EACH STEP THAT EMMA CAREY takes is a size six miracle. She has no feeling in her legs, no sense of when her feet land or they're in the air. That means her legs give her brain zero feedback, so she has to think about where her legs are going but never feels where they are.
Yet she is a ballet, and her legs are her ballerinas. She glides through the streets of Denver on a steaming summer day last July telling her remarkable life story. There's a little bit of a hitch in her gait, where her legs are just a tad mechanical going up and down. But it's not even noticeable until she specifically says to watch for it. "I definitely get slower the longer I go," she says. "But that's most people, isn't it?"
Most people would have no idea that she is paralyzed from the waist down, or that she survived the unthinkable: In June 2013, Carey went skydiving for the first time and fell 14,000 feet out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.
She somehow lived, and now she's in Denver staying with a friend. The night before, she'd camped outside the Taylor Swift concert, dancing and walking around the stadium parking lot. One miraculous step after another.
She lifts the back of her shirt and spins around to show off a scar running up the lower part of her back. "From here up, everything is normal," she says, waving her hand toward her top half. "From here down, it's different."
Her story is incredible, and she will tell it today. But she doesn't know how she feels about telling it anymore. She's told her story hundreds of times to students, at corporate retreats, in a book ("The Girl Who Fell From The Sky"), to reporters, to friends, to strangers -- you name it. People are inspired by it. They gravitate toward her because of it. They are amazed by it, and they want to know what happened and how she could have ever lived, what it felt like during and after. People want it.
But she is more than it. Sometimes she feels like IT -- her story -- is in capital letters, swallowing up her, in lowercase letters. She's 31 years old now, and her skydiving accident happened 11 years ago. Since then, she's accomplished so many cool things and learned other life lessons. The skydiving story is just a story, and she wrestles with how much longer she wants to keep telling IT. She wants to talk about her.
It's human nature to make a story about you into the story of you, and most of the time feels harmless. Think about how many people whose identities are subsumed going from Justin and Maria, to "Justin & Maria," to Mom and Dad, to Grandma and Pap. Everybody has a friend whose marriage falls apart and he suddenly becomes "Divorced Dave," or a cousin who has borrowed money from everybody in the family and therefore is "Broke Brooke." We connect people with one of their stories, and a chapter about them becomes the book on them.
But who wants to be simplified down to one thing about themselves? This is especially problematic for people with trauma and disabilities. Most of us have said "Heather is paralyzed" or "Mike is autistic" without thinking twice, with no ill will. But there's a reason why those affected often prefer person-first language -- Mike isn't autistic, he has autism. He also has a dog, a job, a guitar and an on-again, off-again relationship. Nobody says "Mike is guitar." And if they do, they probably shouldn't.
For Emma, that means as she sits at a coffee shop, on a day too hot to drink coffee, she doesn't want to be Skydiving Survivor Emma. She doesn't mind telling the story of IT, but she wants to tell IT her way, and then she will tell you about her.
EMMA CAREY IS FLYING, and she is so happy. She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I'm going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.
She's 20, just out of high school, an Australian kid traveling alone in Europe with her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. It was June 9, 2013, and Emma had no plans for what she'd do when she returned home. It would oversimplify things to say her life was an open road because there was no road. Not yet, anyway.
Earlier that morning, she climbed into the back of a helicopter alongside Jemma to ascend about 2.7 miles into the sky. Both were latched to an experienced skydiver for a tandem dive. The helicopter was so loud that they couldn't speak to each other, and it was so cloudy they could hardly see outside the chopper.
At some point, sensing Jemma's nervousness about the jump, Emma gave her what they call "The Face." It's the kind of look that two longtime friends share that makes perfect sense to them and maybe only them. The Face involves smushing your upper lip underneath itself so that the absolute maximum amount of top teeth are showing.
