01:41):
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 is advised.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
My parents were both skydivers. They met skydiving. My dad
was an instructor for a long time, and I think
my mom was just an enthusiast, and they both logged
several hundred skydives. My dad made over ten thousand over
the course of his life, over ten thousand jumps. So
skydiving had always been something that I was brought up
with and something that I was told that I was
(02:23):
going to do. The first time I ever went skydiving
was on my eighteenth birthday, and it was in a
little private plane with my dad and his old skydiving buddies,
and they just strapped me onto a tandem set and
threw me out of a plane. So I very much
enjoyed it. But because I had access to friends of
(02:45):
the family that had been doing it, I never I
never spent the money to go full professional skydiver, you know.
I never spent the money to get certified and do
everything else. But I did go pretty often and I
would go to the drop zone that my parents used
to go to because they still had friends there and
I could get a discount, or at least they would
(03:06):
know who my parents were. So on my birthday, I
believe it was my twenty third birthday, I wanted to
go again. And I had a friend, a local Atlanta
(03:27):
actor friend who had never been skydiving, and he wanted
to go too, so he and I. He and I
got in the car. We drove out to where the
drop zone was. It's about an hour outside of Atlanta,
and he had to go through the whole safety procedure
and he was super, super excited, and I was excited
because this would have been my eighth jump, So I
felt like I got to be the veteran who was
(03:49):
showing somebody how to have a good time and how
this goes, and I got to be the one that
was cool and collected while he was very nervous because
he was jumping out of a plane for the first time.
So Ramsey and I were trying to decide who should
go first. What would be more enjoyable for him to
watch me jump out of a plane or to jump
out first and then be on the ground for me
(04:09):
to meet him there, and ultimately we decided that he
should go first. And the whole time I remember this
so clearly, the whole time we were in the plane
and he was just like smiles ears to ears. He
was so excited and so was I. And he jumped out.
And I was the last one to jump that day
(04:30):
because I had done it before, and because the drop
zone was a place that was familiar to me. Even
though I was going tandem, so I was attached to somebody.
The instructor was letting me play so we could do
rolls in the sky. I would be the one to
pull the rip cord, little things like that that you know,
I've done it a few times at this point, so
(04:52):
so he was happy to let me do those small things.
So we're very cavalier about it. We jump out of
the plane. There was no lead up to it. It
was a very quick thing. We got to tumble around
in the air for a little bit. When it was time,
I pulled the rip cord and the parachute it had
a hole.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
In it when it deployed.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
The small hole ripped open upon impact or upon it deploying,
and ripped really really large so there at this point
there's probably like a six or eight foot hole in
our parachute. Because of the wind that everything else, the
parachute would expand and then it would crumple, and when
it would crumple, we would drop, and then it would
(05:35):
catch another gust of wind and it would sort of
reinflate for a moment, and then it would crumple and
we would drop. Clearly, you can't land this way, so
we had to cut away to our reserve parachute, which again,
this is all somewhat standard, I suppose, I mean, it
shouldn't happen very often, but just to note it, of
reserve parachute is a life saving device. It is not
(05:57):
the same as your regular parachute. It's much smaller, it
can't withstand wind the same way, but it does its
job to save your life. However, by the time we
deployed it, we had to cut away from our main parachute,
and then we had to give that time to clear
before we could deploy it. You can't deploy a reserve
choote immediately because you don't want it to get tangled
(06:18):
in your primary shoot that you just deployed. So we
had to free fall for a lot longer than you
would ever want to, and with the fact that we
had been doing roles and turns and things in the air,
we had already pulled the parachute, probably at the lowest
point that you could pull the parachute. So we're at
(06:38):
this point dropping very fast, and we're way lower than
you should have been. By the time we've pulled the reserve.
We never really got to slow down because our first
shoot was deflating, so we were gaining speed the whole time.
We were going fast. So the way that the rigs
set up is that the person, the professional that you're
skydiving with, is in a harness. They attaches you essentially
(07:01):
to their chest, but so that you can also see
and move around. Okay, I positioned lower than him, so
my feet are lower down than his feet are, my
head is beneath his head, and I'm more or less
strapped to his chest. I did not know this. Instructor.
He was super great. He was really goofy. He gave
(07:23):
me a lot of shit for for not being certified.
He was joking with me about how it's completely unacceptable
to have done eight skydives to still be skydiving tandem,
and in this case, I'm very glad that I was,
but he was wonderful. But when the shoot deployed, that happy,
go lucky attitude that he had completely fell away. He
(07:45):
got very tense. He went into problem solving mode and
just started handling things. He went into, you know, life
saving emergency mode. I noticed it, but I didn't and
I knew what was happening, but I also felt very
helpless to the situation. There was nothing that I could
be doing, and I had to trust that he was
(08:06):
going to just do it. He explained to me right
before we pulled the rip cord that we were going
to have to pull the ripcord and cut away, and
we were going to drop again. And when we did
drop again, we were going to roll because when you
jump out of an airplane, usually you spread out with
your arms and your legs in sort of an exposition
with your belly to the ground so that you're flying.
