Near-death experience (NDE)

"A near-death experience (NDE) is a personal experience associated with death or impending death. When positive, such experiences may encompass a variety of sensations including detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light. When negative, such experiences may include sensations of anguish and distress.^[1] NDEs are a recognized part of some transcendental and religious beliefs in an afterlife.^[1][2][3][4]

Different models have been described to explain NDEs.^[5] Neuroscience research suggests that an NDE is a subjective phenomenon resulting from "disturbed bodily multisensory integration" that occurs during life-threatening events.^{[6]" . Wikipedia}

She, like everyone else, was always intrigued and fascinated by the anecdotes of near-death experiences. The bright light, the tunnel, the peace and the sudden return to life.

Her life today was like a very slow-motion NDE. She lived looking at herself from the outside of her body, the world moving around her unresponsive body, reduced to mere reflexes to social stimuli. No intent in her actions. She watched the living world in a jail-like box seat in the life's theater that was featuring this long running show that she had no part in it.

What she felt today was a kind of perverted NDE. While most accounts of NDEs show this smooth pilgrimage-like stroll towards the light, finishing with a sudden thrust back into corporeal life, her life now was different. She'd been suddenly thrust into the after-life where she was now trapped.  She had known about some negatives accounts of NDEs involving anguish and despair, but they all finished with a resolution. She was now dragging herself in a suspended state of despair that saw no end. It seems to her that others recounts of NDE felt they were still "alive" inside of a lifeless body, her sensations were clearly showing someone dead that felt trapped in a living body.

Hers was not a near-death experience. It was an all-around-death experience. There was no light. No serene stroll, no reassurances and she felt the certainty of death every single moment of her so-called life.

If I do all you ask of me, will you let me die?

As I sit here in the darkness of the noisy bus

The huge stars in the vast sky weigh on my head. 

There is another person screaming 

in the solitary confinement of my soul 

begging to be set free. 

It’s myself trying to escape through the tears. 

But just tears are so narrow for my pain to go through.

I’m banging on the walls of my sanity:

let me go, let me go!

Close your eyes near me so you can see it. 

Hold my hand and the screams will be deafening. 

If I do all you ask of me, will you let me die?

Dec 8, 2018

How to start a story

"...Quem sofre fica acordado

defendendo o coração." 

Thiago de Mello

She thought about writing the story of her daughter's life.

It would have to start with Clair de Lune, by Debussy. It was her daughter's favorite.
It was pretty like her, profound, full of mystery and beauty, energy and despair, intensity and resignation, but above all, with awe for life, the universe and all its possibilities.

Awe was what had filled her when she came home from the hospital with her little princess. She was so complete, so perfect. Her heart was full of happiness and energy, that felt like trapped in her chest, almost out of air in admiration the beautiful present that she was given by nature to be able to mother such perfect being.

She remembers she holding her daughter embraced by her husband and all of them surrounded by such warm love that it was as if the universe had stood still watching them.

Intense was her daughter's life. So short, but so intense. So large was the void when she left. In her grief she though she would never be able to write anything. No amount of words would do justice to describe what was having a child like her. It was as if finding the right words would mean confining her daughter's life to the limits of this word, showing her the true extent of her tragedy, her pain, the finality of everything. Her daughter was made of stardust,, she thought. She made herself believe that her daughter's pain was over now, but her life now was free from her body's jail. She had to believe in something to survive.

She wasn't sure why she needed to survive. "You need to survive!" That's what she kept hearing.  She didn't have strength to fight.

Nights were dreaded. The indigenous people of her homeland were right. Bad spirits can haunt you at night if you fall asleep. They sure did. Her nights were tormented with nightmares where painful reality couldn't be forgotten.

Cosmic Time

She thought the abortion, euthanasia, pro-life, pro choice discussion was all too stupid. In the great scheme of things, death and life are all part of the same thing. All complex events altering long chains of carbon molecules along a timeline.                                                                                          

Longing for a life that would be was meaningless, because in cosmic time, each individual existence contributes a neglectable amount of energy into the whole universe. In the way she saw it, no matter the lifespan, the achievements, the impact in other lives, when compared to the 14 billions or so of the universe, they were all and the same practically zero. species can go extinct in the blink of an eye and something else takes its place while the universe and everything doesn't take notice.

The universe goes on expanding itself, stars exploding with all nuclear reactions, black holes swallowing everything, light might get distorted, black matter continues to fill the space, dark energy, and so many more mysteries won't cease to exist, whether  anyone is conscious of it or not.

Even what we call matter really doesn't matter when you consider the size of the universe that keeps expanding. a bunch of nothing that keeps expanding. It's like the absence of her children. Each day expanding and taking up space inside of her.