Emma gave The Face to Jemma, and Jemma gave it back, and they both had to smile. This was a good reflection of their friendship: Jemma, the meticulous organizer, and Emma, the free-spirited adrenaline junkie. If you had a party, Jemma would help plan it and Emma would be the life of it. They met when they were 5 and have been a package deal ever since. Swimming, jazz dancing, tennis, trips to the mall, hiking across Europe right after high school -- it was Emma and Jemma, Jemma and Emma, together, always.
About 20 minutes in, it was go-time. Emma looks at Jemma, says "I love you" and then jumps out of her side of the helicopter with her instructor. Thirty seconds later, Jemma jumps from the other side. Jemma closes her eyes for the duration of her jump -- she hates every second of it. Emma, on the other hand, loves it. She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off.
She crosses her arms and then ... nothing.
She's not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He's out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They're not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
Panic hits her. She realizes she's now in the middle of a situation that is such a nightmare that it has been a nightmare since the beginning of time -- the feeling of falling, and falling, and falling. That's when most of us wake up. But this is real life for Emma. She thinks about dying, about what she could have done and said and been. She eventually comes to grips with the fact that she is not slowing down and she's not going to live when she lands in the cow pasture below.
Right before she hits the ground, she has two overwhelming thoughts.
The first is that she doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to give in to the inevitability of her situation. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life, but she wants to have one. She will fight this, even though nobody beats gravity.
The second, the one that breaks her heart the most: Jemma will be the person who finds her body.
WHEN SHE HITS THE GROUND, Emma can't believe she is still conscious. She asks her legs to move but she gets no response. She tries over and over again. Nothing. The equipment is so heavy, and her instructor is still out cold strapped to her. She feels tremendous pain, the kind of pain that is so overwhelming you can't even tell exactly where it's coming from. It wasn't a signal from her body; it was a siren.
As she lies there, she can only muster the strength to yell Jemma's name.
Jemma can't hear her yet. Her trajectory from the opposite side of the helicopter takes her off in another direction far enough that she loses sight of Emma for most of the dive.
At a little over 5,000 feet, Jemma's instructor pulls their chute. If something went haywire -- a rare occurrence -- an emergency chute is supposed to automatically deploy at 5,000 feet above the earth. The leading theory on what happened with Emma's chutes is that her instructor forgot his altimeter to tell him their height and that he somehow pulled the regular chute at the exact second the emergency chute went off, causing them to tangle. Experts interviewed for this story said the odds of this are astronomical.
When Jemma lands, she stands up and can just make out Emma on the ground about a half-mile away. She desperately tries to disconnect from her chute so she can run. And then she takes off.
It's the longest run she'll ever make. Jemma's suit is heavy and the ground is soft, so every step feels like slow-motion. At first, Jemma can't quite tell what she is looking at, whether Emma is crouched or lying down. Her instructor isn't moving, and she has a sinking feeling as she gets closer that he is dead.
But throughout a five-minute sprint, the picture slowly comes into focus: Emma, on the ground, moaning in agony, yelling "Jemma!" The instructor, lying there motionless.
"Jemma, I can't feel my legs!" Emma says. "Help me get up."
"You're badly hurt," Jemma says. "I think you should stay where you are until help arrives."
Emma listens to her friend, and Jemma stays beside her for about an hour as they wait for help. EMTs arrive and instantly diagnose that Emma's injuries are so severe that she needs to be transported in an emergency helicopter to a hospital in Bern, Switzerland's capital. First responders are also preparing to separately transport the instructor to a hospital.
Jemma is told there's only enough room on the chopper for the medical team and Emma. But there's no way she can let Emma go without her. So, she eventually argues her way into a seat with the EMTs and finds herself on another helicopter ride she never wanted to take.
Under the thunderous roar of the chopper, Emma is having trouble processing what happened. She fell from the sky with a passed-out person on her back, and she is somehow alive. She can't believe it. And yet here she is.
