Two summers ago in the black night of Brooklyn
I spewed several liters of blood into the bathroom tub.
After wiping the retch from my face
More blood surged from my body.
Liters’
Something was not right.
Something was very wrong.
In a taxi
I crossed the East River.
To NYU
Inside the emergency room.
The staff took one look.
A scrum of nurses, technicians, and doctors sped my body into ICU.
Many hands stripped my body nude.
“Sir, can you hear me?”
A young intern.
Nod.
“You are bleeding to death from the varices.”
“Varices?”
“Small stomach fissures. Do you have family in New York?”
Head shake from side to side.
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
An oxygen mask on my mouth and nose
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“An tsíoraíocht.”
The Celtic word for eternity held no meaning to Christians.
Their only afterlifes
Heaven hell or purgatory.
The hiss of gas.
Propofol swarmed the life out of this life.
Dead in limbo.
White light.
Nothing, only white.
There was something else.
Eternal nothingness times zero equals zero.
This was death and I was cool with that.
And then I was back.
Life.
Here.
Pain.
The Here not my own bed.
The pain mine.
This had not been a dream.
I sucked air.
The other patient in the room.
Not breathing.
Never again.
Hospital.
Nurse.
Doctor.
An earnest doctor.
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
“But I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news.
Cancer, cirrhosis, the looming threat of death.
I was 69.
Alone in a hospital bed in a city of millions.
Bad news.
It was all right
I had had a good life.
I was not dead, still alive.
But straddling eternity. No fear
I had died before.
Car crashes. Beatings. Broken hearts.
Whatever didn’t kill me made me wish it was dead.
This time same.
Why fight for life?
Why not give up?
Morphine made surrender easy.
Free five days later.
My friends saw death in my eyes.
My children in Sri Racha prayed
That I will live forever.
People believed in life eternal.
I once believed the same.
Not now.
I had had a good life.
New England, New York, California, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Quebec, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Nepal, Tibet, Kenya, Tanzania.
Friends by the thousands.
Two family in Thailand.
It was a good life.
I was not dead, still alive.
But straddling eternity. No fear
I had died before.
Car crashes. Beatings. Broken hearts.
Whatever didn’t kill me made me wish it was dead.
This time same.
Why fight for life?
Why not give up?
Morphine made surrender easy.
Free five days later.
My friends saw death in my eyes.
My children in Sri Racha prayed
That I will live forever.
People believed in life eternal.
I once believed the same.
Not now.
I had had a good life.
And there was still more to come.
Months passed.
A year and more.
A new hospital.
Cornell-Weill.
Jaundice, weight loss, pain.
People thought I looked like a Rolling Stone.
Keith Richards.
Ahead my last days.
Then a miracle.
Yulemas. An available transplant.
That night back in the OR.
The room cuts to black.
Clear light.
I know Limbo well.
No gods, no heaven, no hell.
Nowhere. Nothing. No one.
The white light of death.
Gone again.
To
London
Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse.
My body on a chopping block
Entrails scattered across the wood.
Then back to life.
Antiseptic smell.
Clean sheets
The machines beep. None followed a Max Roach beat.
A nurse gave me water
Taste of Limbo.
Nothing.
This not my body.
A black scar marks the execution of the old me.
Yet I am alive.
Bracketed by pain.
But alive with another soul within me.
Paula. My donor. Forty years old, 300 pounds.
I love her and she me.
Old School Lazarus II.
Where’s the morphine.
Back from the eternity of white propofol extinction.
No Maine, no South Shore, no New York, no Paris, nor Thailand.
No permanent record.
Tabula Rasa.
Not a trace of the Here-Before.
Just Paula and Lazarus II
Wicked scars.
Never dead before my time.
Only dead to the time before now.
Now a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn.
Time eternal, because there is no time in nothingness.
Only Nothing Paula and Lazarus II.
We are not too lonely together.
Living forever again.
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going.
Ashes to Ashes not.