A study in three parts.
Story | Experience | Speculation
Near-death experiences happen to soap opera characters, or they're tabloid fodder. On daytime TV and in the mags, one hovering between heaven and earth almost always recounts bodily detachment, a tunnel of light. Flashes of memories. Peace.
Mine was different.
Do you have your own experience? Or have you heard an oft-told story about someone else's? Or...to some, the intruiging, to others, the unfathomable...a story of a death experience, where death occurs?
STORY
My mother disclosed to me a couple of tales as told by my father, a professional firefighter and paramedic. In the dread of a brutally cold, snowy Wisconsin winter, he arrived to the scene of a suicide at a home residence. The deceased had shot himself in the head in his driveway. Brain matter was splattered on the icy cement, steam rising from it. My dad had previously attended to several gunshot victims, and while those grisly images were difficult to forget, the sight of that steam was a terrible memory that consistently haunted him. He kept it to himself at first, waiting quietly before telling my mother. When she attempted to get him to talk about it, he confessed that he wasn't sure why it bothered him so deeply. Me, being a lot like my quiet and sensitive dad, could possibly relate to why this affected him so strongly. Dad had never met this person; he'd never shaken his hand or heard his voice - yet he'd seen his brain splattered on the concrete. How does one (even a professional) grasp getting to know someone this intimately?
Another significant call to which my dad responded involved a car crash victim who was trapped in his car…still alive, still conscious…when the car's fire became out of control, and the emergency responders did not have the equipment to extricate him from the vehicle. How do you watch someone die? How do you watch someone burn to death? These men who had committed their lives to helping and saving others could do nothing but watch someone die. And what was the man in the car feeling (emotionally) and thinking? In his death inferno, he saw those who are employed to protect and serve doing nothing to save him. Did he see a flash of his life's memories? Did he feel regret? Did he picture the people closest to him? Or did he see the paramedics just outside his car, and curse them for not helping him? This haunted my dad for months. He would drive to the junk yard that housed the blackened shell of the car in which the man burned to death. He'd stare through the fence at the car, silent, stone-faced. Like the suicide aftermath he witnessed, he never shared with my mother what he was thinking or feeling when he saw that blackened death-site car.
EXPERIENCE
On a February Saturday, I had an anaphylactic allergic reaction after eating gourmet pizza topped with prosciutto, gorgonzola cheese, and walnuts that had been roasted in peanut oil. For 30 years, reactions caused by my peanut allergy had been mild, resolved by antihystimine medication.
Not this night.
After one bite of the walnut-goganzola-prosciutto pizza, my tongue starting "itching" (swelling). I took my pills and waited for them to work. They didn't.
Less than an hour later, I developed full-body hives and began feeling faint. I didn't know who I was or where I was, and I didn't recognize the people with me. I lost blocks of time - I don't remember moving from the dinner table to the bathroom. In moments of lucidity, I was still waiting to start feeling better, expecting my medicine to work. Instead, I collapsed on the bathroom floor, unconscious. My blood pressure was dropping dangerously, and my body was transitioning from anaphylactic shock to full-system-shutdown shock.
When I awoke, my vision was black, and I was aware of what had happened and what I thought was happening. Only now did I think I was dying. When my vision returned, I only saw cheery pink and blue geometric shapes decorating the bathroom in which I grasped I was dying; the bathroom all over which I began vomiting uncontrollably (a feeble response of my body to eject the allergen). I couldn't function, and I couldn't think to head to the toilet.
After all this, I feel that I truly was dying. My near-death experience? I didn't see a glorious flash of memories, I didn't see what I thought were my favourite moments over the course of my 33 years. I didn't think of my husband or my parents. I didn't see anything except the "fun" kaleidoscope colours of the popcorn bathroom ceiling. I was coherent enough to think, "I'm going to die on a bathroom floor of the thing that has plagued me my entire life." I was living (dying) "in the moment", which tickles me. I've often been accused of not "living in the moment", rather, focusing on the past or the present and not the now. How interesting in the moment in which I'm living (dying), I'm right in the present.
Mercifully, my friends had called 911, and an emergency crew piled me into their ambulance and gave me a shot of epinephrine, which saved me. I spent a few hours in emergency, then came home despite the doctors warning that they needed to monitor me in case the symptoms came back and caused a new bout of anaphylaxis, which can happen to those with severe/fatal allergies. I couldn't afford to pay to be admitted to a hospital, so I came home, lay down in bed, and, exhausted after my ordeal, tried to go to sleep, knowing the anaphylaxis could return and that I might not wake up. Only at this point did I think of my husband, my parents...what I love, rather than what I regret.
The ambulance crew had some advice after surrendering me to the ER. "Get pepperoni next time!"
SPECULATION
So simple but so complicated. A dear friend of mine recently committed suicide. What did he go through? Waiting to die. What would you think about? Whom would you think about? Would you leave a note explaining WHY you should die?
Or do you let people wonder and continue to have questions about why people die, why you died, and what we should do as we mourn you?
His suicide was successful, but what did he think about after he took those pills, as death took hold? Family? Work? Regret, as I did? Did he think of me? Is that selfish? Did he have pain? Or did he have, as I wish for him, peace?
For those we love, and even for those we don't know and perhaps even for those who irritate us, or those we hate…we'd wish a "good death.”
We'd never wish suicide or tragedy upon anyone, but a smooth transition into the unknown world, with good wishes, or prayers, or sincere mourning.
Magnolia is a writer and extremely keen observer of the human condition in all of it's crazy forms. Further exploits can be seen on her blog.
