Alive again — Emma Lou Thayne finds hope, recovery and a vibrant life

SALT LAKE CITY — For a long time, people told poet and writer Emma Lou Thayne that the six-pound metal bar that flew through the windshield of the car she was riding in should have killed her. It smashed the glass and then her face above her right eye socket before lodging in the rear window. For her, it meant a number of surgeries and a sensory-numb recovery that seemed to lack color, joy and life.

She lost her buoyancy.

"You could have died," friends said, exclaiming over the nearly three-foot L-shaped rod that lives now in a corner of the coat closet off her living room, a not-too-ready reminder. It was built to hold a mudflap on a semi.

It took her a while to realize that she did die briefly.

Thayne has captured the quarter-century personal journey since the accident in her 14th book, "The Place of Knowing," a spiritual autobiography that is being released next month by iUniverse Press. It is published under the name Emma Lou Warner Thayne because it's a family story, she says. The audio version, which she narrates herself, is already available.

She was riding along with her son-in-law, a plastic surgeon, in 1986 when the calamity occurred. "That's the way you want to have it if it happens," she notes humorously. "With a plastic surgeon there." He was driving. She had eight fractures, a broken jaw and six dead teeth. Afterward, she couldn't see because of the glass in her eye and couldn't read as she healed.

But far worse was the feeling that she'd lost three dear friends who helped make her "Lulie," as her father always called her and as she refers to herself: the wizard in her head who could "plan, create and figure," the genie in her heart who "could fathom joys and woes" and the tiger in her bones who "could muster, leap and frolic."

Sleep, long her friend, became an enemy, filled with "wretched" dreams. Her mother had always said to pray at night and plan in the morning, and Thayne had always been able to solve things in her sleep. No more.

"It was like someone else in my skin," Thayne, now 86, recalls. "I didn't laugh, cry, nothing. And I felt so perplexed." She became, she says, "despondent because I didn't feel anything."

A friend who was teaching at BYU at the time had been to a conference on dreams and wanted to help her friend. She ran her fingers down Thayne's arm, speaking to her softly, and by the time she reached Thayne's fingers with her tender touch, Thayne was weeping. The dam had broken at last.