21-05-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
It began as an ordinary Monday. Then I accidentally set myself on fire
'Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,' wrote the late US writer Joan Didion in her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking following the sudden death of her husband and editor, John Gregory Dunne.
One moment, Didion writes, he's sitting opposite her at the dining table nursing a single-malt scotch, very much alive, talking: 'Then he wasn't. Wasn't talking.'
Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.
September 16, 2024: My husband has taken our youngest to school and our 17-year-old is in the shower. I'm working from home, and I get up from my desk to make a cup of tea.
Then I wasn't. Wasn't making a cup of tea.
In the days that followed, here's how I recalled what happened next:
At 8.52am, I get up from my workstation and walk to the kitchen ... I … put the kettle on [the top of the stove] to make myself a cup of tea. I am wearing a flowing top and, as I turned towards the sink, my top catches a spark from the flame …
In the millisecond it takes me to clock the flame it's already devoured my top (a favourite!), and the highly flammable one beneath it. It surges across my chest, up my neck and catches under my right arm. It claws at my eyelashes and sears the left side of my face. My hair is next. The more it takes, the more it wants. I exhale, and my world shrinks, warping behind a blinding, suffocating curtain of orange and red.
'What would you do if your clothes caught on fire?' pose the authors in the Country Fire Authority's primary-school manual Home Fire Safety: Lessons for Year 1 and 2. 'Would you run around to put out the flames? Would you blow on the flames? Would you stop, drop and roll?'
