I Saw Absolutely Nothing When I Died
I have a bad heart. A really crappy, beat up, scar-covered, and weak heart. It’s flat-out not any good and even up-and-quit entirely on me seven years ago. That year, on Father’s Day, I had a massive heart attack. Flatlined. Was paddled back to life and had a heart procedure for a stent placement in my right coronary artery–all within a matter of hours. According to the medical staff, if I hadn’t lived so close (a ten-minute drive) to the hospital I absolutely would have died before getting there.
I had chest pains for the two months following my heart attack. There’s nothing more terrifying than trying to sit still and prepare for death, because here’s what you need to know: There is no preparing for death, and there is nothing more terrifying than being right at the edge of it. If anybody tells you differently, they simply haven’t experienced clinical death or even near-death. If you have most any religious faith, there’s an outside chance you might, for instance, find yourself burning in a lake of fire when you close your eyes for the last time. If you don’t have faith in organized religion or even a personal spirituality, what is there? There’s only a dark mystery. Literally nothing is known about what is about to happen to you. There can be no greater fear. The unknown—the true unknown of death—has only the depth of interstellar space to match the sheer ability to warp the mind.
On the way to the hospital, I was convinced I was having a heat stroke. It was a particularly hot day that day, and I was cutting grass when I started losing my breath and couldn’t get it back. My mouth started to draw and my fingers started to curl up. And I still couldn’t catch my breath. I heaved hard and long, the way you do after running at a full clip for as long as you can. It was a deeply black shade of horror.
At one point I decided that, if I didn’t get off the ground (I had sat down in the grass beside the lawn mower) then I would certainly die. Taking long, lurching steps, I rounded the corner of the house. If I could get to the porch, and if I could get in the house, I could wake Tyler up, and he could take me to the hospital. My son, Tyler, was still at home and had a friend over the night before. Heather was on her way to the house with our daughter Natalie.
I kept up with the lurching until I reached the porch, but then I went down, catching myself in the porch swing. I dug my cell phone out. Dialed Heather. Told her I was having a heat stroke.
I was, in fact, having a massive heart attack. I was still having it while on the table in the ER. When the nurse who had been wiring me up and holding me still while other nurses and assistants cut my jeans from me said I was having a heart attack, I thought she was made of plastic. I thought she had fallen from a cartoon somewhere or was an extra from an episode of Cheers. Everything after that is unclear except the moment I flatlined. I had my head held up looking around the room when I started feeling it get really heavy, sort of like it was filled with wet sand. A second later, I felt the back of my head hit the bed and everything went black.
Since everyone asks me what happened during the roughly twenty seconds I was dead, I’m going to give you the visual answer:
Not one thing. Nada. A big, whole bag of zero.
Back in the world of the living, I thought I had passed out, even saying as much when all the shocking me with paddles actually kicked my heart back to life. I said I had passed out, even giggled a little when I said it, embarrassed. I don’t remember anything after that, really. I left the hospital and the real worrying started.
I never thought about death before the heart attack. Death was only an abstract notion, something that would happen when you’ve got gray hair or no hair or you’re wearing diapers in a nursing home somewhere.
Post-attack, any small pang of pressure anywhere near the area of my chest where my heart is sends me into total lock-down mode. I have to start the process of accepting the insane fact that I am about to leave the world I have always known. Forever. And I have no idea what, if anything, is on the other side. All I’ve seen of that place is blackness, a dreamless sleep, nothingness times infinity. Anticipation of death has spawned religions since time immemorial. Living each minute having to be prepared for my final breath gives me a certain amount of envy for people who take comfort in some idea of what will happen to them when they die. Envy isn’t too strong of a word. But if the religious beliefs you had instilled in your youth somehow gets tilted or even shattered, getting back to that place of pure belief again is impossible.
Carl Jung once broke his foot and then, subsequently and somewhat strangely, had a heart attack. Jung wrote that while he was hanging at the edge of death he saw the earth from a thousand miles above somewhere in space. At the time he was experiencing deliriums and visions while medical professionals gave him oxygen and administered camphor injections. So mostly unreliable, probably. And it’s Jung, who was a genius of analytical psychology but also crazy as a cracked-out bedbug.
Thing is, Jung’s descriptions of the earth when viewed from space were stunningly accurate. That wouldn’t mean much, except that his heart attack and vision happened in 1944, predating space travel by roughly two decades.
But we want to believe this so badly we have to suspect ourselves of some kind of reality bending. I mean we have to. It’s common. I want most every kind of supernatural everything to be real. Talking rocks, people who can sleep underwater for weeks, Bigfoot, Loch Ness. You name it.
Life after death? Any kind of existence after death? Yes, please.
