Me and my wife had a horrible experience ourselves where our 2 year old daughters best friend(also 2 years old) drowned in their family swimming pool after figuring out how to open the door herself. I know this wasn't nearly as close to heart as the other stories in this post, but receiving that text on a Saturday evening was super tough and me and my partner was crushed for months after it happened. It's now been 10 months and we rarely think about it anymore although we did end up in a house WITHOUT a swimming pool, so in a way it's still with us.
My life has a stark demarcation of before and after that, and sometimes it feels like nothing is quite real since.
One day my wife said she was going to give our 4 year old daughter a bath, then I find my daughter by herself in the bath and my wife all the way across the house in the bedroom. I asked “Why aren’t you watching her?” The reply, “She’s fine. She knows how to swim and the water isn’t even that deep.”
I work remotely in the upstairs bedroom and will occasionally come down for water. Half the time I find my one year old eating alone in his high chair in the kitchen, with my wife doing something in the bedroom. “Where are you? What if he chokes?” “You don’t trust me. He’s fine. I can hear him from the bedroom.”
My wife will get in road rage incidents. People flip her off and yell threats at her as she slingshots through traffic with our little kids in the back seat. “You’re going to crash driving like that.” “Stop telling me how to drive.” Someone pretended to pull a gun out on her after she swore at them. “You’re going to get shot.” “No I’m not. I can tell if any of those people would have a gun.”
She also has severe ADHD. Our daughter got under the sink when she was two and ate half a dishwasher detergent pod before my wife noticed and called poison control. Another day when my daughter was two my wife forgot to shut the gate at the bottom of the stairs when she came upstairs to talk to me during the workday. Suddenly I hear a series of thuds and cries. Our little girl had fallen down the flight of stairs after trying to follow my wife without her noticing. Same thing happened to my 1 year old son under the watch of my wife’s mother.
I’m so scared that one day I’m going to get a call about something horrible that has happened to my kids either because of my wife’s inattention or anger issues.
There's something I wanted to say reading this whole thread. I just hope it does not come off as lecturing or preaching. It's this: Don't feel bad about things that there is no way for you to change. Just do your very best about the things you can. Nobody can ask more of anyone.
This is how I've felt every time a friend has tried and failed to commit suicide. I'm so sorry.
The rest of that event - why I walked away from the group, whether I was called back or just lucky, or even what I thought or felt when I went into the water - all gone. Can't remember. Only that afterwards, it felt odd how panicy mum was, and that she immediately insisted on swimming lessons.
So when I was five, this was an experience like "any" - How was I supposed to understand that I had a close brush with death, or what that even meant ?
(I wish your daughter a long and happy life, and may neither her nor anyone have to experience the feelings that you did, or my mum)
My grandfather ran me over when I was 6 and nearly killed me. When he ostensibly realized what happened, he took his sweet time to exit the vehicle while it was pinning me down, slowly get out, stare at me, and then made sure to run over me again while moving the vehicle. The only two things that saved me was that he was driving a light pickup truck, and my bike folded around my chest and neck and prevented the wheel of the truck from crushing them. I will never know if he saw me and ran over me intentionally or not, but I was in plain view waiting for the bus and he never expressed any emotion at any point over what happened.
I was crying and shaken up and traumatized, but he made sure I still got on that bus without so much as a quick medical checkup. I felt very numb and isolated for a long time after that. No one around seemed to understand that I'd just experienced a near-death experience. I also didn't receive a new bike for years, seemingly out of spite.
No permanent injuries on our end, but what you said about walking on a thin crust of ice rings true. And feeling like there's another reality where things didn't turn out OK. All the best to you, I am glad your daughter is OK.
She had a simple fever cramp (her second) in the tub and nearly drowned because of it.
This was 2 years ago. I remember walking out of the building at work in trance, looking for a cab, after I got the call, thinking my daughter was dead. She was back to normal (apart from the nasty infection that lead to the fever cramp) on the next day. Buy my wife and I have never been the same since. I entered the apartment 2 days later, and the tub was still filled with water and some of my daughters hair, and there was blood on the living room floor because the medics gave her sedatives and she kicked against the syringe. While cleaning my daughter's blood from the floor, I got the distinct feeling that she really died and that I was just in a very long dream in which she survived, and that I would wake up very soon to a world of sorrow. That feeling has never left me. It may explain why most things now feel completely irrelevant to me, including work.
We quickly bought a house 6 months later and left the apartment. I now realize that this was mostly motivated by the fact that we couldn't stand the look of the bathtub anymore.
The worst part is that she fully remembers. A few weeks ago, she freely and cheerfully explained in daycare that she once was bathing and then cried "mum" and then "fell asleep under water". At dinner a few months ago, she also explained that to us and then laughed and mentioned that "mum must've thought I am a mermaid" and happily continued eating.
If my wife had folded 2 or 3 shirts before entering the bathroom, my daughter would be dead now.
Life to us is now nothing but walking on a thin crust of ice, which spans over an infinite hell of fire, horror and torture. At any time, without warning, the ice may break.