Going Under
Nov 15 2013


There was no revelation.
No life
flashing before my eyes.

When I almost died
there was only disappointment
at passing so young.
A detached sense
that it all could end

with such banality.
And compassion
for loved ones, left;

who will imagine my suffering

when all I felt was regret,

and how much I would give

to comfort them.

When it was simply giving up.
How odd
the life-long struggle
was so suddenly done,
how unexpected.
And how easy it was
going under.

But now you know
I never went.

With burning lungs,
my strong desire
to overcome,
one final mighty kick
found the surface,
the most heavenly air
on earth.
Dropped into troughs of monster waves
gulping water, wracked by coughs
I craned my neck,
up enough for breath
treading hard.
The cold clutch of fear
constricting harder.

Every second of every day
we are all near death,
one distracted step
into traffic,
3 minutes of breath
away.
All, as contingent as the thinnest thread
a quick mistake.

There will be no bright light
no face of God,
no great destiny
or completion.

Just a colossal sense of waste,

a glimpse
into the dead weight
of fatalism.

Surrender

urging us on.

Which is when I refused
its warm embrace,

emerged
into the storm.


I was listening to an interview with a ground-breaking (no pun intended!) Canadian cave diver (Jill Heinerth). Apparently, this is the most dangerous sport in the world: scuba diving in pitch-black caverns and caves, in subterranean rivers and lakes, in the seams of the earth. She said her closest brush with death was swimming down through a giant iceberg, newly calved off the coast of Antarctica, where a reversal of flow made it a 3 hour struggle back to the surface; and where, an hour after they emerged, she watched the entire mass of ice disintegrate into a mountain of slush.

She recounted her emotional state much as I recall mine. I've had maybe 3 such experiences: tipping my canoe in the middle of a lake when the waves should have kept me onshore; white-water kayaking (actually, probably more than one!), when I missed my ferry and dropped backwards into a giant churning hydraulic; and -- compressed into mere seconds -- when I slid off a winding winter road, rolled 11/2 times down the incline, and ended up suspended by my seatbelt half-buried in snow. I recall that looking out the windshield was like looking through the window of a laundromat dryer: everything in my field of view turning, while it felt as if I was sitting still. In all three cases, panic was quickly replaced by a sense of calm, mild regret, and resigned detachment: a brief interval -- that seemed forever -- suspended between surrender and struggle. And then, my ambivalence gave way to agency, focus, and a determination to do what I could.

The near death experience has been much written about. There is the cliché of one's life flashing before one's eyes. There is talk of transcendence, re-birth, revelation. And some have referred to a preternatural feeling of calm, of being embraced and comforted. All re-tellings are usually coloured by culture and belief and world-view. My experience is far more mundane. In a way, it removes some of the fear of death itself. Although if it does nothing to allay concerns about the actual process of dying: of pain and suffering; of the prolonged over-medicalized death; of indignity and dependence. I've said before that, if I let myself, I would write a lot more "death" poems than I do: the one great mystery; the one thing we all have in common; and -- paradoxically -- the thing that most gives meaning and urgency to life.

Most of my poems are acts of imagination. This one is closer to autobiography. I suspect the experience may be more common than one would be led by popular culture to believe.