She is becoming this immense void of life, feelings, reason that somehow is still mutating, the void expanding. She is getting thinner, transparent. she looks at herself in the mirror and she almost can see through herself.

That's what we all are. Stardust specs, infinitely small representations of the whole universe devoid of individual meaning.                                            

CPR

She called her daughter and the silence was deeper than usual.
She started banging on the door and the silence was deafening
She asked for her husband to help opening the locked door.

As they scramble to look for tools to break the lock, her heart was pounding in pain.

She heard her husband screaming:"oh, my God!"

She rushed into the room and started screaming, asked him to remove the belt from around her neck. As they started CPR and he called emergency, she heard a breath of life leaving her daughter's body.

30 chest compressions, unblock the airways, ventilation through her mouth. Every second counting.

The emergency crew arrived and started pouring on the front door. As her husband continued the chest compressions she went to open the door, and from that moment on she was not allowed back into her daughter's room.

The seconds now became minutes and minutes converted into long hours of pain, screams, tears and wailing.

As the hours became days and the days are becoming months, they miss her even more and the void gets bigger and bigger.

Remains

I'm knitting a blanket for my daughter
it will be 9" x 7" x 4.5"
fitting snugly around her.

No, she is not a tiny little girl
out of a fairy tale
although her birth made my life so magical
and brought dreams back into my soul.

It's tiny 3-dimensional blanket
to cover the tiny golden box
that today holds her combusted remains.

Cremation

Maybe among them there might be residues
of previous cremations,
the pulverized cardboard,
the wrapping material around her body.

Are the bodies wrapped so the handlers
don't have to see their faces?

Combustion
It's all a transformation of matter with heat.
Some of her transformed cells
remained in the burning chamber
and will be mixed with other remains.

Some particles floated in the air
and mixed with the dust
that will be swiped away
when the janitor comes buy
during the normal cleaning routine

Some climbed through
the crematorium chimney,
as gases that were devoid of smell
and then released into the atmosphere

Most of it will remain
in this tiny golden box
that I'll wrap in this tiny blanket
knitted in her favorite color.

Was it the first favorite color?
Or the third...
I can't remember the order
of her favorites anymore.

She stopped telling me that
long before her death.

I think of the all these particles
if they are still parts of her, if they hold
anything of what made her
so unique and so loved.

Are they going to spread her beauty
and greatness everywhere they land?
Can souls be rubbed off into others?

What will be wrapped in this tiny blanket
is just a heavy transformed
incomplete portion
of what my daughter once was
mixed with other things
that weren't hers.

My beautiful, precious daughter.
She now cannot refuse my hugs.
I can cradle this little box
for as long as I want.
She stays still all the time
compliant to whatever rules
we impose upon her.

No more locked doors.
No more defiance.
Never late for school again.
never dragging us down.
No more drama.
No more stress.
No more pain.
No more tears in her eyes
No more broken hearts for her.

nothing,
no more!
never again,,,

Crime scene investigation

She had lost her son twice. And twice she had been saved by her daughter.

First when he left, at 15, with his heart bitter with resentment that he never explained.
She cried everyday, all day long. Her husband, out of pity on her misery, suggested them to have a child.

The daughter born 9 months later saved her. It was a new beginning, her daughter was more than perfect. She was a dream fulfilled.

The second time she lost her son was when he died, at 25 suffocated in his desperation and hopelessness.

Her soul cried deep inside with an infinite sorrow. Again her daughter saved her, because if wasn't for her, she wouldn't continue alive.

Now, at 15, her daughter died. She didn't have enough tears to cry anymore. A furious rage started eating her entrails, poisoning her blood, crunching her heart: "I miss you so much that my heart aches to pump and my blood crawls slowly through my veins".

During the memorial mass, while the priest was explaining about Lazarus and how we are all going to assume a celestial body at the end of times, she could only stare at the box with her daughter's ashes. She remembered how heavy was her lifeless body when she found her and tried to revive her with CPR and now it was a light bunch of ashes in a box. She thought of all the atoms that made her daughter's body, all the fusions and collisions that had happened in billions of years in the forge of the stars that were now gone and that somehow got together to form such a beautiful girl that had brought so much happiness and hope to her in he short life. She reflected on how all these atoms were constantly changing, transforming, combining, reacting as her daughter grew. In how they were still being transformed, by the fire of the cremation, but they were all there in one way or another, still part of this universe. All that we are is a bunch of atoms combined, reacting and transforming one another. The dust of the stars. Maybe that's the celestial body mentioned by the ancient people. We are made of stardust and to the stars we return as dust.

This idea was at the same time tragic and wonderful, but neither that, nor the Lazarus story could bring her any comfort.