Out of body experience

Apparently my heart stopped during the operation.

The first I knew about it was when I woke up and found myself floating upwards, towards a great light. I could see my body flat out below me, raw red rip where the surgeon had been, but otherwise serene and peaceful, an anaesthetised smile on my face.

The scene played out in slow motion. The surgeon was swearing at everyone, barking insults and orders. A junior doctor was juggling inexpertly with the defibrillator, shocking my body with powerful electric jolts. A machine was beeping, which added to the general air of panic. I was the only one with any sense of perspective and watched over events with a calm detachment.

The light drew me towards it, I felt like a moth confronted by some divine table-lamp, but before I could float further upwards I heard the machine stop beeping, the surgeon stop cursing and looked down to see my lifeline twitching back into motion. I was alive, and as if to confirm the fact found myself floating back into my body.

I woke up the next day in cold pyjamas and an all over body sweat. I unbuttoned my top and checked the scar, it was as if somebody had crocheted a ladder across my chest.

Up until that point I'd never believed in any god, but now I'd seen the very path to heaven. Lying there in that bed I knew I was a changed man. "I died in that hospital," I told my wife, Samantha, when she came to visit, and on countless occasions thereafter.

"You lived," she always replied. She never shared my conversion, my new stance on life. She remained a doubter.

Life wasn't the same after my experience. My day-to-day life no longer seemed real, nothing was important. In my work I either finished a job or I didn't, sold or didn't sell, did well or did badly. At home, it all mattered even
less. Part of me was just waiting to die, for that moment when I saw the bright light open up above me and trod the path to the pearly gates.
Samantha eventually reached a point where she simply refused to discuss my experience. In desperation I searched the web for people who'd been in a similar position. I soon found out about the Out Of Body Club, an online site for people who'd died on the operating table.

Strangely the group was 45% atheist, a fact I know from reading the results of the survey they published on the front page. The atheists all had similar experiences to me, similar insights, felt a renewed passion for life, wanted to use their close escape to do something meaningful. They even shared the feeling that there was more to life than science alone could tell us, they just didn't think god could add anything.

I discussed our differences in detail with many of my online friends. Karen in particular, I'd talk to for hours. She was a divorcee, had lost her job, her husband and her home within a year, and just as she was recovering from all that she'd had a heart-scare. Why she refused to die when her heart stopped I couldn't understand, she'd got nothing left to live for.

"That's exactly why I had to live," she'd replied, "I didn't want to die alone, to die without purpose, nobody knowing, nobody caring. I want people to grieve my death."

It turned out that Karen lived nearby, just a 40 minute drive, and we arranged to meet up. We both needed to talk face-to-face about what we'd been through. I told Samantha I had to meet a client for work.

I wasn't being deliberately duplicitous, it was just that she didn't understand why my experience was so important to me. "It was just a lucky escape, that's all," was her interpretation.

We met in a pub, the Old Sailor, a pub that had clearly once been a smoky local, but was now half-heartedly converted into a pub that served food and catered for families. You could still see the tobacco stains on the walls though.

I hadn't expected Karen to be good looking. Most of the people in the Out of Body Club were elderly, and though I knew Karen was a young widow I'd blanked the fact out of my mind, I'd assumed she'd be a baby bloomer, not a still-blooming beauty, with raven hair and oak-brown eyes. "Shit," I thought to myself.

We talked for hours. I had to phone Samantha with another lie, then again with another. I looked up a nearby hotel on my ipad and booked a room for the night, just so that I could drain every minute out of this opportunity. I guess I knew, somehow, that I could never meet Karen again after his.We talked about everything and nothing. Mostly I wanted to know why she didn't believe in god, when she'd been that close to him, when she'd seen such a clear sign.

"Was it a sign though?" she asked, "or just a trick of the mind? What happened before modern surgery, before defibrillators, how did people find god then, when there were no signs, no bright lights, just death?"

She continued. "I don't think there's a god, nobody watching over us. Maybe the point of the experience was simply a reminder to watch over ourselves, our subconscious mind showing us that life was important. It's why I decided I had to live, had to make my life special."

She was right, of course. God or no god, divine message or simply note to self, the learning point was the same. Watch over yourself, take care of everything that's important in your life.

I phoned Samantha and told her that my plans had changed again and I was coming home after all. I stopped at the service station to buy petrol and, on a whim, bought her flowers, some sort of lily. I realised that in all the months since my operation I'd completely forgotten to tell her how glad I was to still be alive.