1.01.02

What I experienced next was pure chaos. I’d only gone through something similar once before when I was much younger and lost control of the car I was driving. I was told it flipped end over end several times, spun, and went over the embankment to smack into a stone wall. Thanks to seat-belts I walked away from that crash without a scratch.

This time it wasn’t a car that was totaled, it was me.

Everything seemed to happen all at once, a crashing splintering sound as the chunk of space rock tore through all the material above to get to me. A brilliant flash and a terrible, wet, meat-like sound as it did. I remember the split second after that seemed to last a really long time, as the echoes faded and I glanced down, still in no pain, to see weirdly that my insides simply weren’t there anymore. It’s so strange to see nothing where a lot of you used to be.

My last thought as I faded was a final irony – that as an atheist I wouldn’t even get the pleasure of finding out I was right all along. Then deep inside my soul there was a shift, and I involuntarily surrendered to the irresistible grey that rushed in upon me.

Then something happened that I will never completely be able to put into words. When that wall of fog reached me and pervaded me, something like an energy or vibration remained, like a buzzing gnat that just doesn’t let you quite fall asleep. At the same time, it felt like an itch I needed to scratch, an interrogation of my soul that I wasn’t allowed to ignore. I was put to the test in that moment. It challenged who I was at my very core, and what I truly wanted. It called into question why I had been born, and where I had been going with my life. And above and beyond and through all of it, the implied query: was I truly ready to cease to be, or did I have anything worth living for?

Knowing who I am and what I’ve been through, the next part may make you laugh, dear reader. But all through my life to that moment I’ve been implacably opposed to the very idea of death. While others have spouted to me that nonsense about death being an important part of life, I rejected it. When they asked who in their right mind would want to live forever, I always firmly said, “Me.” Of all the injustices of the world, death I knew to be the worst – because while everything else could make you hurt and suffer, only death could destroy the last shreds of hope.

Thus, in that moment I raged against death, against the hopelessness and utter powerlessness that the fact of death represents in this world. I raged against all of it, all the darkness, all the pain, against the loss I was experiencing and the small number that would lose a part of themselves when they discovered my demise. But most of all I raged against this beastly world that had the audacity to obliviate the universe that I was as a person, billions of times over. My whole soul rejected death and its hold on me in the name of all sentient life.

And the moment ended. The vibration or energy met with my refusal, melted into it somehow, into me.

And my body, nearly torn in half by the impact, died.

I know that because I was standing there looking at it.

It was pretty gross, but I have to admit the first thought on my mind at that time was, “Crap, I was wrong, there is an afterlife, and I might be in big trouble…”

For a minute I waited for a tunnel of light to show me the way, or an angel (or worse) to come take possession of me. Nothing happened.

I’m not a patient sort at the best of times, and I wasn’t then. First I glanced around my living room, looked up through the hole in the ceiling torn by the meteor, peered down through my couch at the hole going into the basement. Looked around the destroyed room. I tried not to look too closely at my body itself, or the bits of me decorating all four walls. The place was a mess.

I checked out the clock in the entertainment center, which was still working. That’s how I know that I waited ten more minutes, but nothing changed. At all.

What the…?

I reached for a candy from my candy dish next to the couch, absentmindedly, as I considered what to do next. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when my fingers passed right through it, but it certainly got my attention.

I tried to touch the arm of the couch, and the side table – but my fingers contacted nothing. A part of my brain wondered how it was I could be standing on the floor if I couldn’t make contact with matter, but I avoided pulling at that thread for now, for fear I would start falling towards the center of the earth if I did.

Instead, I refocused on the candy dish. I’d heard many stories of ghosts and poltergeists causing a ruckus by interacting with the world in limited ways – maybe if I tried hard, I could at least lift one candy, or nudge it or something.

So I leaned over the dish and brought my forefinger and thumb together on the topmost piece. Just before contact, I willed as hard as I could for my fingers to grasp it, and in that moment three things happened simultaneously:

I picked up the piece of candy.

My corpse and associated biomatter all around the room simply vanished.

And I was suddenly aware of what I had been missing since my “death”, as all the ordinary aches and pains of having a 50-year-old body suddenly returned.

I stood there, mouth agape, when the pounding at my door started, startling me out of my brain freeze. I opened the door and greeted my visitors, getting the next shock:

They shone.