It was shortly before dawn, on a perfect summer morning in May. Outside, in the meadow adjoining the orchard, rabbits left dewy trails in the drenched grass, birds sang their deafening chorus, the unstoppable rising flood of light and life rose and swelled with the sunrise, now just starting to send the first stabbing, blinding rays over the edge of the window sill, and straight down onto the bed, where I lay dying.
Yes, my time had come, all too quickly. My illness had followed the typical course of mysterious symptoms, a shocking diagnosis, various courses of treatment, apparent recovery, relapse, and then rapid decline into the condition where life is all about simply gathering strength for the next tight and agonising breath. From my last year, I had reached my last month, the last week, the last day, hour and minute, and now there was not the strength left to draw the next breath, and so, dazzled and all but blinded by the risen sun, I simply stopped breathing, my heart stopped pumping, and my life was over.
The sense of hearing – as I had often heard said in my earlier life – is the last faculty to fade away at death. I can confirm this to be not only true but an understatement of monumental proportions. I lay there, to an observer a corpse already, but hearing with a clarity I had never experienced before. The unrelenting and constant rushing sound and thumping of my restless pulse had stopped, and I was free to hear, as I had never heard before, in those final seven seconds. Years before, I had visited the Gobi region in Mongolia, and had walked about a mile away from the tiny village where we were staying, in order to experience Silence. As I sat in the deathly calm of the Gobi scrubland, things certainly did become very quiet, but I became increasingly aware of the rushing of the blood around my veins, the thump of a restless pulse, which became louder and louder, the quieter my surroundings became. It seems that we carry our own racket around with us, to protect us from any danger of Real Silence.
Now, however, having just let go of the tinnitus that is life itself, I lay there, absolutely still, bathed in dawn’s early floodlight. With the short-lived gift of perfect hearing, the sound of the birds outside increased, and swelled, until I could well believe that I was hearing the sound of angels, singing unceasing and unbearably loud praises to one another, with fiercely joyous faces, lit, dazzlingly, by that tremendous all-encompassing light, which shone from behind them. The last seven seconds, bathed in the new day’s golden light, and the music of the bird-angels, I slipped away, I know not where.
Who can recall and recount their life before birth? Is there anyone capable of telling and describing the dim weightless warmth and comfort of those paradise months? Is it a dreamlike, drowsy state, or a condition of intense, sharp experience and delight? I do not know, and neither do I know where I went, or what it was like after that slipping away and departure from the only life I had known.
How long was I gone? It felt as though scarcely a second had passed, but it could have been countless aeons, I have no way of telling, but I can say that, against all attempts at explanation or credulity, I found myself, alive, breathing normally, deeply and easily, in a standing position, next to that same bed, in which my just-died self was still lying.
Yes – there I was – back in that same room I had so recently left – not crippled and struck down by those evil and distorted clumps of rebel cells, warding off all attempts to reign them in, but standing up next to my death-bed, alive, well, strong and fit as in the days of my youth.
How had this miracle come about, the alive me and the dead me? I have no idea at all, why or how I was singled out for this amazing undoing and reversal, but there I stood, looking down at my poor old self, an already corrupting dead thing, dark gash of a mouth, drawn tense and immoveable, blood no longer flowing, but pooling and coagulating, a piece of wreckage, pale and yellow, no rise and fall of chest betraying any flicker of life, eyes open and staring, no facial expression betraying any emotion, whether of joy or despair.
I have to say that I did not look down on my dead self with any sense of affection or sentimentality at all. No, I gazed upon myself with a very deep distaste, disgust even, and saw a piece of unsavoury wreckage, a dead corrupted thing to be covered over, got rid of, disposed of as soon as possible. All manner of shadows, twistedness and corruption seemed to be sticking to that object which was – unbelievable as it seemed – my former self.
I left that room and called my doctor, who happened also to be a good friend of mine. When he had finally managed to apprehend the miracle that had taken place, we consulted together, down in the kitchen, the early sun now shining on the flagstones in that ancient house. What should we do now? Should he write out a death certificate for me? This could make life a bit complicated, he pointed out, as – with a valid and official death certificate – I, of course, would no longer exist in a legal sense. Better, we agreed, to hold a simple and quiet funeral service as soon as possible and avoid any complications.
And so, working as quickly and quietly as the now hot mid-morning sun would allow, we dug a short trench in the middle of the orchard, and then fetched that pale and yet dark object from the room upstairs, wrapped it in a sheet, laid it into the ground and said a few short words and a prayer. I raised my eyes from that hole in the ground, now covered over again with freshly turned earth, and smiled at my friend, standing there grinning back at me, as the blood-red cherries hung on the tree nearby.
Despite my brand new life and body I felt tired after all that digging, and lay down on the bank, outside the orchard, adjoining onto the meadow, and, with the bird-angels quieter now, but no less joyous, allowed myself, for the second time that morning, to be engulfed by the warmth, light and glory of that risen sun.
God Bible Life 