Proof of Heaven (6 page)

The girl’s outfit was simple, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else in the surroundings had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for a few moments, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these . . . beyond all the different types of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world
around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the girl said—again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question.

Back where?

Remember who’s talking to you right now. I’m not a soft-headed sentimentalist. I know what death looks like. I know what it feels like to have a living person, whom you spoke to and joked with in better days, become a lifeless object on an operating table after you’ve struggled for hours to keep the machine of their body working. I know what suffering looks like, and the answerless grief on the faces of loved ones who have lost someone they never dreamed they could lose. I know my biology, and while I’m not a physicist, I’m no slouch at that, either. I know the difference between fantasy and reality, and I know that the experience I’m struggling to give you the vaguest, most completely unsatisfactory picture of, was the single most real experience of my life.

In fact, the only competition for it in the reality department was what came next.

B
y eight the next morning, Holley was back in my room. She spelled Phyllis, taking her place in the chair by the head of my bed and squeezing my still unresponsive hand in hers. Around 11
A.M
., Michael Sullivan arrived, and everyone formed a circle around me, with Betsy holding my hand so that I was included, too. Michael led a prayer. They were just finishing when one of the doctors specializing in infectious diseases came in with a fresh report from downstairs. Despite their adjusting my antibiotics overnight, my white blood cell count was still rising. The bacteria were continuing, unimpeded, with the task of eating my brain.

Fast running out of options, the doctors once more went over the details of my activities in the past few days with Holley. Then they stretched their questions to cover the past few weeks. Was there anything—
anything
—in the details of what I’d been doing that could help them make sense of my condition?

“Well,” said Holley, “he did take a work trip to Israel a few months ago.”

Dr. Brennan looked up from his notepad.

E. coli
bacterial cells can swap DNA not only with other
E. coli
, but with other gram-negative bacterial organisms as well. This has enormous implications in our time of global travel, antibiotic bombardment, and fast-mutating new strains of bacterial illnesses. If some
E. coli
bacteria find themselves in a harsh biological environment with some other primitive organisms
that are better suited than they are, the
E. coli
can potentially pick up some DNA from those better-suited bacteria and incorporate it.

In 1996, doctors discovered a new bacterial strain harboring DNA for a gene coding for
Klebsiella pneumoniae
carbapenemase, or KPC, an enzyme that conferred antibiotic resistance on its host bacterium. It was found in the stomach of a patient who died in a North Carolina hospital. The strain immediately got the attention of doctors all over the world when it was discovered that KPC could potentially render a bacteria that absorbed it resistant not just to some current antibiotics, but to
all
of them.

If a toxic, antibiotic-proof strain of bacteria (one whose nontoxic cousin is ubiquitous in our bodies) got loose in the general population, it would have a field day with the human race. There are no new antibiotics in the ten-year pharmaceutical development pipeline that could come to the rescue.

Just a few months earlier, Dr. Brennan knew, a patient had checked into a hospital with a powerful bacterial infection and was given a range of powerful antibiotics in an effort to control his
Klebsiella pneumoniae
infection. But the man’s condition continued to worsen. Tests revealed that he was still suffering from
Klebsiella pneumoniae
and that the antibiotics hadn’t done their work. Further tests revealed that the bacteria living in the man’s large intestine had acquired the KPC gene by direct plasmid transfer from his resistant
Klebsiella pneumoniae
infection. In other words, his body had provided the laboratory for the creation of a species of bacteria that, if it got into the general population, might rival the Black Death, a plague that killed off half of Europe in the fourteenth century.

The hospital where all this occurred was the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, and it had occurred just a few
months previously. As a matter of fact it happened at about the time that I’d been there, as part of my work coordinating a global research initiative in focused ultrasound brain surgery. I’d arrived in Jerusalem at 3:15
A.M
. and after finding my hotel had decided on a whim to walk to the old city. I ended up taking a lone predawn tour of the Via Dolorosa and visiting the alleged site of the Last Supper. The trip had been strangely moving, and once back in the States I’d often brought it up with Holley. But at the time I’d known nothing of the patient at the Sourasky Medical Center, or the bacteria he contracted that picked up the KPC gene. Bacteria that, it developed, was itself a strain of
E. coli.

Could I have somehow picked up an antibiotic-proof KPC-harboring bacteria while I was over in Israel? It was unlikely. But it was a possible explanation for the apparent resistance of my infection, and my doctors went to work to determine if that was indeed the bacteria that was attacking my brain. My case was about to become, for the first of many reasons, a part of medical history.

M
eanwhile, I was in a place of clouds.

Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent orbs, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced.
Higher
.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they
had
to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but that doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could
hear
the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way.
Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look
at
anything in that world at all, for the word
at
itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet . . . or a butterfly’s wing.

A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.

Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind—and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Each time I silently posed one of these questions, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these bursts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They
answered
them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an
immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. An orb that was living and almost solid, as the songs of the angel beings had been.

My situation was, strangely enough, something akin to that of a fetus in a womb. The fetus floats in the womb with the silent partner of the placenta, which nourishes it and mediates its relationship to the everywhere present yet at the same time invisible mother. In this case, the “mother” was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it. This Being was so close that there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself. Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite vastness of the Creator, could see how completely minuscule I was by comparison. I will occasionally use
Om
as the pronoun for God because I originally used that name in my writings after my coma. “Om” was the sound I remembered hearing associated with that omniscient, omnipotent, and unconditionally loving God, but any descriptive word falls short.

The pure vastness separating Om and me was, I realized, why I had the Orb as my companion. In some manner I couldn’t completely comprehend but was sure of nonetheless, the Orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this extraordinary presence surrounding me.

It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the Orb (who remained in some way connected to the Girl on the Butterfly Wing, who in fact
was
she) was guiding me through this process.

Later, when I was back here in the world, I found a quotation by the seventeenth-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that
came close to describing this place—this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness . . .”

That was it, exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

The questions, and the answers, continued. Though they still didn’t come in the form of language as we know it, the “voice” of this Being was warm and—odd as I know this may sound—personal. It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I’ve always associated with human beings, and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos . . . even irony and humor.

Through the Orb, Om told me that there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.