All belief about life disappeared with my first death.
Drowning at Adam’s Pond
New Hampshire
1962.
I’ve died many times
Since.
Nantasket Beach
Ile St. Louis
Paris,
The East Village
South of Doi mae Salong
Lanna Thai.
Always the same
On the other side.
Nothingness.
Same on the operating table
December 23, 2023
Loaded on drugs.
Like
Michael Jackson
On profopol.
A wasteland.
White.
Formless.
Nothing.
No God.
No gods.
No Satan.
No heaven or hell.
No purgatory.
No fear.
No pleasure.
No pain.
Nothing but nothing the promise of more nothing throughout eternity.
Then
I sensed something else.
More than nothing and I remembered from my math education
That nothing times something equal nothing.
Nothing was more powerful than everything and I was okay with eternity as nothing.
My father had once come in a dream
I had complained about my problems.
He stopped me.a familiar voice.
In his fifties.
Strong.
Not old.
Not young.
He knew something I didn’t know and said clearly, “Don’t worry. When you’re dead all of those problems will mean nothing.’
I had believed him without question.
He had never lied to me.
I wish I could have claimed the same.
I had lied to me all the time.
This white nothingness absolved me of my deceits.
Searching for something in the nothingness.
Unfearing nothing.
The nothings felt like forever,
Then a dream.
I was on a cutting block.
The Smithfield Market
London
Butchers in bloody white aprons
My body
In pieces.
My guts scattered across the wood table.
No pain.
No terror.
A vacation from nothingness,
Then
I emerged from death.
Snap.
My eyes opened.
On an operating table.
My body had been opened to transplant a liver.
No guts to be seen.
The scar a thick rope
To my fingers.
Nurses stood around me.
“Are you okay?”
The voice came from behind me.
I croaked out yes.
Life.
Not death.
Not nothing.
I breathe.
I feel drugs.
Morphine.
Maybe Dilaudid.
I recall demanding no Oxys.
This was not a new life.
I had not died.
I had lied to myself.
The nothing was not real.
A doctor said, “Everything went well.”
Good
But what about the nothing?
What about the nothing?
I was in everything
Again