We promised we would stay in touch, and we did: emails, texts, phone calls, video calls. For six years. Also, I promised him that anytime I knew of an oob, he would be the only person in all of science I informed.
Seven
Of course we’re not supposed to play favorites among the patients. I keep promising myself I won’t, and I always do.
I knew the librarian would be looking at her clock, expecting me to come see her first thing, as usual. I would have to keep her waiting. I was paged almost as soon as I took off my coat and hung it on the hook in my office.
A patient I hadn’t seen before was asking for a chaplain—and not just asking, but demanding one.
He’d been causing all sorts of trouble. Would I come right away?
On that unit, I met with a nurse whose husband ran an auto shop she was also involved in. She liked to compare everyone to people dealing with getting their cars fixed.
The patient, a lawyer in his fifties, was the type of customer who’d come into the bays in spite of the sign that said you couldn’t. He would look at a wrench in the hand of a mechanic and tell the mechanic he was holding it wrong. He would order an expensive engine oil that was only expensive because of the brand name, then he’d watch it go in like he suspected they’d switch in a cheap one. He’d try to pay his bill with the only credit card they didn’t accept, like there wasn’t information about credit cards all over the place, including when you called to make your appointment.
In his brief time in the hospital, he antagonized everyone involved in his care, starting with a lab technician who told him that if she ever had to draw his blood again, she was going to take it all and he would not be able to stop her; he’d have to sue the medical center to get it back.
With me, as the nurse predicted, he was courteous and polite and even pleasant.
I found him calmly lying flat in his bed, covers to his chest. He was freshly shaved and showered, and wore a hospital johnny. The room was dim. He held out his hand to me for a firm, friendly handshake. I saw that he was not ill or wounded. He was scheduled for release in the morning.
I took my place in the bedside chair, and the first thing he told me was that he considered himself a rational man. He believed in facts, in evidence. He described his life as a comfortable one, well-ordered and satisfying, filled with challenges and a measure of happiness that basically, when he added everything up, came out greater than the sum of his disappointments.
He was quick to say he had little to complain about concerning his marriage, his children, his colleagues, his friends. In his personal life, while he valued the importance of emotions, he was pretty much the same as he was in his profession. He always kept faith with his powers of clear, careful thinking, and evidence, evidence, evidence.
He sometimes attended his wife’s church, a historic one, noted for its organ and music. He had never cared for services. Church was where he discovered how it felt to be deeply moved by J. S. Bach and Mozart. He’d come to believe there was a part of the human brain that could be stirred only by a certain kind of music. Until three days ago, being spiritual was all about Bach and Mozart.
He would leave the hospital early, before breakfast. He had waited to ask for a chaplain until now, his last night, so he could wake to go home with a sense of something accomplished and done with, like a verdict in a trial that would not be appealed.
His overall health was excellent. He was proud of himself for keeping his body cared for, finely tuned.
Only in the last few hours, alone in his room, was he able to collect his thoughts. He felt it was fortunate to be somewhere no one knew him—having visitors would have been unbearable, for there was only one thing to talk about. He finally felt ready.
He delivered his story quietly, his voice steady. He was brought to the emergency room after feeling ill—he didn’t need to share the details. All that mattered was the fact that he was taken into surgery.
It had all been uncomplicated, minor, routine. But while he was under anesthesia, something went terribly wrong, resulting in cardiac arrest. He would not bring a lawsuit against the hospital to compensate him for his ordeal.
At the moment his heart stopped beating, and before it registered on a monitor, he woke, floated upward, and found himself looking down at himself on the operating table.
He did not have the sense that he was viewing his body as a brand new corpse, lifeless as it was. Otherwise, he might have been moved to sorrow or anger. He looked at his body in an objective, impersonal way, and he saw that the man on the table no longer had a connection to him. Of the surgical team around that body, he took little notice. They had nothing to do with him, which was true of all the equipment, the cloths, the masks and gowns, the instruments, the sounds of beeps and chatter and someone telling a joke he didn’t quite catch, but it seemed to be funny.
He didn’t think he was freed from his physical self by any special occurrence, or the action of someone else. It all felt perfectly natural, probably the way a butterfly feels when it suddenly knows it will cling to a leaf no longer as a non-winged bug, or crawl on the ground afraid of being stepped on.
A deep, abiding serenity had entered him, along with the knowledge that he was weightless, like an astronaut outside of gravity. He remembered a thought that came to him as a revelation, and made his peacefulness expand to a level of emotion he could only describe as pure joy. It was not like anything he’d ever experienced before. No music was playing, but whatever was going on made him think that Bach and Mozart hadn’t really known anything about music.
Then he went for a walk.
He had never been to the medical center before. Far from home, he’d been attending meetings connected to a professional matter. He was stricken ill when he was packing to check out of his hotel.
An ambulance had brought him. In the emergency room, he was sedated for his surgery. Nothing was in his memory of being wheeled to surgery.
In his new state, in his lightness, he was aware of the hospitalness all around him. He was eager to get away.
He went through corridors lined with doorways, many of them, the same ones over and over, as if he were trapped in a maze. The people he passed gave no indication they saw him, or felt his presence. He remembered a man with an arrangement of flowers in a blue vase that was shaped like a baby’s bootie; a young woman in scrubs, pushing an empty wheelchair; a patient in a bathrobe on a stroll, while attached to his IV stand, the wheels of it squeaking a little.
He saw by this evidence he was invisible, without the mass of any object, which neither pleased nor worried him.
It was all simply natural. He was airy, he was light, he had no sense of time. He had no way of knowing how long he wandered and found no exit. But a creeping sense of claustrophobia was taking hold of him. He had never suffered from such a thing before. He began to be afraid he would panic.
How he was freed from the maze, he had no idea. He only knew that suddenly he was in the presence of a white cloud of beautifulness.
He was beholding a cloud, he told me. There was a cloud and it was in front of him, and in its center, somehow, was a light shining brilliantly, with a warm, soft radiance, unlike any other light he’d ever seen.
Looking down, he realized he was standing on what seemed to be some sort of wooden platform, or perhaps an ordinary floor, on which a carpet lay. The carpet fabric was light gray. It was splashed here and there with bits of white. He was puzzled about that, until he figured out that what he stood on wasn’t flooring.