(08:28):
But because the parachute had already deployed, we were sitting upright,
which means when we drop it again, we were going
to roll in the air because we were not positioned
to be belly down to the ground. So he prepared
me for that, and we did. We rolled and it
was fast and that was pretty scary, and pulling the
(08:49):
second shoot, the reserve chute did straighten us back out,
but it was a sort of rough experience being straightened
back out. And by the time the reserve chute was inflated,
we were pretty low down to the ground and the
wind was not working in our favor. The wind was
pushing us straight down. There was no angle that we
were having, and we were falling very fast, and the
(09:13):
ground is rushing up at you very very quickly when
you do a regular skydive where nothing goes wrong. One
of the things that I've tried to explain to people
before is that it once you're floating, once your parachute's deployed,
(09:37):
you're so high up and you're moving at such a
pace that until a certain point, it doesn't really feel
like the ground is rushing up at you. You really
do kind of feel like you're suspended in air and
the ground is sort of abstract. It's not something that
your brain can super easily comprehen same as when you're
in a plane. You know, but as you're falling, the
ground isn't getting any bigger. For a while until you're
(09:59):
low enough to where you can really start understanding the
speed at which you're falling. With the reserve shoot, the
ground was coming up, and it was coming up fast,
and it felt like it was coming up impossibly fast.
It felt like it was coming up too fast, and
that there was no sense of control, where in my
previous experiences with a regular shoot that deployed successfully, you
feel like you know you're going You're going a little fast,
(10:22):
and it's a little scary, but it's not anything that
doesn't feel like it's within your control. The reserve shoot
felt like the equivalent of I don't know, trying to
jump off a speeding train. I remember in those moments
as we're approaching the trees feeling calm. I was not
(10:43):
feeling panicked. I think that it was a fight or
flight instinct that takes over. I was not afraid, but
I was trying to problem solve. My instructor, who is
behind me, explained again what had happened, and he more
or less said, I'm going to do everything I can
(11:03):
to get us down on the ground safely. I'm going
to need you to stay quiet, and I'm going to
need you to do anything I say to do as
soon as I say to do it without question. By
the way, we're way off course at this point. We're
nowhere near the drop zone, and we were dropping into
(11:24):
farmland that had lots of trees and forest area, and
we were dropping what seemed like directly into a bunch
of trees, which was pretty scary because I didn't know
what was going to happen there. I didn't know if
we were going to get hung up in a tree.
For a moment, I thought maybe I could grab on
to a branch and use that to soften our fall,
because we were coming in so hot, we were coming
(11:44):
in so fast that I didn't I wasn't sure what
the impact would be like. But I also knew that
we were coming in so fast that the idea of
grabbing onto a tree branch would likely mean ripping my
arms out of their sockets. It was not a safe
option to grab anything. I had the distinct feeling like
(12:16):
we were not going to die. There was a very
very clear feeling that this was something we were going
to survive. But in the same moment, I completely and
fully accepted the fact that I was going to shatter
both of my legs and I would probably never walk again.
I was certain of it. There was just no way.
With the angle that we were coming in and the
(12:36):
speed at which we were coming in, there was no
way that I was going to land on the gri
especially because again I'm positioned a little lower than my instructor,
so my feet hit the ground first, and I have
the weight of him on top of me and the
velocity of the fall, so I have all these factors,
and I was certain that my legs were going to shatter. Normally,
(13:06):
when you land on a skydive, a proper skydive, and
you're moving slowly, it depends on the angle at which
you're coming in. But a lot of times, if you're
coming in kind of fast and you don't want to
risk the impact on your legs, you'll stick your feet
out in front of you and you'll sort of glide
in onto your butt. In this case, that also was
not an option. We were coming in too fast and
going into my butt would have meant shattering my tailbone
(13:27):
and potentially damaging my spine. So in this very quick moment,
I was forced to accept the safest thing to do
is to sacrifice both of my legs to shatter my legs,
and at the time, I was working on having an
acting career, and I was like, great, I'll never be
an actor. That's fine, And none of it really deterred
(13:50):
me too much because I was so sure I wasn't
going to die. I was willing to lose both of
my legs. In that moment, I knew that I was
not going to die. I think that that is the
(14:12):
only thing I can say about that is that it's
an instinct. I do feel like there was some cognizance
of the idea that the reserve shoot was doing its job,
but it had slowed us down enough that we would
survive this fall. But we were going fast enough that
it did not feel like there was any option to
(14:32):
get out of it unscathed. But all I can say
is that that was a feeling. I had no other
reason to believe that, because it probably is the equivalent
of We're coming in really fast way above the tree
line when I was having these thoughts, and if a
person were to just jump from that height, they probably
wouldn't survive. Timing was a very interesting factor in all
(15:01):
of this. I have no concept of time for all
of this, and in fact, it felt very, very distinctly
like time stopped and completely slowed down. So what may
have been I mean, typically speaking, if I'm not mistaken,
and again I might be wrong about this, but I
think that usually from the time that you deploy your
parachute to the time that you land is it's pretty short.
