Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife (12 page)

At some point, I came up to the edge of the Gateway and found that I could not reenter it. The Spinning Melody—up to then my ticket into those higher regions—would no longer take me there. The gates of Heaven were closed.

Once again, describing what this felt like is challenging in the extreme, thanks to the bottleneck of linear language that we have to force everything through here on earth, and the general flattening of experience that happens when we’re in the body. Think of every time you’ve ever experienced disappointment. There is a sense in which all the losses that we undergo here on earth are in truth variations of one absolutely central loss: the loss of Heaven. On the day that the doors of Heaven were closed to me, I felt a sense of sadness unlike any I’d ever known. Emotions are different up there. All the human emotions are present, but they’re deeper, more spacious—they’re not just inside but outside as well. Imagine that every time your mood changed here on earth, the weather changed instantly
along with it. That your tears would bring on a torrential downpour and your joy would make the clouds instantly disappear. That gives a hint of how much more vast and consequential changes of mood feel like up there, how strangely and powerfully what we think of as “inside” and “outside” don’t really exist at all.

So it was that I, heartbroken, now sank into a world of ever-increasing sorrow, a gloom that was at the same time an
actual
sinking.

I moved down through great walls of clouds. There was murmuring all around me, but I couldn’t understand the words. Then I realized that countless beings were surrounding me, kneeling in arcs that spread into the distance. Looking back on it now, I realize what these half-seen, half-sensed hierarchies of beings, stretching out into the dark above and below, were doing.

They were praying for me.

Two of the faces I remembered later were those of Michael Sullivan and his wife, Page. I recall seeing them in profile only, but I clearly identified them after my return when language came back. Michael had physically been in the ICU room leading prayers numerous times, but Page was never physically there (although she had said prayers for me too).

These prayers gave me energy. That’s probably why, profoundly sad as I was, something in me felt a strange confidence that everything would be all right. These beings knew I was undergoing a transition, and they were singing and praying to help me keep my spirits up. I was headed into the unknown, but by that point I had complete faith and trust that I would be taken care of, as my companion on the butterfly wing and the infinitely loving Deity had promised—that wherever I
went, Heaven would come with me. It would come in the form of the Creator, of Om, and it would come in the form of the angel—my angel—the Girl on the Butterfly Wing.

I was on the way back, but I was not alone—and I knew I’d never feel alone again.

T
hinking about it later, Phyllis said that the one thing she remembered above all else about that week was the rain. A cold, driving rain from low-hanging clouds that never let up and never let the sun peek through. But then, that Sunday morning as she pulled her car into the hospital parking lot, something strange happened. Phyllis had just read a text message from one of the prayer groups in Boston saying, “Expect a miracle.” As she pondered just how much of a miracle she should expect, she helped Mom step out of their car, and they both commented that the rain had stopped. To the east, the sun was shooting its rays through a chink in the cloud cover, lighting up the lovely ancient mountains to the west and the layer of cloud above as well, giving the gray clouds a golden tinge.

Then, looking toward the distant peaks, opposite to where the mid-November sun was starting its ascent, there it was.

A perfect rainbow.

Sylvia drove to the hospital with Holley and Bond for a prearranged meeting with my main doctor, Scott Wade. Dr. Wade was also a friend and a neighbor and had been wrestling with the worst decision that doctors dealing with life-threatening illnesses ever face. The longer I stayed in coma, the more likely it became that I would spend the rest of my life in a “persistent vegetative state.” Given the high likelihood that I might still succumb to the meningitis if they simply stopped the antibiotics, it might be more sensible to cease using them—rather than
to continue treatment in the face of almost certain lifelong coma. Given that my meningitis had not responded at all well to treatment, they were running the risk that they might finally eradicate my meningitis, only to enable me to live for months or years as a once-vital, now-unresponsive body, with zero quality of life.

“Have a seat,” Dr. Wade told Sylvia and Holley in a tone that was kind but also unmistakably grim.

