The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it. -Cesare Pavese 

   It was not a near-death experience. It was death. Dazzling. Plain. Eternal. Inescapable. 

   Friday, August 20, 2021, Death swallowed me & spit me back to earth. The scent of his guts & the perfume of heaven's salvation, remain.   

   My dying began around 1 p.m earth time. My doctor smiled, said to me, "See you on the other side. I promise" & injected what he later called a "hefty dose" of the anesthetic ketamine. 

   The impact was immediate. My body vanished. I entered Eternity.

   My hearing had been replaced with music. A mask had rendered me blind & I saw everything. Human senses, including eyes, were irrelevant.  

   Since my body had been hijacked, the world fell away. My remaining awareness was sucked into a vortex flooded with images never seen, drenched in experiences never felt.

   Hardest to describe is the intensity. My immersion in the afterlife overwhelming. No more escapable than death itself.

   Much of this eternity was appealing. It was not the white light where deceased relatives appear. Instead, imagine inhabiting a kaleidoscope. Not looking through one but living inside abstractions more rounded & mixed than cut glass pieces. Interesting. But, what if you thought this was "it"?

   The shifts were constant. There was the Emerald City of Oz. There was the dull light of a dreary day. A pulsing, dimpled, globe glowed.

   Everything fell pell mell into me in a wrenchingly insistent avalanche that makes analogies inadequate.

   Mid-death doubts loomed: Dr. Barton was wrong. I will never return to the other side because the dead cannot do that. 

   A remnant of my earth consciousness reminded me that he was there. My voice screamed but I was sure he could not hear me.

   His hand arrived on my shoulder with saintly comfort. I took that hand, a precious human gift, in both of mine & stroked it as one would do during a final encounter with a loved one. 

   From the other side his voice said, "Erie. You're okay."

   Still, I was a hostage in a land barren of people.

   Other than Doctor Barton's hand, experienced like God's to Adam's in Michelangelo's painting, I felt no sense of humanity. Only pleasing but indifferent shapes.

   I was alone.

   Then people started to appear. Eternity's caregiver's?

End, Part One.  

-Erie Chapman