(15:26):
You're not floating for very long, a matter of minutes
at most a couple of minutes at this stage, from
the time that our reserve shoote deployed and were a
bit above the tree line, where we had straightened out
and the ground was rushing up at us and we're
coming down very fast. I do think that if it
had deployed for five seconds, we probably would have been
(15:47):
in a much worse situation than we ended up being in.
But time itself slowed way down. I remember that distinctly
because I was able to form very well thought out
plans of action and to determine in my brain whether
or not they would work. So the whole thought process
(16:10):
of maybe I can grab a tree branch. No, we're
going pretty fast, I think that would rip my arm
sockets out. Well, is that okay? What's better that? Or
my legs? The whole reasoning process of what I can
and can't do and why I can and can't do.
It felt like that was a normal you know. It
didn't feel like my mind was racing. It felt like
I was thinking all of that out at a pretty
(16:31):
reasonable speed, and it must have been faster than that.
I'm sure everything was going very fast, but it did
not feel fast. It felt like everything slowed way, way,
way down. It felt like from the moment that we
had deployed the reserve shoot until the moment we hit
the ground was ten minutes. And there's just no way.
(16:53):
My dad made over ten thousand jumps in his lifetime.
He had to cut away to a reserve shoot three
times in ten thousand jumps, so it's not very common.
The process of cutting away a reserve shoot is not
as cool as in the movies. I wish it was
actually pulling out a knife and sawing through the chords.
But there's a there's a fail safe mechanism in your
(17:15):
in your parachute rig that will just basically do it
for you. You pull a chord and it just unclips
those wires that you're attached to, and then you're free
falling again and again. You have to wait for those
to go away. You don't have to wait very long,
but you do have to wait to be clear of
those before you can pull your reserve shoot, which is
(17:37):
just a different lever. It's a different handle that you pull,
so it's a pretty quick process. The instructor that I
was with was amazing. He was doing everything that you're
supposed to do. He had never had to pull away
to a reserve shoot before, and he had certainly never
had to do it while attached to somebody. But I
(17:57):
will say that in those moments of fallings, I trusted him,
but I also wasn't thinking about him. I wasn't thinking, oh,
I'll let this guy save my life. I was thinking
about how I was going to save my life. It
almost felt like it just did not matter that he
was there in that moment. I'm sure it did matter
that he was there. He's the person that saved my life.
But in those moments where you're dealing with so many
(18:22):
factors that are in nobody's control, the wind, to the ground,
everything else, there's only so much he could do, and
I felt very much like I was going to be
responsible for for whatever ended up happening. Of course, there
was only so much I could do, I couldn't be
the one to pull the reserve shoot. I did not
have the training that he had for emergency situations. But
(18:45):
I will say that the one thing I did do,
which came from years of training at Push Push Theater
in Atlanta, was I am. Since high school, Tim Haberger,
who runs Push Push, had really really strongly pushed physical
stage acting, and we used to do a lot of
(19:05):
things like pratfalls, and we would jump off of platforms
and learn how to fall safely. Falling safely is something
that I had been taught how to do since I
was in high school, and I was never grade at it,
but I had some training in it. So once we
got to a point that felt like the equivalent of
jumping off a box or a very tall probably ten
feet up, I instinctually went into pratfall mode, and I
(19:31):
positioned myself to fall safely, to sort of tumble full.
So when you fall, you don't lock up. You stay
as loose as you can, You let your knees come
up a little bit, and if you can, you fall
to the side. You position yourself so you're not going
to brace with your arms, so that you don't shatter
your wrists, and you just sort of position yourself to
the most well equiped parts of your body to absorb impact,
(19:54):
and you let yourself collapse. It was harder attached to some,
but I do think that that's part of why I
came away with no injuries. That coupled with the fact
that it did rain the night before. We fell into
somebody's farmland and the ground was kind of spongy. No
(20:18):
no legs, brains, no leg breaks, nothing at all. My
feet hit first, but I very quickly let my feet
fold and let my knees sort of come up to
my chest and fell to my side. And the ground
was still wet from it raining the night before, and
I'm sure that helped us. And the guy fell on
top of me, and he was a bigger guy, so
(20:38):
that that that was like the most dangerous part of it,
was having a full grown man fall on top of me.
Maybe not the most dangerous part, the most painful part.
(21:00):
We both just sort of laid there on the ground
in the wet grass, and I think there was a
long moment of silence. It's early ish in the day
and it smells like cows, it smells like farmland. It
(21:24):
smells like farm animals, not in an overwhelming way. There's
still a lot of fresh air, but it smells like
the country. The air is cool, but the sun is
out and you can feel the sun, so there's that
direct sun warmth, but with a cool breeze. I'm in
(21:45):
the shade so and I'm aware that I'm in the
shade from the trees, the shade being a little cooler.