She lays her head back, the pain medication kicking in. She later finds out the extent of her injuries. She suffered a catastrophic series of injuries to her midsection: a broken sternum and pelvis, as well as a broken sacrum, L1 vertebrae and a crushed spinal cord. She hadn't defeated gravity ... but she hadn't lost, either. She feels the strangest combination of crushed and grateful.
Jemma makes eye contact and they stare at each other. Emma is strapped down on her back, barely able to turn her head to look at Jemma. Their lives had just changed forever. They're both somber. Confused. Devastated. But at least they're devastated together.
Then Jemma watches Emma do a ridiculous thing that she never needed more. As they fly over the Alps to a trauma center 9,000 miles away from anybody they know, Emma pinches her lip small and makes her teeth big.
"She did The Face," Jemma says, "and that's when I knew she was going to be OK."
EMMA IS TAKEN into surgery for about 8 hours, and Jemma goes to work. She makes a bunch of phone calls home to Australia to tell their families what happened. But after an hour or so, she doesn't know what to do with herself. She leaves the hospital and finds something to eat -- an ice cream -- and then wanders over and sits down on a bench. She eats her ice cream and stares off into nothing.
Emma had become something more than a best friend. More like a twin sister, and maybe more than a twin sister, if that's possible. They both believe that from the moment they had first met as 5-year-olds, they had seen each other every day for 15 years straight. To see Emma hurt like this makes her soul hurt.
After a few minutes, she decides to go back inside the hospital. She still has her skydiving suit on. Without much thought, she pulls off the outfit, lets it drop to the ground and she walks off. She chuckles a bit now, 11 years later, thinking about some random Swiss person stumbling upon an abandoned skydiving suit in a heap on a park bench.
When Emma wakes up later, she is, somehow, pretty much the same old Emma. She has always been impossibly optimistic, with an easy smile. But Emma's not optimistic because happiness knocks on her door every morning. She's one of those people who wakes up every day with a desire to drive toward happiness, through the fog of everything else. Happiness isn't a feeling for her; it is a mission statement.
She tried to remember this during what became the toughest month of her life. Emma's mom and sister soon arrived from Australia to support her recovery. Emma kept waiting for her boyfriend to visit. But he never did. In her book, Emma details feeling gutted as he slowly ghosted her from thousands of miles away. "If I had been given the choice of him or walking again, I would have chosen him," she says. "Looking back, that's so ridiculous to feel that way. But that is how it felt at the time."
With Jemma, her mom and her sister at her side, Emma began to lobby to get home to Australia as soon as possible. Jemma wanted to make the trip, too. They had originally planned to visit Spain, where Jemma would complete an exchange program for college credits. But she didn't want to leave her friend.
Emma was having none of that.
"Absolutely not," Emma said. "You're staying. I will be fine. You'll see me again soon."
"It's just a few university credits," Jemma argued.
"You need to do the course, and I will see you when you get home in a few weeks," Emma said, and that was that.
Jemma packed up her stuff and begrudgingly left the hospital a few days later. She hugged Emma and cried -- Emma's not really a crier, so the tears were all from Jemma -- and then she said, "I'll see you soon."
In the trauma ward of the hospital, Emma went through what so many survivors of serious accidents do. Her doctors said she was paralyzed from the waist down and she'll likely never walk again. She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she's alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55.
At some point, Emma found out that her skydiving instructor had not only survived but was transported to the same wing of the same hospital as her and was also being treated for horrific lower body injuries.
Emma decided that no matter how hard it was going to be -- and it was going to be hard -- she had to forgive him. Sure, she occasionally felt mad at him, mad at the parachutes, mad at skydiving, mad at everything. But she pushed back hard against those feelings, and it mostly worked. She's not exactly sure how it happened but one day she looked up from her bed and there he was, in a wheelchair as he recovered from significant leg injuries.
They talked for a while, and the conversation changed the course of Emma's next 10 years. He was so apologetic, so despondent at what happened, that forgiveness poured into her. "I felt really bad for him," she says. "I saw how much guilt he felt ... I wanted him to see me and see that I am OK."
After a few weeks, Emma started using crutches to prop herself up. Would she walk again? She still wasn't sure. But she knew she was getting a little closer every day.
She began to develop a complicated relationship with the idea of walking, though. She had recently heard another patient say, "I won't be happy until I walk again." It was a thought she'd had ever since she hit the ground, and that thought was reinforced in a hospital full of well-meaning doctors and nurses who were trying to fix her body.
But she realized that walking again couldn't become the be-all, end-all of her recovery. Because what if she didn't? What if the likely diagnosis, that she would never get feeling below the waist again, was the final verdict? Being fixated on that goal would attach her to a specific definition of success that might be beyond any amount of hard work, surgery or physical therapy. So, she decided to put in the effort but let go of the outcome. "There's a whole world out there to see, and none of it depends on if I can walk well," she says.
She was journaling around that time and wrote down a phrase that sticks with her to this day: If you can, you must. She's not quite sure where it came from, but it's become her motto, the idea that these lives we're given are so fragile that if it is possible, you must go for it.
For her, that meant trying to walk again. Finding love on her terms. Healing up any anger and resentment she had. And most of all, getting back to everybody and everything she cared about in Australia. She needed home to try to become whole again.
And then Emma got the good news: She would be able to go back to Australia and continue to recover there. It would cost north of $125,000, paid for by her traveler's insurance that she bought at the very last minute before the trip. She needed an ambulance to take her to and from the plane. Several rows of seats had to be removed to accommodate her bed, and a doctor and nurse had to be at her side for what was about a 12-hour flight.
She was transferred to a hospital in Sydney near the ocean, and she got her sister, Tara, to take her out to the beach one day. She'd always loved the feel of her feet in the ocean. As she sat in the water that day, she couldn't physically feel it hitting her legs. But the water seemed to wash over her spirit. This was where she needed to be.
So the minute she got discharged from the hospital in Sydney, she moved to the Gold Coast, and she hasn't left since. She loves it there, though it has one gigantic downside -- she's a 10-hour drive from Jemma. She kept rehabbing, kept grinding, kept hopeful, even as she hit some setbacks. At one point, she cut her ankle without even knowing it, and the wound didn't properly heal, putting her in bed for almost an entire year. Another time, she was sitting on a bench and noticed a bright red spot on her leg -- she'd burned her leg severely on something, again without realizing it was happening.
Her walking improvement has tapered off, and she's OK with that. In her book, Emma says she filed a personal injury claim against the skydiving company and eventually received a large settlement. But that was after a brutal six-year court battle, prolonged mostly by complex international law and constant delays as she fought in Swiss courts from Australia. She can't talk about the settlement but seems content with the amount, which she says she hasn't touched.
She's made a living the past few years by telling her comeback story. Her first book (she wants to write more) was published in 2022. She designed and started selling a necklace that says "If you can, you must." She's been working on her public speaking skills and could probably keep telling her story for pay as long as she wants. In December 2023, she accomplished her longtime dream of delivering a TED Talk.
But she's not sure how long she wants to tell the story of the girl who fell from the sky. IT was her proudest moment, something that moves anybody who hears IT, but it's also the most traumatic thing she's ever experienced. "At this stage in life, I don't want to hold onto it anymore," she says. "I can't imagine I will want to talk about this forever."
A dam broke for her when the lawsuit was over and she moved to the beach. She could live. Not exist. Not try to recover. Just live.
Over the past six years, she's followed through on her longtime desire to do wild adventures, including going back to Switzerland and the scene of the accident in 2018, as well as a life-affirming monthlong trip to Antarctica that she took a few months ago. She even went hot-air ballooning with a half-dozen friends.
