ICYMI: What A Pianist Learned About Gratitude By 'Dying'

ACROSS AMERICA — Dan Knight died 50 years ago. He’s been grateful every day since.

On July 24, 1971, he was an 18-year-old with a promising future as an opera singer. A full-ride scholarship was waiting for him at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa — at the time, practically a guarantee for a spot with The Met Opera, the famed opera company in New York City.

Knight was riding his motorcycle when a drunken driver crushed his dreams, and his leg. When his bike went down hard, “it broke my leg like an eggshell,” Knight told Patch in a virtual interview last summer from his home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In the two years he was in and out of the hospital, he developed blood clots so large they showed up on chest X-rays, and then sepsis. He coded.

Patch’s “30 Days Of Gratitude” is a series of articles exploring the intentionality of gratitude and featuring bits of wisdom from Patch readers. Come back to Across America Patch every day through November and read more.

“I died for a few minutes,” Knight recalled. “I went to the light and was surrounded by pure love, and like you hear from so many people, I heard a voice, ‘It’s not your time, you have to go back.’ I felt this energy — almost like I had on suspenders, and it yanked me back into my body.

“What happened, literally, is it flipped a switch for me, and when I came back, I came back in hyper mode,” he said. “I was hypersensitive, energized, rewired, but with a far deeper and far broader sense of purpose.”

Today, Knight, 68, is an accomplished pianist and composer. He had a series of professorships before retiring from education, and is currently the artist-in-residence at the Steinway Piano Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina. It wasn’t the path he’d taken for granted since he was 11, but it was paved by intentional gratitude.

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(Editor's note: The full story, published on Oct. 29, launched Patch's "30 Days Of Gratitude" series.)