He laughs first, and then I laughed. And I think
(22:08):
the laughter moment is just that feeling when you are
so overcome by emotion. It's not happy laughter or sad
laughter or grateful laughter or anything. It's just it's just,
I think, a release. It wasn't funny, but we did
(22:31):
come out of it completely unscathed, and it felt like
a relief laughter. And it wasn't a long laugh. It
wasn't like a giggle fit or anything like that. It
was just it was just an acknowledgment of the absurdity
of the situation that we just survived, and a release
of all of the tension of whether or not we
were going to survive it. For me, when I think
(22:59):
of this experience, the moments that stand out the most
are the moment right before going into the tree line,
because I didn't know where the ground was because the
tree line was pretty dense, so I didn't know how
much further I was going to have to fall once
I got past the tree line. So the moment right
before that was very scary, and that was still when
(23:20):
I was questioning whether or not I could grab onto
a tree limb. But it's funny. I remember that moment
above the tree line and the moment specifically of acceptance
that I was going to shatter both of my legs,
and I remember thinking specifically that it was funny that
I was okay with that, and that I was even
(23:43):
a little grateful in that moment because I just knew
that I wasn't going to die, and I felt great.
It felt like a fair trade to me. I was like, sure,
if I'm going to live, I can be in a
wheelchair for the rest of my life. That's fine, I'll
say again. The second moment, this very visceral, is when
(24:10):
I realized that moment of it kicking in that I
needed to fall safely. I needed a pratfall like theater
training and taught me how to do. Was another clear moment,
because then it felt like I had something to do,
where before everything was happening to me, that moment felt
like I had to execute something and I had to
execute it right. So that was a very honed in
(24:31):
moment for me, and those are the two moments I
think of the most. But I do also very specifically
remember the texture of the ground because it had rained before,
because the ground was wet still and it was spongy,
and we happened to land right on the edge of
a farm, so there was trees that we went. We
just got past the trees and then there was a
(24:53):
big open field and we didn't know where we were.
We had no idea how far off course we were,
none of that. And after a moment of laying in
the sort of spongy, wet ground, I got up. He
was very afraid of me getting up, but I got up.
I was fine, He was fine. We were both completely unscathed.
He gave me a hug. He asked if I was okay,
and he said I did a great job. And we
(25:17):
chatted a little bit about whether or not that had
happened before, and we just we were like, okay, we
gotta go, we gotta go find the road, and we
gathered up the parachute he found the He we had
no idea where the other parachute went. I'm sure they
found it eventually, But we gathered up our reserve parachute
and we got out out of the road and we
started walking, and eventually a pickup truck came and loaded
(25:39):
us into the back. They had found us. They'd been
out looking the other the drop zone people had been
out looking for us because they could see from the
ground what had happened. They saw us more or less
where we landed. They came and got us. We were
something like two and a half or three miles off course,
we weren't that far away, and we came and when
I got off the truck and was there waiting for me,
(26:01):
and he was so scared. He was so so scared,
and I mean in the way that any of us
would have been if we just saw our friend's parachute
malfunction and they dropped going a million miles an hour
into the tree line. He was terrified. And he told
me that he looked over to his instructor when our
shoot disappeared, and he said, is she gonna be okay?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
And his instructor just said, oh, fuck. So Randy thought
I was dead. He was so scared and so grateful.
I was very grateful.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
A bunch of people apologized to me, but it was
nobody's fault. It really probably was such a minor tear
that just escalated when the shoot up, and it's nobody's fault,
and I wasn't upset about it. In fact, I was
super grateful that I was with somebody who handled the
whole thing so well. And then it was done, and
(27:03):
that was that. We went home and I called my
dad and I said, hey, Dad, my parachute didn't deploy,
and he said, congratulations. The moment that I knew that
I wasn't going to die is something that that moment's
(27:23):
the thing that sticks out to me more than anything else, specifically,
because I don't know how I knew that. I, like
I said before, I did have somebody with me. I
did have a second parachute that was deployed, but those
things alone weren't necessarily enough to guarantee my survival. And
this circumstance because we were so close to the ground
when the parachute did deploy, and because the winds and
(27:44):
everything were working so far against us, and it wasn't
a matter of I felt safe because of those things.
I didn't feel protected because of those things. I don't
have any other way to say it other than a
crystal clear instinct that today wasn't my day. Today wasn't
my day. It wasn't. It just felt very clear. Even
(28:08):
though all of the physical indicators said today could be
your day, my brain went, no, it's not today, and
I don't have any reason for that. And it wasn't
a decision. It wasn't a will to live. It wasn't
a choice that I made. It was a quick analysis.
It was a hey, Zoe, you might die, and you're
(28:29):
not going to die today. Yeah, you're not going to
die today, so let's figure out what is going to
happen today. And that was actually the thing that happened. First.
It wasn't let's all right, team, let's let's figure out
how we're gonna get out of this. It was, Okay,
you're not gonna die. You're not gonna die. You can
feel that in your heart. You're not gonna die. What
is going to happen? And that's when the analysis starts going, Okay,
you're gonna break both your legs and then I've got
(28:51):
the flash's actual physical like imagery flashes of like you know,
being in a hospital bed and then being in a
wheelchair for the rest of my life. It did occur
to me in those moments, which I think is a
it's hilarious looking back that I did have a very
brief mourning for my acting career up there and in
the sky, which you know I've had. I've since mourned
(29:13):
more completely.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
But I went through just the quick list of what
is going to happen to you, and then the third
thing that happened was, Okay, what's the game plan.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I think this experience showed me that we're capable of
a lot. In moments where it feels like we don't
have any control, we are more capable than we think.
I think the human body and the human brain are
absolutely remarkable because I can get overwhelmed and clouded by
(29:54):
emotion when you know a delivery that I've been expecting
doesn't show up on you know, there are things that
can completely ruin your day and can set things off
on a train of nothing's going right and everything just
seems awful. And yet in these moments where it really
(30:14):
matters and where you may or may not make it,
and everything you've known in your consciousness that exists might
be blinking out soon. It's amazing how clear everything can become.
And I think it's amazing the intensity with which your
brain can zero in on details to survive. It's just survival.
(30:36):
We've got these little survival machines in our heads, and
it's incredible how easily it can sift out the things
that are not necessary for you in those moments and
distill your experience down into what is necessary. And this
is an opinion that I'm about to express, but I
believe that because I knew I wasn't going to die,
emotions became unnecessary and the things that became necessary or
(31:00):
life saving instincts. Whereas I do think that in certain
situations where survival might not be an option that would
make sense to me, that emotion would then become the
defining factor because your brain is going to fledge you
with that in that moment, emotion might be the most
useful thing if there's not a survival option. Who knows.
(31:20):
I don't think that there's Yeah, I don't think there's
an explanation, but fear, elation, sadness, you know, nostalgia. Any
of those things might be the thing that in real
final moments might be the thing that's most useful. The
(31:41):
time slowing down thing was very interesting to me, and
it makes sense, I suppose, when you think about things
like going into the zone in a basketball game or
whatever else it might be. But I don't feel like
nothing that happened to me felt like it was. Everything
was a bit of a surprise. I didn't know how
(32:03):
I would react to any of this. If you had
told me that I was going to jump out of
an airplane and the shoe wasn't in a deploy, I
would imagine that I would be panicking. I would imagine
that I would be I've always I've had morbid fantasies
before about what would you do if you were in
a plane when the plane went down, And I remember
I used to think that I would try to use
my phone to call, or try to get a text out,
(32:23):
or write something down so that if they found my
phone that could be later discovered by my loved ones
that could say, you know, I was thinking of you
in my last moments. I know that's a very morbid
thing to say, but you think about these things sometimes
communication and expressing that I loved you. And I've considered
that in a moment of unplanned emergency death, I would
(32:45):
want to try to get a message out to my
loved ones that I loved them, and that's how I
would want to spend my final moments. But in that moment,
that was not That was not on the table, and
I and I you want that to be on the
table because you want to think that, like, oh, that's
a really beautifu last thing to happen, But it wasn't.
In my experience, it really was just a Hey, we're
(33:05):
going to get out of this? How are we going
to get out of this? For me, it informs the
way I think about death and about how it's amazing
what your brain will do to protect you in moments
of real danger. And again, I know that every circumstance
is going to be different, but I think about it
a lot in terms of actual death. I don't believe
(33:32):
that at the time of this experience that I had
any concept of how I was going to die. I
was not raised with any kind of religion. I was
both of my parents were atheists, and so I was
raised to sort of believe that nothing happens when we die.
(33:54):
And I was raised in a way that of course
we're all going to fear death, but I was I
don't know. But no, I didn't receive or I never
knew how I was going to die at the time.
I have since had premonitions of how I would die.
And it's not in an airplane. It's in a car.
(34:18):
And I hope I'm wrong, But there is an interesting thing.
And I will say that I did think of this
experience when I had that premonition, because the thought that
I had of it was a similar acceptance. It wasn't
(34:38):
a pleasant thought, and again I hope that it's not true.
But when I did have that thought, it was a
flash that came into my mind out of nowhere, completely uninvited,
and it was images of what that those very final
moments would be. And along with it came a distinct
(35:03):
feeling of acceptance. And you know I wouldn't. Happiness is
not on the table here, neither is sadness. There's no
emotion attached to it. It's just a clear It's like
stating a fact, same as you know sky's bluegrass is green.
This is how you go. And again I hope I'm wrong,
(35:25):
because I don't want to go that way. What I
would like to happen is to die at one hundred
and ten in my sleep, you know, but who knows.
But I do think it is interesting that that's the
only other time that I've ever had a completely emotionless
response to the idea of my own death. At the
(35:46):
same time, it's impossible to not think about other people's
near death experiences or other people's actual death experiences, and
I feel very privileged and very fortunate to be able
to say things like I wasn't scared and it's not scary,
because I don't want to. I don't want to suggest
that it's not scary for everyone. I don't want to
suggest that it's not like that in everyone's final moments
that they're they're feeling very zen about it. But in
(36:07):
my moment, I was feeling very zen about it. And
a carry away for me has been that in my
actual final moments, I think I will feel that too,
and which is further bolstered by the fact that in
my pseudo premonition about how I may or may not die,
I feel very zen about it. I don't want it,
but I feel zen about it. There's one overwhelming thing
(36:31):
that I was loved with with this experience that I
love and I'm very grateful for. And I had no
idea that this would be my takeaway, but I think
about it often, which is that in those final moments,
or what could have been a final moment, in those
uncertain moments for me, in that moment, there was no
fear for me. In that moment, there was no fear.
(36:52):
It was not and I don't say that to sound
like I'm brave. It's that there was too many other
things that I had to think about. And granted I
didn't have a heart stopping moment, and I did have
a reserve shoot and I had somebody with me, so
there my near death experience was in many ways more
controlled than a lot of others. But it was still
uncertain for a while. And in those moments of uncertainty,
(37:17):
my life didn't flash before my eyes. I wasn't thinking
about my loved ones and what I wish I could
have said to them. I wasn't thinking about regrets or
anything emotional. I was thinking about how I was going
to save my life. But it was done without fear.
It was done with complete confidence and I appreciated that,
(37:39):
and I've carried that forward into the idea of in
our most vulnerable moments, we can be very very strong
and we don't need to be overcome by fear. And
I'm sure it's all circumstantial, but in that moment, for me,
I was shocked at the lack of fear. I was
conscious of the lack of fear. And I've taken that
and I've held that, and that's been that's been a
(38:01):
big thing for me going forward and thinking about other
people who I've known who have passed away since, and again,
every circumstance is going to be very different. I'm sure
there that I'm I'm very lucky in that regard. But
the quiet acceptance of things, even the quiet acceptance of
I'm going to shatter both of my legs and I'm
(38:22):
okay with that, was overwhelming. The the the amount of
emotion that was not involved was really really shocking. And
that's something that that I've that's stuck with me. Would
(38:43):
I do it again, I would absolutely And at the
time the day that I the day that this happened,
I would have gone again that same day if you
would let me. And I think that that same day,
I was feeling not invincible, but I was feeling very present,
and I was feeling very very open to experience and
to doing things. I also was feeling very much like, well,
(39:05):
this probably won't happen again, so I should probably get
up in a plane and do this again, because what
are the odds there would happen twice. But I think
that if anything, it has made me, it has made
it a little easier to be present and to accept
things as they are coming, and for a time, I
(39:27):
would say probably made me a bit more adventurous because
of that. I don't think, I'm certain that this experience
made me more comfortable with the idea of my own death.
Of course, I'm still scared of it. Of course I
don't want it to happen. But the major takeaway that
I had from it that I do believe is that
(39:48):
in my final moments, and again I can't speak to
anybody else, but I do believe that in my final moments,
I'll be okay with it. And that was a takeaway
that I got from this experience.
Speaker 5 (40:01):
You can be okay with anything when you're faced with reality,
and I believe that for me, in those final moments,
I'll be terrified leading up to it.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
I'll be terrified thinking about it. I don't want it
to happen. I don't like thinking about it, but I
do believe that in those last moments, I'll be okay.
And I think that this experience gifted me with that.
I have, ever since this experience, felt very strongly that
it's our responsibility in life to live it. And because
(40:37):
you don't know when you're going to do something that
might be your last thing, we are not guaranteed anything,
and I know everybody knows that, but it kind of
stares you in the face a little bit when you
come close. And I have absolutely tried to live my
life in a way that's consciously aware of the fact
that I'm going to die, and I think it's it's
(40:59):
been a way wonderful thing to remember always that you
don't know and you can't control, and the best thing
you can do to face your own death is to
live your life.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Welcome back, This is Alive again. Joining me for a
conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story
producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Die And I'm
your host Dan Bush. Let's talk about Zoe Cooper, the
one and only.
Speaker 6 (41:51):
One of my favorite human beings in the right.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
One of the most cool.
Speaker 6 (41:58):
Is really impossible if you the universe Zoe to not
just automatically fall completely in love. She's just like such
a cool, sweet, funny, smart as hell. One of the
best writers I've ever amazing writer, just impressive. Yeah, oh
(42:18):
my god, freaking brilliant. She wrote on that show Teacup
and she she wrote, uh, mantak caves with you and I, Yeah,
that was.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
She wrote on a twelve Ghost, didn't she?
Speaker 6 (42:29):
And she wrote on yep, she wrote on twelve Ghost
thirteen Days Twelve Ghosts episode of Thirteen Days of Halloween.
If I want my work torn apart and put back
together again, I'll send it to Zoe because she is
absolutely brilliant on things like story structure and character and
does not pull punches, which I appreciate give she gives
(42:51):
amazing notes. Yeah. I just can't speak highly enough about
this human being.
Speaker 7 (42:56):
And I had no idea that this was part of her.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Her experience and what happened to her brain in this
heightened this moment of heightened awareness as she's got seconds
to decide how she's going to you know, maneuver in
this situation. That's so fascinating to me. I've got to
go find a neurologist to talk to about these things
like the the experience of time dilation and how that
(43:22):
works in the brain, and the experience of fear and
how your brain could shut off your amignala in times
of hyper awareness when your life is at risk. Her story,
I just you know, when I re listened to it,
I was like, oh my god, this is one of
our best stories.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
Yeah, it's it's really intense, and you know, it does
remind me of another episode that we've done on Derek McManus,
who was the you know, Special Forces rescue guy who
got shot a bunch of times. The way that their
brains worked in those moments seemed so similar.