As the 10th anniversary of the accident approached last summer, Emma had an idea: What if they went back and did the actual trip they'd planned to do as 20-year-olds? Go to the same towns, hike in the same spots, stay in the same places. Finish what they started. Just at age 30 instead of 20.
She floated it to Jemma, who has built a busy life for herself. Jemma double-majored in public relations and arts in Australia after the accident and opened up her own boutique PR and event planning company in Canberra, called Dak & Co. Along the way, she's gotten married and considers herself to be infected by the travel bug courtesy of Emma.
But as sweet as the 10th-anniversary trip seemed on paper, Emma thought maybe that was all it was -- a nice idea. Maybe a return trip to Europe was just a half-baked passing thought.
But when she ran it by her friend, Jemma had a surprising answer: "Let's do it."
IN JUNE 2023, EMMA stood in the middle of the same Swiss field she fell into. This time, wearing a white dress, she raised her arms in triumph, and she held the hand of her best friend in joy, rather than desperately waiting for an emergency helicopter to arrive.
They still talk nearly every day, and Jemma swears they have yet to have a single significant disagreement in their 25 years as friends. But the distance between them is not nothing. So the trip back to Europe felt like a nice way to see each other every day for a while again.
They didn't realize how much a therapeutic retracing of the first trip would help them until they left Australia. Emma wanted to go back to the field where she landed and just take it all in. And Jemma wanted to go and walk the halls of the hospital like she used to, but from a place of triumph this time -- she couldn't wait to watch Emma walk down the same hallways where doctors said she'd probably never walk again.
They mostly retraced their steps, including staying in the same cabins the night before they went to the field where they had landed. The field was green and lush, which probably played a role in providing at least a little bit of cushion when Emma landed. For this story, MIT engineering professor Dr. Peko Hosoi estimates that Emma likely fell at a rate of 30-60 mph because the massive amounts of fabric slowed her from peak speeds of 125 mph or more. But even 45-60 mph is the equivalent of jumping off the 10th or 11th floor. "If you hit the ground at 45-60 mph, that's a car accident," says Chazi Rutz, a member of the U.S. skydiving team. "It's amazing for someone to survive."
The Hollywood rendering of her story would introduce us to Emma's skydiving instructor, and we would know his name and the impact of the accident on him. We would hear the apology that Emma heard, the heaviness of his life that she says he described to her. We'd understand where his story and her story intersected 11 years ago dangling off the side of a helicopter.
But Emma is adamant that that part of her story is hers, and only hers. She says she's reached a point of forgiveness with the instructor and has fiercely protected his identity in the decade since. She's met with the owners of the skydiving company and considers them friends now. But she keeps their names to herself, too. In dozens of news and feature articles about her over the years, she has kept her story tightly focused on herself. Part of her reasoning feels selfless and beautiful; part of it seems to empower her agency over her trauma. "I would never reveal their names," she says. "I know the impact the accident had on them, and I don't want them to go through anymore."
As Emma and Jemma walked around that exact field recently, they both had a good laugh thinking about something they'd been told years ago -- the farmer who worked that pasture said the cows who lived there were so aggressive that if he hadn't moved them that morning, they may have stampeded her when she landed.
Emma loves telling that anecdote. She's often matter-of-fact telling the story of the fall and her recovery because she's told IT so many times. But the aggressive cow part is still hilarious to her. "I remember how it felt to land on the ground," she says. "How dramatic it all was. And then I picture laying there realizing I'm paralyzed, and then I see a cow walking toward me and stepping on me. What a way to go -- the girl who got trod on by a cow."
They eventually left and went to the Swiss hospital where Emma woke up. It was an eerie visit. She knew her little nook of the hospital well. But that's all she knew. So Jemma showed her around, and Emma asked a lot of questions about how she figured out what to do with herself, where to eat, how to talk to locals and everything that comes with being a stranger in a strange place. "Jemma was so alone there," Emma says. "She was just a kid. She had to actively deal with life there every day."
Before the trip, Emma had fallen into a funk. She was fine. Her life was fine. But something was off. Spend five minutes on her Instagram and you'll see she lives happy and joyous most of the time. But she has chunks of time where it's not lilacs and butterflies and she gets into a rut about what happened to her.
"I kind of used to think that when you get through it, when I walk again or get out of the hospital, I'll never be sad again and I'll be so grateful and happy," she says. "For a while, it's easy to live on that plane of gratitude and appreciation. But as time goes on and life starts to happen again, that can fade from view a bit. I didn't used to need to remind myself. But now I kind of have to stop and actively get myself in that frame of my mind again."
She feels like she is coming out of that funk now, though. As she sits at the coffee shop in Denver, she says she thinks about how revelatory it was a year ago, when Jemma got married. She cried a lot that day, which is uncharacteristic for her, and she especially fell apart when Jemma came walking down the aisle. She kept thinking back to the moment in the field, when Jemma came running toward her, and she couldn't stop linking the two visuals of Jemma approaching her. One was agonizing. This one was the opposite of that.
At various points throughout the wedding and reception, Emma would be crying and she'd make eye contact with Jemma, and they'd both start to pull their lips up. "It was the most beautiful day," Emma says. "Seeing her walk down the aisle, so happy, all these years later, everything she's been through, I just couldn't handle it."
Emma finishes speaking and is quiet for a bit. Then she says, "I need to go to the bathroom," and she pulls a green catheter out of her purse.
This is one of those parts of her story where you might expect her to be reluctant and guarded. Not the case. She is fearless talking openly about having accidents almost every day, sometimes multiple times in a day. She monitors her food and fluid intake very carefully to be able to time trips to the bathroom as best as she can. "When I got out of the hospital, I was so embarrassed that I had to use catheters and I would have accidents. It seemed like the worst thing ever," she says. "It's not the worst thing. The worst thing already happened, so I think I can handle a bunch of strangers laughing at me if I did pee."
She takes another sip of her drink and then goes back to talking about Antarctica. She gets more animated about this part of her story than any part of the accident, or relearning how to walk. She loved the adventure of the trip, the sights, the sounds, the wildlife and the community established with the other people on the boat.
But there's something else in her eyes, something she can't quite put her finger on. This is a new addition to her story, and the exuberance of her voice is up several octaves over talking about surviving the skydiving accident. There is a duality to the way she talks about Antarctica -- she knows that her most joyous moments in life often land in her heart that way because she knows the pain of her accident. The happiness of her springs off the agony of IT.
She has a specific story she remembers that she wanted to tell earlier. One time, she says, three whales swam up to the side of the boat and just sat there, faces above the water, eyes gawking at this weird floating thing full of two-legged creatures they might have never seen before in one of the world's most remote places. Emma stared back, and the whales didn't break eye contact for a half hour.
They lurked there for a while, nudging the boat from time to time. Then one of them went down under the water, re-emerged to the surface and blasted water onto the people watching them.
At this point, Emma scrunches her neck down for a second, then she bolts upright and says, "Hello!" as if she's the whale's voice.
She's asked if she thinks that's how whales communicate, in an upbeat, silly Australian accent, and she nods yes.
"Hello!" she says again.
She sits quietly, then says, "I was so glad I survived everything to see that."
The last thing she thinks about on this day is an answer to the ultimate question: What does she want from life?
She contemplates that question in silence for a few seconds, then says she's not a planner, so she doesn't make lists like that. But she keeps thinking. She eventually says she wants to have a sense of freedom, and for her, that means lots of travel. Maybe she will keep telling her story. Maybe she will stop someday. She knows she wants to live in Australia. She wants to have kids someday. She's not a dog person, so maybe no pets.
She slowly circles back around to the question, and says, "I don't know." She pauses for a few seconds and her last words are, "To enjoy it," and she means it in the most lowercase kind of way.