By GARRETT EBLING

Published: April 3, 2008

The first and foremost was a return to family. Second, life on a journalist’s salary is difficult in Northern Virginia and its cost of living. Moving back to the Midwest would help stretch my dollar a little further. And third, having been through 9/11 and the infamous sniper attacks, Minnesota seemed safer — a lot safer. Bad things don’t happen in the land of 10,000 Lutheran church basement hot-dish dinners.

Then Aug. 1, 2007, rolled around.

For you, it was most likely a normal Wednesday. For me, it was anything but. Four days prior, my life would change forever when I proposed to my girlfriend Sonja in my apartment’s living room. Ninety-nine hours later, it changed again when I fell into an international news story, not as a managing editor but as a victim.

I was out driving and was almost halfway across the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis when it collapsed 60 feet above the Mississippi River. My car, along with dozens of others, tumbled with sections of jagged concrete and twisted steel beams. My maroon Ford Focus hatchback fell nose-first and slammed into a section of concrete, side-swiping another vehicle on its way down and landing upright in the river. When two men pulled me from my car, the water had risen up to my neck.

I spent two months in two hospitals. The final tally: Two broken feet (surgery), a compound fracture in my left arm (surgery), a severed colon (surgery), a collapsed lung, injured right eye, broken jaw in three places (surgery) and fractures in every plate in my face (two reconstructive surgeries). According to abdominal surgeon Dr. Chad Richardson, in an interview with the Associated Press, “I thought he was going to die numerous times those first few days.”

(Read the full article at: usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-22-802001540_x.htm)

It’s been a long journey since then. Therapy has been both physical — slowly learning to walk again; mental — continuing counseling to deal with a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder; and emotional — gathering with other bridge victims in lobbying the state legislature for a compensation fund.

Yet as exhausting as it has been, there’s a greater blessing. I have seen an invaluable strengthening of connection with friends, family and even those I never knew before that tragic day. I’ve had six months to evaluate who I am, and God has given me a second opportunity to paint myself as who I ought to be: more loving, more committed, more aware, more like Him. Would this have happened had I not happened to be on that bridge at that precise moment?

Don’t get me wrong: I’d give almost anything to look and feel like the “old” Garrett, to walk without soreness in each step, to be able to smell again. No amount of money could sway my choice, had I ever had one. But perhaps —contrary to popular belief — I was at the right place at the right time. A crazy thought, huh?
Life’s gonna knock you down. There’s no such thing as “safe” in this world. Through all of this, I’ve come to rely on a Japanese proverb: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” Just in case you were wondering, I’m still standing.

Garrett Ebling was the managing editor of the Sun from 2003 to 2005 and is currently the senior communications specialist for Great Clips, Inc. He and Sonja Birkeland plan to marry Aug. 3 along the North Shore of Lake Superior. To track Garrett’s progress visit the Web site link,
caringbridge.org/visit/garrettebling.