A Light in the Dark - Part VI
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. The bliss of that experience was short lived and what followed was a dreary emotional desert that left me wondering what was the point of living when we are all just going to die.
THIS IS PART 6 of a SIX-PART STORY
Image: Matt Kochar
It seemed like a long time before the ambulance arrived. I was in shock and felt no pain. I don’t think I even knew how badly I’d been hurt. But then something very strange happened. As I was being lifted into the ambulance, I realized I was dying, that the life flow was ebbing from my body. I felt extremely relaxed about that. I was about to die, to go someplace else, and I told myself perhaps I should think about God as the blood seeped out of me and the lights of the world grew dim.
That was odd. I was from a secular Jewish family, had been brought up without religion. Talk of God in our house was unusual; for us spirituality lay in painting, books, music. And yet as soon as that word -- God (G-d for Jews, the word so holy it couldn’t even be spelled out) -- as soon as that word echoed in my brain, I felt my spirit peel away from my body and take off in the dark.
Any sense of time or space dropped away. There was simply me, the essence of me, flying through a vast, unquantifiable, all-consuming darkness toward a light.
I don’t think I will ever have the words to properly describe this light. It was a Being. It was luminescent. It shimmered and shone with knowledge of me, everything I had ever done or thought right there in the light it projected, a misty, beckoning, pulsating light that knew me inside out and pulled me toward it with the strength of gravity. I wanted to go to it, to be reunited with it, to live with it forever.
And yet, as soon as I got close, I was pushed back down toward my body…. and then, pushed back up, rising through darkness one more time to approach the Being and feel its kindness, peacefulness and wisdom wash over me. I had the sense that it told me something I’ve spent my whole life since trying to remember and understand, that there was communication between us. But while I knew that the Being of light was real -- more real than anything I’ve encountered before or since -- I wasn’t allowed to remember what it told me.
I don’t know how long the meeting with this Being lasted. In the end everything went dark and I woke in a hospital with a masked surgeon leaning over me. In the days that followed, I learned that my entire vein system had collapsed and that I had indeed passed into the territory of death. For weeks after that, people kept telling me how sorry they were (my face was horribly swollen, half my head was shaved, a long red scar darted across my cheek). But, as terrible as I looked, I didn’t care. I’d gotten my answer. I knew that life continued after death, that things happened in a dimension that was as real as the street I lived on. I didn’t have to continue with my teenage anxiety over the point of existence. I already understood.
Cover photo: JR Korpa