When Emma Carey describes the most beautiful town in the world, she says it looks like a dollhouse and then an oil painting, because in her memory, it’s falling away from her as she rises above it in a helicopter. Her 2013 trip to Lauterbrunnen, in Switzerland, was part of a long-held dream she and Jemma Mrdak had shared for as long as they could remember. Best friends since grade one, Emma was drawn to Jemma because she was fearless. But on this summer’s day in June, it was Emma’s appetite for adrenaline that had brought them into the chopper, and as they flew skyward, Jemma’s eyes were brimming with tears.
It wasn’t unreasonable for Jemma to be scared – they were about to hurtle into the air at 14,000 feet – but Emma, then 20, was excited and had a huge smile on her face. An active, sporty and irrepressibly positive young woman, she loved to throw herself into new experiences, and on that fateful day, she was eager and unafraid.
Emma and her skydiving instructor sat on the edge of the helicopter, then they leapt, and suddenly they were flying, floating, weightless in the sky. Emma was euphoric. These were the experiences she lived for. The instructor tapped her shoulder to let her know he was about to deploy the parachute. When the jolt came it was painful.
“It felt like my hair was being ripped from my head. Nobody had warned me that it would hurt,” Emma recalled in her memoir Something was wrong. “As we
