Opera Singer ‘Died’ But Lives On As Pianist: 30 Days Of Gratitude, A Patch Series

ACROSS AMERICA — Dan Knight "died" half a century 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, 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.

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.

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.

“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.

Gratitude Isn’t Just An Attitude

Living with gratitude isn’t as simple as being thankful — though Knight certainly is that. He had a seminal moment after he was brought back to life. For others, living with gratitude is as simple as making a deliberate choice, “an affirmation of goodness” in the world, according to Robert Emmons, a University of California, Davis, psychology professor known as the “father of gratitude.”

Practicing gratitude isn’t pretending bad things didn’t happen, experts say, but rather savoring the goodness.

“First, it’s an affirmation of goodness,” Emmons explained in a video for the Greater Good Science Center. “We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received.”

Second, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves” — that is, other people who “gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness in our lives.”

Research around the science of gratitude shows people who practice it experience a boost in their overall well-being, increased resilience and stronger relationships. Physical health also improves, according to researchers, with stronger immunity, lower blood pressure, better sleeping and more-alert wakefulness.

“It’s not what comes to us,” Knight said of living with gratitude. “It’s what we give to others. The more you give, the more you have to give.

“The biggest thing,” he continued, “is to learn to have compassion for yourself — not necessarily feeling sorry for yourself, but having compassion, understanding and wisdom in terms of the things we’re all going through.”

‘I Had To Rewrite My Life’

Knight was in and out of the hospital for two years. He had to learn to walk and use his leg again. More perplexing, he had to figure out how to keep the music inside him alive after the blood clots robbed him of the ability to take the deep breaths required to push out a note like a high A and make it look easy.

His life had been planned out since he was an 11-year-old kid living in Ottumwa, Iowa.

His teachers recognized his talent and submitted an application for him to the exclusive Curtis Institute of Music, a private conservatory in Philadelphia that was recruiting “quite talented and precocious young kids who could sing,” Knight said.

His mother put her foot down when he was accepted. She didn’t want someone else raising her son, and steered him toward scholarships and opportunities closer to home.

“Turning down that offer to go to Curtis looked like a tragedy to me,” Knight recalled.

In retrospect, it was anything but. Gratitude is sometimes posthumous.

His mother died in the fall of his senior year at Ottumwa High School.

“It’s good I didn’t go to Philly,” he said, grateful for the turns of fate that have defined his life. “Those were years I had my mom. My family needed me. My dad needed me. My younger brother and sister needed me more than Curtis Institute.”

So Drake University it was, until that dream was smashed along with his leg.

“I had to rewrite my life,” Knight said.

After all, he went on, the voice he heard when he coded said “this is not your time,” and he couldn’t very well make a liar out of God.

“If it was my time,” Knight reasoned, “there would have been a voice telling me that.”

In the silence, he pondered his future.

“I understood my time here was immeasurable but measured at the same time,” he said. “What it gave me was direction. What it gave me seemed to be superfluous to many people. To breathe deeply, to bleed and not bleed — it gave me gratitude for all the little things.”

And it came to him. He had been at home sitting at a Steinway since he was 6. He didn’t have to completely abandon the dream he’d nurtured since before he’d gone on his first date or kissed a girl for the first time. What was his voice if not an instrument for the music that flowed in him?

“I couldn’t sing,” Knight said, “but I could still play the piano.”

Gratitude, Now More Than Ever

Knight makes it look easy to live with gratitude.

“Open yourself to it without preconceived notions about what success or lack of it looks like,” he said. “Grab ahold of the positive things around you in positive ways, and it will percolate around you. It will find you in abundance. All the small things are big things, and all the big things are small.”

Living with gratitude doesn’t mean ignoring difficulties — especially during the coronavirus pandemic, which Knight said has been “a period of gloom from the sickness and illness, and the inability to even agree on what the proper course of action might be.”

“I still have moments of my life,” he acknowledged, “living through what we’ve lived through in the last year with COVID-19 and death and isolation and feelings of abandonment and inability to make money and everything surrounding this whole disease.”

In those moments, he allows himself to drift back to 1971, when his voice was full and his future bright, before the instant when everything changed. Before his "second birthday," as Knight calls the day he coded, he languished, his body injured and broken, and feeling “powerless and unable to face the reality.”

Knight is able to snap himself out of a funk by remembering his “irrevocable, eternal contract” with God to live with gratitude. “I couldn’t bail on that” then nor now, he said.

Sometimes, the nudge back to gratitude came from the outside.

“My friend would call and say, ‘Dan, how are you? I know you can’t sing much, but can you sing in the choir?’ ” Knight recalled. “They understood, and I began to understand that if I thought of suicide, it would tell the people they didn’t love me enough.”

Advice For Beginners

From Knight’s perspective, living with gratitude is a critical life skill.

“It’s the single building block for everything we have to build our humanity, our spirituality, our nature, our lives,” he said. “If we don’t have gratitude, we don’t have thankfulness. We can’t have gratitude and still have anger. We can’t have gratitude and still cry hatred.

“It is the building block of thankfulness for who we are, what we have, and how we deal with it.”

It may sound overly simplistic and obvious, Knight said, but those who want to live with gratitude but don’t know how should start with people they may not know well, but with whom they regularly interact.

Some examples to get you started:

• As a manager or supervisor, Knight said, “empower those people around us doing things for us, and allow them to feel meaningful and purposeful so the job’s not drudgery.”

• Share your gratitude with people who provide services. “I’m thankful I can go to Walmart, order online, or drive and pick up what I need,” he said. “When they bring the groceries themselves, say ‘Thank you, I’m so grateful to you for doing this,’ and they look at me like I’m some kind of weirdo, and I’m like, ‘No, you don’t see what you have done.’ ”

• Acknowledge you’re a small cog in a large wheel.

• Every day, tell the mail carrier how much you appreciate them.

Do you have a story of living with gratitude? Tell us in the comments, or email Patch national editor [email protected] with the subject line “30 Days Of Gratitude.”

Find Your Patch

Patch is in more than 1,000 communities across America. Find your community and see what's happening outside your front door.