Speaker 7 (43:56):
To me, so analytical.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
They both just went into problem solving mode and both
had this sense of innate optimism about them in these
situations that like, I've got to get to the other
side of this is going to be totally fine, And
that is incredibly impressive to me, and I wonder if
(44:19):
I'm capable of doing the same thing. Hopefully I'll never
find out hopefully, I, like Zoe said, die in my
bed asleep. At one hundred and ten.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
She came out of this whole experience going, Okay, when
it's my time, there's a possibility because of what I experienced,
and she holds onto this that I will not be afraid.
That your mind is this wonderful machine that is built
for survival and it's built to protect you. So she
took hope in the idea that you know, when it's
her time, she might be able to also not have
(44:50):
that fear, so it won't be a horrific sort of
fear that goes along with that. She said, Now, these
conditions are specific to what happened to her, and these
circumstances are not all circumstances, but just that she had
gone through this and had this experience of fearlessness or
not even fearlessness, there just wasn't It wasn't about fear
at all. It was about survival mode. Just the way
(45:12):
she integrated these experiences into how she sees her future
and how it sort of made her even more willing
to take some risks, I think, is what she said.
Speaker 8 (45:20):
I thought it was amazing how her theater training is
what saved her.
Speaker 7 (45:24):
Saved by theater training.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yes, for the first time in history.
Speaker 6 (45:29):
I think half of the people on this call have
actually worked with Push Push, the theater that she was talking about.
I think if if any theater's training was going to
save your life.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
Mm hmm, yeah, learning how to take a pratfall is
way up there.
Speaker 6 (45:46):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 8 (45:47):
We've had a couple of stories like this, I can't
think of them off the top of my head, where
the thing that that person was really into is a
thing that came back in their moment and help them,
Like like Dwayne Meadows talking about his knowledge of marine
biology when he was stuck in the tsunami in Thailand,
(46:09):
you know, like where I know what's coming because I
have this thing I've devoted my life to and it's
helping me in this last moment. And Les Cochrane her
experience as a diver helped her survive the fires in Lina.
And a lot of these stories too are you know,
there's stories about people on the brink of death. But
(46:30):
what I've found is a lot of these stories are
really about the thing that that person loved the most,
you know. So it was really interesting to see how
Zoe about her theater experience and her her love of acting,
and you know, and the recognition that she may not
be able to act if if she crushes her legs
in this fall. You know, I just think it's it's
really it's always been interesting to me how much the
(46:52):
way the person lived their life comes comes comes out
in these final these what could be their final moment.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Right Like Derek McManus, who was shot for teen times,
he's langlare, He's like, well, I might be a gold
medallist now because you know, in the Paralympics. And then
and then Zoe's like, oh, well, I guess I'm gonna
you know, I'll never be an actor again, but okay,
I'll make that bargain.
Speaker 6 (47:14):
And now she's a fantastic writer, right.
Speaker 8 (47:17):
Or there's she people like Drew Cybert who are like,
I'm going to take this experience of being a paraplegic
and I'm going to go on to get my law
degree and help veterans who have lost the benefits that
have been guaranteed to them because I understand what they're
going through. You know, I just think it's really interesting
how how in that moment they can they can see
their future, you know what I mean, Like not only
(47:39):
and Zoe knew she was going to survive that, which
is another interesting thing.
Speaker 6 (47:43):
She's like, no, no, I'm going to get through this.
Speaker 8 (47:44):
It's just how am I gonna adapt after.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
All the bargains that she was making on the way
down in the split seconds, like it must have been
just maybe ten seconds in that last little bit. But
timeslod and stretch, which I guess they say is mostly
a memory effect, not a real time yeah obviously, but.
Speaker 7 (48:01):
It's it's how your brain is recording everything, not how
you're literally experiencing it.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Right, and you you're recording, you're taking in so much
more information in a short period of time that you're
clocking all of that. And then so when you play
it back, of course, it seems like more than Yeah,
when you play back in your mind, it seems like
more than you would in a normal experience.
Speaker 7 (48:20):
Feel normally, we're just not recording that part or that fast.
Speaker 6 (48:26):
The brain is so weird in that way. Yeah, it's
you know, it's so similar to uh, I when you
learn what deja vu really is. Uh It's it's when
you're the part of your brain that that makes memories
is the one that's like, your lord, you seem to
(48:47):
know what this is. Can you explain this better?
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Yeah, you've explained it before. Can you explain it for
us again?
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah? Okay.
Speaker 7 (48:52):
So deja vu is this thing where essentially the part
of your brain that is telling you what you are
currently experiencing gets a little bit miswired and it kind
of punts whatever is happening in front of you into
the this is a memory part of your brain and
then like like like you are like, oh, this has
(49:14):
happened before.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
No, it's just your brain miswire.
Speaker 6 (49:18):
Yeah, it's just a processing error. Yeah, which you know,
it's cool to know that, but also kind of a
bummer to take the manage it away.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Can you guys imagine making bargains like the way she
was making a bark. She's like, Okay, well I guess
I'll I'll lose my acting career, but and I'll lose
my legs, but I'll live, so okay, And she's like
becoming okay, like the things you're willing to shed off,
the layers you're willing to drop away as you're approaching
the inevitable crash.