“Dr. Brennan and I have each had conference calls with experts at Duke, the University of Virginia, and Bowman Gray medical schools, and I have to tell you that everyone to a person is in agreement that things do not look good. If Eben doesn’t show some real improvement within the next twelve hours, we will probably recommend discussing termination of antibiotics. A week in coma with severe bacterial meningitis is already beyond the limits of any reasonable expectation of recovery. Given those prospects, it might be better to let nature take its course.”

“But, I saw his eyelids move yesterday,” Holley protested. “Really, they moved. Almost like he was trying to open them. I am sure of what I saw.”

“I don’t doubt you did,” said Dr. Wade. “His white blood cell count has come down as well. That’s all good news, and I don’t for a minute want to suggest that it isn’t. But you need to see the situation in context. We’ve lightened Eben’s sedation considerably, and by this point his neurologic examination should be showing more neurological activity than it is. His lower brain is partially functioning, but it’s his higher-level functions that we need, and they’re all still completely absent. A certain amount of improvement in apparent alertness occurs in most coma patients over time. Their bodies do things that can make it appear that they’re coming back. But they’re not. It’s simply the brainstem
moving into a state called
coma vigile,
a kind of holding pattern that they can stay in for months, or years. That’s what the fluttering eyelids are, most likely. And I have to tell you again that seven days is an enormously long time to be in coma with bacterial meningitis.”

Dr. Wade was using a lot of words in an attempt to soften the blow of a piece of news that could have been spoken in a single sentence.

It was time to let my body die.

A
s I descended, more faces bubbled out of the muck, just as they always did when I was moving down into the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View. But there was something different about the faces this time. They were human now, not animal.

And they were very clearly saying things.

Not that I could make out what they were saying. It was a bit like the old Charlie Brown cartoons, when the adults speak and all you hear are indecipherable sounds. Later, upon looking back on it, I realized I could actually identify six of the faces that I saw. There was Sylvia, there was Holley, and her sister Peggy. There was Scott Wade, and there was Susan Reintjes. Of these, the only one who was not actually physically present at my bedside in those final hours was Susan. But in her way, she had, of course, been by my bedside, too, because that night, as the night before, she had sat down in her home in Chapel Hill and willed herself into my presence.

Later, learning about this, I was puzzled that my mother Betty and my sisters, who had been there all week, holding my hand lovingly for endless hours, were absent from this array of faces I’d seen. Mom had been suffering from a stress fracture in her foot, using a walker to ambulate, but she had faithfully taken her turn in the vigil. Phyllis, Betsy, and Jean had all been there. Then I learned that they had not been present that final night. The faces I remembered were those who were physically
there the seventh morning of my coma, or the evening before.

Again, though, at the time, as I made the descent, I had no names or identities to attach to any of these faces. I only knew, or sensed, that they were important to me in some way.

One more in particular drew me toward it with special power. It began to tug at me. With a jolt that seemed to echo up and down the whole vast well of clouds and praying angelic beings through which I was descending, I suddenly realized that the beings of the Gateway and the Core—beings I had known and loved, seemingly, forever—were not the only beings I knew. I knew, and loved, beings down below me, too—down in the realm I was fast approaching. Beings I had, until now, completely forgotten.

This knowledge focused on all six faces, but in particular on the sixth one. It was so familiar. I realized with a feeling of shock bordering on absolute fear that whoever it was, it was the face of someone who needed me. Someone who would never recover if I left. If I abandoned it, the loss would be unbearable—like the feeling I’d gotten when the gates to Heaven had closed. It would be a betrayal I simply couldn’t commit.

Up to that point, I had been free. I had journeyed through worlds in the way that adventurers most effectively can: without any real concern about their fate. The outcome didn’t ultimately matter, because even when I was in the Core, there was never any worry or guilt about letting anyone down. That had, of course, been one of the first things that I’d learned when I was with the Girl on the Butterfly Wing and she’d told me: “There is nothing you can do that is wrong.”

