My Near Death Experience - Feb 5 2024

 

My Near Death Experience

Feb 5 2024



My near death experience

happened underwater

in a cold spring.

The hydraulic held me under,

tossing my helpless body

like an industrial washer

on laundry day.

Odd, how time slows.

How detached I felt

after the first clutch of panic

and fear.

No life passing

angels calling

hovering soul,

no dark tunnel

with a beckoning light at its end.

But more a sigh of regret

and resignation,

shaking my head

at bad choices and dumb luck.

At the stillborn future;

my lacklustre story

cut even shorter,

the potential I wasted

and will never now attain.

At the loved ones I will miss.

The ones left to grieve

wonder

second-guess.

And the ones I hurt or neglected,

for whom amends

will never now be made.

And at the very human concern

about what others will think of me,

my foolish pride

ignominious end.

And then, how soon they'll get on with their lives

and simply forget.

Yes, a lot, in just a few terrified seconds

that felt like forever;

intense

compressed

and so terribly mundane.

Of course, you know how it ended.

The water released its hold,

and I found myself floating downstream

fiercely sucking air;

the river

with the indifference of overwhelming power

simply shrugged its shoulders

and spit me out.

It's a relief to know

that after the first fierce struggle

there is this letting go.

That this calm comes over you,

a passive acceptance

of cruel fate.

Not Dylan Thomas

burning and raging at the close of day,

but rather a dimming of the light

on the bedside table

and surrendering to sleep.

I'm still waiting

for a glimpse of the afterlife

and sense of cosmic meaning;

that is, if either even exists.

But for now, there's life to deal with.

In which I often feel more panic and fear

than in the cold whitewater

that spit me out.

Although, after coming so near

if not any better at life

at least I know what dying is like

and am less frightened at the thought.

Actually, more than once.

Of course, that's the terminal event: the final process of dying, the next to last breath. What's still scary is all that comes before: any or all of disability, dependency, delirium, dementia, air hunger, pain, loneliness, mortification, incontinence, and loss of all sensory pleasures. So a more accepting attitude toward death presumes it will come quickly, that there will be no or minimal decline.

Death itself (not the dying, but what comes after) remains the ultimate mystery. But not so problematic for me. Because while I admit to an infinitesimally slim possibility of some kind of afterlife (one can only hope not hellish!), my belief is that it's simply extinguishment and oblivion. The best analogy to the utter nothingness of death would be how it felt in the non-existence before birth: because it didn't feel! Or the unconscious state of sleep (or, better still, a general anaesthetic, if you've ever come out of one; a coma, if you’ve been so unfortunate): you awaken after an empty interval of time in which you were absent and the universe didn’t exist. During which space and time collapsed into nothingness. During which the clocks inexplicably advanced, the date changed, things have moved all by themselves. A black hole of nothingness. But also of nothing to fear.