The Death of Me

into the vortex of infinite silence. . . the taste acrid, bitter . . . the sound, the sound of the Great Beast . . . and then . . . and then . . . the void unimaginable, inconceivable . . . and then nothing except the truth, the Ultimate Truth, that it is life, not death, which is the Barbarian at the Gate.

Time has collapsed, but I am aware I’m in a hospital.

I’m not sure how long.

I grow used to the sounds, the approaching sirens, the squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum floor, the P.A.’s eerily calm announcements of some code or another, the squawks of pagers, the rolling wheels of gurneys, the muffled conversations outside my door.

i smell something. medicinal? disinfectant? no, it is my own urine. there is a rhythmic beeping pinging. there are tubes stuck into me.

i feel a hand, a hand is holding mine. i lift my head. i can open my eyes. i can see colors again. i try to focus, focus. i see the hand that holds mine and I look up at her face framed by raven black hair. her peach pale skin. the purple streak in her hair. she smiles and clutches my hand tighter. i look at her name tag. hope.

Hope.

They had me on a morphine drip. Then they said I was disoriented because of the morphine. That wasn’t the reason, but they switch me to fentanyl. A doctor tells me fentanyl is causing me hallucinations, which it isn’t. I don’t hallucinate, but they switch me to Oxycodone. Oxycodone gives me nausea and headaches.

Nurse Hope helps me pretend to take the Oxycodone, then disposes of the pills.

The doctors try to give me antidepressants. I am not depressed, just aware. The doctors try to give me pills for terror. I feel no terror, only the Truth of Death. Nurse Hope hides those pills, too. She holds my hand, not, I think, as any sign of affection, but rather to physically tether me to something that is alive.

Hope chases off the NDE junkies, as she calls them. Someone from the hospital told the newspaper how long I was dead, and so the Near Death Experience groupies flock to my room, making their pilgrimage. They come in all sizes, shapes, ages. They look like castoffs from Burning Man. I am the wrong person to talk to. I was not near Death, I was dead. But they want to talk to me. I refuse to do that. Hope will not allow them close to me. So they take rushed pictures of me as security ushers them out. I am their freak show and also their desperate hope that there must be something after life.

The psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists and psychologists come in waves, hunting for termites in my brain. They ask questions. I tell them about Death, but they refuse to accept what I say, or even entertain the possibility of what I tell them. They talk about Emotional Dyscontrol or Dissociative Insanity or a Psychotic Break or Reality Distortion or Vestibular Disorder. One doctor tells me about Cotard Delusion, where the patient believes he is dead, a walking corpse, and denies his own existence.

I am their lab rat, my mind is their pin cushion as they poke and poke and poke and show me strange pictures and ask strange questions.

So I no longer talk to them or respond in any way. And then they tell me I suffer from Anosognosia, which is a patient’s denial that he is ill.

I’m not ill. I was dead.

They take pictures of my brain, of the inside of my head. EEGs, PETs, MRIs.

I don’t have a head injury. I was dead.

When you die you do not hover above your lifeless corpse or see a long tunnel with a bright light at the end. Nor will the entirety of your life flash before you. There will be no overwhelming sense of peace and serenity. No ethereal melodies. You will not see those close to you who have ‘passed over’, a snake oil euphemism used to beat back our fear of death. There is no purgatory, no heaven, no hell, no demons, no angels. No pearly gates or heavenly harps.

Death is not a passage.

Death is Truth, the Only Truth, Truth revealed, a Truth unique to our species.

And what differentiates Man from other species? The opposable thumb? Complex language? That we are the only animal that wages organized warfare against its own species?

No.

It is this: We are the only species that asks the question “Why are we here? Why do we exist?”

And since there is no answer to that question, we make one up.

We make up the answer and live our lives according to the fiction we create and desperately embrace. That fiction is to pretend what we do is meaningful. And purposeful. We forge fake meaning out of the fires of futility. And as we travel our fairy tale yellow brick road, we collect worthless souvenirs. Roadside shrines for the walking dead. Souvenirs like jobs and cars and houses and things.

Run rabbit run.

Down the rabbit hole.

I hear them as they huddle outside my door, conjuring diagnoses.

Another shrink, a supervisory type, comes to the side of my hospital bed and tells me I have an Identity Disturbance and he is placing me on involuntary hold.

Then Hope comes to me.

She says, “Enough of this. I’m taking you out of this place.”