Speaker 6 (49:51):
You know.
Speaker 7 (49:51):
I think she went through all the stages of grief
in like seven seconds, Ye blasted through them and was like, well,
all right, that's fine. Damn right.
Speaker 8 (50:00):
Yeah, I would say there are no atheists in a
fox hole, and a lot of that is just people going, Okay,
I'm about to die?
Speaker 6 (50:06):
What what?
Speaker 8 (50:07):
What deal am I going to make with whatever force
there is? That With Zoe it was herself to make
to make myself to get out of this situation. You know,
how am I going to adjust my life to whatever
reality I'm going to be living in when I come.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Out of this.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
I love how she described the moment when they realized
that they were unscathed and they were in this wet
field that was kind of spongy and helped absorb some
of the impact. And then she described the laughing, not
because it was funny because but just because it was
this huge release, yeah, from all of the heightened stuff,
Like she couldn't be emotional during the moment to moment,
(50:46):
split second decisions that was rapid firing through a brain
of taking in information, figuring out how to you know,
which choices to make as quickly as possible, and then
all of a sudden, when all that was gone, the
emotions just flooded in and they came out as laughter,
just this release. That was kind of a beautiful moment.
Speaker 8 (51:02):
It's amazing that how long does it take to jump
from a plane and land of the ground, Like maybe
a minute in twenty seven seconds, and it took her
thirty minutes to tell the story, you know, like that
much went on in that short period of time. And
I think I remember you telling me that you weren't
quite sure that this story would fit the format of
the show. I'm not quite sure why, because it seems
(51:25):
to fit it perfectly. You know, it's like, how are
you going to reckon with this moment? But so much
of it it wasn't about like how does it transform
your life after the moment. It was just like so
much went into telling the story of what happened in
those in that minute twenty seven seconds or however long
it takes to I'm going to look up on Google
it takes to jump out.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I was wrong, No, I think I was just early on.
I was just kind of it was my first story
and I was like, this is not an actual clinical
near death experience where there's an out of bout experience,
you know, And I was I was thinking more in
terms of, you know, how does somebody undergo massive trauma,
bodily traumas and things like that. And I was sort
(52:06):
of searching for what the show was. And now I've
gotten to a point here at the end of season
one where I'm like, oh, I know what the show is. Yeah,
it's it's just about all things that have to do
with being human when you're pushed up against the edge
of life, you know, so it's about being alive again.
And this did inform her sense of agency going forward,
(52:27):
and still does.
Speaker 8 (52:28):
I just looked it up and it said a skydive
usually takes five to six minutes with approximately fifty seconds
in free fall, so she would have had four to
five minutes of this terror.
Speaker 1 (52:39):
No, she they pulled the shoot after being able to
tumble for three or four minutes. So when they pulled
the shoot and it started to fail, they only had
about a minute left.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Jeez.
Speaker 7 (52:48):
Yeah, because that four to five is a lot of
drifting and yeah.
Speaker 8 (52:54):
And you fall faster when there's no parachute.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (52:57):
I also was it was interesting to me she talks
as many of our interviewees talk about wanting to reach
out to family in this scary moment about having about
feeling that connection to loved ones and wishing that there
was a way that she could reach out, which a
reminded me of Aaron's story of getting his arm crushed
(53:19):
in the canyon and how he used his you know,
not literal but like technological connection to his loved ones
through his camera as like a psychological lifeline in those moments.
But also it was kind of funny because like Zoe
was not alone, she was physically connected to another human person,
and in a way that in a lot of our
(53:39):
stories people are very alone in those moments. And I
don't know, it's just it's so interesting to me because
like she talks about both feeling glad, feeling like logically
comforted that he's there because he knows what he's doing
and he's an experienced dude, but also how she still
felt very much personally responsible and kind of on her own,
(54:00):
and that she wasn't even really thinking about him, and
so like that part of the psychology, I was like, huh,
Like even, yeah, like we are all truly alone.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
Kind of one of those moments.
Speaker 1 (54:16):
Next time I'm Alive Again, Australian Star Group officer Derek
McManus was shot fourteen times in under five seconds and
left bleeding on the ground for nearly three hours while
a siege raged around him.
Speaker 9 (54:31):
And I'll always retain this sense of optimism no matter
what happens to me. And my body is closing down,
He's still firing continuously. Well, it's pounding through the bricks.
And then I don't know if you know guys in
the Special Forces, but we have a slightly bigger ego
than the average person, and that ego kicked in and
while I'm lying on the ground my body's closing down,
(54:52):
I start thinking to myself, I'm damn good at basketball.
If I can add something to what they're already doing, well,
we may make the Paralympic finals, may end up with
a gold medal.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Special thanks to Zoe Cooper for sharing your story. Zoe
is a film and TV writer and director based in
Los Angeles, California. Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney,
Brent die Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbau. Music by Ben Lovett,
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
(55:27):
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. Kali
and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka, Brent
Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Alive Again is a production
of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have
(55:48):
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 ve A
g A I N P R O j E C
T at gmail dot com.
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