For the majority of us death will greet us in a slow sickly, often-painful manner. Aided in our passing with medication but administered by caring yet comparative strangers. Those lucky enough will ascend instantly or within moments, either by a natural process related to aging or by unfortunate circumstance. Some of us, having stepped to the other side, will be reprieved and sent back. This is my story.
All happened so fast as the back end caught up with the front. The car had slid into full lock then seemed to pitch low, much like a ballerina dipping before springing out across the stage. In one continues motion our car pirouetted into the first roll. My reaction was in unison with the event as I thrust my palms to the roof but then I remembered not to put my “filthy paw prints” on Dads roof lining. I reverted to bracing with just the lightest touch of my fingertips. The car catapulted onto its roof then carried on over without losing momentum. Gambolling through this other roll it whisking with it a cape of darkness.
The sun was warm on my back as I opened my eyes. The pain didn’t hit me until I tried to stand. My right side hurt awful bad and my right ankle was worse than sprained. I tried to stand again but the pain brought on another round of darkness. My twelve-year-old frame hadn’t faired so well from my adult sized tumble drier ride. I had no idea why or how I was outside the car but back in 74 very few cars had seat belts. Brief moments of consciousness came and went over a series of days. Those fleeting glimpses leaving me with snap shot memories of my Dad kneeling by me with blood pouring from his nose and forehead. An uncomfortable ambulance ride, its siren bellowing the drama of the moment. An intensive care room with a sweeping fan blowing rasping shivers of cold air over me in my caged hospital bed. I hated that fan.
Three weeks later I was home on my crutches with just five weeks for my right ankle to remain in plaster. I hadn’t been home more than ten minutes when the pain in my side came back. Pinching at first then squeezing me hard as the then unknown haemorrhaging of my liver ushered in more darkness and then more fleeting snap shots. Sirens once again emphasised the drama of the charge, trumpeting me awake from my painless slumber. Frantic nurses busied themselves; their worried faces momentarily peered at me. Doctors pricked and poking while some annoying kid kept dragging a noisy cog driven thing past my bed.
Later in a surreal nightmare, I felt myself passing through those cogs but they were huge like water wheels, green, red, blue and yellow. As those cogs meshed together the teeth would crush down onto my belly. I was flicked from one set of crushing cogs to another on an endless conveyer belt of agony. The pain was beyond anything one could imagine then a distant voice said, as though to save me, “ he’s coming round”. I opened my blurry eyes to see a very bright circular theatre lamp above. A few clinical figures in theatre whites leaned into me then the anaesthetist put a black rubber mask over my face. The smell of gas was sickening, lapsing me into darkness as I struggling against the oppressing mask. It would be a couple of weeks before it dawned on me that, as they opened me up from my spleen to my liver, I had become conscious on the slab.
Two, three or possible four days passed with me lying in my hospital bed, playing peek-a- boo with consciousness after the operation. The pain was diligent with its steady relentless pendulum like blows to my guts. It was torturous to wake up and eventually I lost the craving to do just that. I was weak; tired, my strength was all but depleted. The cycle was unremitting, too much to fight against. I had no armour nothing left in me. I was overwhelmed and the time, my time, had come. Talking from within I made my apologies to my mother, whom I knew would be distraught. I thought it apt to plead with God and Jesus to accept me. Every muscle in my body relaxed as I …let go!
Pushing off on this unknown voyage the first thing I experienced was an overwhelming sense of calmness, tranquillity mixed with euphoria and absolutely pain free. We honestly don’t have words to describe this blessing of a sensation. It is unknown to us and is beautiful beyond illustration and thought. Then within a nano second I experienced being uploaded with so much information and images. History and nature and how it all worked. How we fitted into the grand plan. How bad things were also good. What our place was with everything in the world, nature and the universe. I can’t emphasis enough how quickly all this knowledge was uploaded, accepted and fully understood, other than to say it was quicker than clicking your fingers. Then came the light. It was a huge expanse of white light. Much like a blank white page of paper except I was one with it, a part of it. Like a tiny molecule of gas in a charged florescent tube I knew what every molecule knew, where it was and what it was doing. It was a sensation of being linked to everything no matter the distance within the tube.
I remember thinking to myself “is this it. Is this what it looks like, is this heaven?” Looking around it seemed an empty expanse of white light. I didn’t have a solid body I was an entity in human form, an existing thing but looking around as though with my mortal eyes. Aware I was standing still I took a step forward, intending to explore this expanse of white light then things started to focus quickly, making me pause in my tracks. It was very strange in its appearance much like the outline of wonder woman’s invisible plane. I was standing on a pure white street with a cobbled Victorian road, lined only on my side with pure white houses. I seemed to have stepped out of an alleyway. The place was teeming with invisible but yet viewable people. Folk were milling around and walking by. It was busy as a shopping centre but not crowded. As these other entities walked by I was aware of their presence and could view them to see what they looked like and what they wore. As I looked at them I instantly knew everything about their history and their ancestry. One could talk with them but without talking in the physical sense.
An entity of a man was walking up the cobbled road. As he passed me by I viewed all the information about him, much like a scanner would a bar code. Via my father’s farther side I was now aware of him being related to me. Linked in our joint ancestry by about a century back. He was in his forties and came from the early part of the twentieth century. The man had gone past me but came back to tell me of our distant relationship, which I acknowledged. He carried on with his journey and I recall feeling quite ignorant by thinking “so what”. My selfish indifference didn’t strike me as the right thing to think. Not in a place like this.
It’s at this point I was transported to another place to bare witness to an event that I haven’t written about yet. Lets just say I was made aware of where I “wanted” to be and that was back in my body. As quickly as I left I was back in my painful shackle but I was fortified. Charged with a state of mind to persevere. The experience hadn’t seemed to last much more than a minute. The nurses flapped and made a fuss. The doctors were barking their orders and I got another go.
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