But now it was different. So different that, for the first time in my entire voyage, I felt remarkable terror. It was a terror not
for myself, but for these faces—in particular for that sixth face. A face that I still couldn’t identify, but that I knew was crucially important to me.

This face took on ever greater detail, until at last I saw that it—that
he
—was actually pleading for me to return: to risk the terrible descent into the world below to be with him again. I still could not understand his words, but somehow they conveyed that I had a stake in this world below—that I had, as they say, “skin in the game.”

It mattered that I returned. I had ties here—ties that I had to honor. The clearer the face became, the more I realized this. And the closer I came to recognizing the face.

The face of a young boy.

B
efore sitting down with Dr. Wade, Holley told Bond to wait outside the door because she hadn’t wanted him to hear what she feared was very bad news. But sensing this, Bond had lingered outside the door and caught some of Dr. Wade’s words. Enough of them to understand the real situation. To understand that his father was not, in fact, coming back. Ever.

Bond ran into the room and up to my bed. Sobbing, he kissed my forehead and rubbed my shoulders. Then he pulled up my eyelids and said, directly into my empty, unfocused eyes, “You’re going to be okay, Daddy. You’re going to be okay.” He kept on repeating it, again and again, believing, in his child’s way, that if he said it enough times, surely he would make it true.

Meanwhile, in a room down the hall, Holley stared into space, absorbing Dr. Wade’s words as best she could.

Finally, she said, “I guess that means I should call Eben at college and have him come back.”

Dr. Wade didn’t deliberate on the question.

“Yes, I think that would be the right thing to do.”

Holley walked over to the conference room’s large picture window, which looked out on the storm-soaked but brightening Virginia mountains, took out her cell phone, and dialed Eben’s number.

As she did so, Sylvia stood up from her chair.

“Holley, wait a minute,” she said. “Let me just go in there one more time.”

Sylvia went into the ICU room and stood by the bed next to Bond, as he sat silently rubbing my hand. Sylvia put her hand on my arm and stroked it gently. As it had been all week, my head was turned slightly to one side. For a week, everyone had been looking
at
my face, rather than into it. The only time my eyes opened was when the doctors checked for pupil dilation in reaction to light (one of the simplest but most effective ways to check for brainstem function), or when Holley or Bond, against the doctors’ repeated instructions, had insisted on doing so and encountered two eyes staring dead and unmoored, askew like those of a broken doll.

But now, as Sylvia and Bond stared into my slack face, resolutely refusing to accept what they had just heard from the doctor, something happened.

My eyes opened.

Sylvia shrieked. She would later tell me that the next biggest shock, almost as shocking as my eyes opening, was the way they immediately began to look around. Up, down, here, there . . . They reminded her not of an adult emerging from a seven-day coma, but of an infant—someone newly born to the world, looking around at it, taking it in for the first time.

In a way, she was right.

Sylvia recovered from her initial flat-out shock and realized that I was agitated by something. She ran out of the room to where Holley was still standing at the big picture window, talking to Eben IV.

“Holley . . . Holley!” Sylvia shouted. “He’s awake. Awake! Tell Eben his dad is coming back.”

Holley stared at Sylvia. “Eben,” she said into the phone, “I have to call you back. He’s . . . your father is coming back . . . to life.”

Holley walked, then ran into the ICU, with Dr. Wade right
behind her. Sure enough, I was thrashing around on the bed. Not mechanically, but because I was conscious, and something was clearly bothering me. Dr. Wade immediately understood what it was: the breathing tube that was still in my throat. The tube I no longer needed, because my brain, along with the rest of my body, had just kicked back to life. He reached over, cut the securing tape, and carefully extracted it.

I choked a little, gasped down my first fully unaided lungful of air in seven days, and spoke the first words I’d spoken in a week as well: