The Most Peaceful Moment of My Life Happened the Day Before I Turned Six
“I drowned the day before my sixth birthday“.
It happened at the bottom of an apartment complex swimming pool in Southern California in the summer of 1975.
For several minutes, no one realized I was missing.
And what should have been the most terrifying moment of my life became the most peaceful moment I have ever known.
I was five years old.
Like a lot of families back then, mine was a blended one. My mom was a young mother raising four children. My older sister was the oldest, my brother was second, I was the third child, and then there was my little sister.
My stepfather was what people would call a teaser. He liked to joke around and play pranks on people. With me, though, the teasing almost always involved water.
To this day I don’t know why.
We lived in California in the Garden Grove / Anaheim area. It was 1975. Summers there were warm and bright, the kind of California sunshine that made the whole world feel lazy and slow.
In the years leading up to my drowning, I remember my stepfather teaching my older sister and my brother how to swim in my aunt’s backyard pool. I always wanted to learn too.
But whenever I asked him to teach me, it never went the same way.
Instead of lessons, he would throw me into the deep end and laugh and say, “Sink or swim.”
I would panic, kicking and screaming, trying to fight my way to the edge of the pool. Eventually I would grab the side, terrified, and he would just laugh and push me toward the wall.
For him it was teasing.
For me it was terrifying.
I was a very small child, and I never understood why it was always like that with me.
Then came the day everything changed.
My stepfather wasn’t around that day. He was probably at work. I honestly don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter.
My mom was young. She had me when she was twenty-one, so when this happened she was only twenty-six years old.
That day she told us to grab our towels and put on our swimsuits because we were going to the apartment complex swimming pool.
For me there was one rule.
I had to stay in the shallow end.
My older brother and sister already knew how to swim, so they were allowed to go wherever they wanted in the pool.
My mom stretched out on a lounge chair and eventually drifted into a light sleep while she was sunbathing.
My older siblings were laughing and playing games in the deep end.
And I was in the shallow end. At least at first.
I’ve always hated getting water in my eyes. I’ve always had to plug my nose around water.
But that day, standing at the edge of the pool, I decided something.
If nobody was going to teach me how to swim… I would teach myself.
I would hold onto the edge of the pool wall, take a deep breath, squeeze my eyes shut, plug my nose, and slide down into the water.
I would keep one hand on the wall and feel my way down until my feet touched the bottom of the pool.
Then I would push myself back up, sliding my hands along the wall until I reached the top again and grabbed the edge.
Each time I succeeded, I moved a little further toward the deep end.
Eventually I reached the deep end.
I hesitated for a moment. It looked darker and deeper than the rest of the pool.
But I had already done this many times successfully.
So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, plugged my nose, and pushed myself down.
My hands felt the wall. Down… down… down… until my feet touched the bottom.
Then I pushed upward as hard as I could.
But something was different.
The bottom of the deep end curved outward like the belly of a bowl.
When I pushed off the bottom, I pushed slightly away from the wall.
Suddenly I couldn’t feel it anymore.
I was tiny, floating in open water, and I had lost the wall.
I let all the air out of my lungs and sank down again.
I bent my little legs and pushed upward with everything I had.
My right hand broke the surface of the water.
Just barely.
My fingertips touched the sunlight above the water.
But that was as far as I made it.
My body started sinking again.
And as I slipped back down into the water, I remember yelling the only thing a child thinks to yell when they are scared.
Mommy!
I took my first breath of water.
And then… everything went black.
For several minutes, no one realized I was missing.
My mom was still sunbathing. My brother and sister were still playing.
Eventually two teenagers came to the pool. One leaned over and looked into the water.
“Hey… I think somebody’s towel is at the bottom of the pool.”
My mom jumped up and started counting her children.
One. Two.
The third was missing.
“That’s my baby!” she screamed.
A man from a second-story balcony heard her cries and ran down to the pool.
He dove in, swam down, and pulled me up.
My mom dragged me onto the concrete and used something she had learned in nursing school to force the water out of my lungs.
Paramedics arrived.
I had been pronounced dead.
They shocked my heart and brought me back.
On the way to the hospital my heart stopped again.
They shocked me again.
I spent three months in a coma.
When I woke up, I had amnesia for another three months.
Then came six months of recovery—speech therapy and physical therapy.
In total, I spent a year in the hospital. And another year in therapy after I left.
But I survived.
And the strangest part of the entire experience is this:
What should have been the most terrifying moment of my life…
was the most peaceful moment I have ever known.
That experience shaped me in ways I’m still discovering.
It is one of the truths that made me.
And it is one of the reasons this space exists.
Because every one of us has moments that change us forever.
Moments that almost end our story.
Moments that somehow become the beginning of something else.
A Moment Like This Changes You
Many of us carry moments that shape who we become.
Moments that frightened us.
Moments that quietly changed everything.
That experience shaped me in ways I’m still discovering.
It is one of the truths that made me.
And it is one of the reasons this space exists.
If you have experienced a moment like that in your life, your story deserves to be heard.
You are welcome to share it here:
