The Resurrection of the Body (14 page)

T
he Brush with Death

They told me later that I only lived because an ambulance was close by when they called 999. They were there within a minute. In less than three minutes I was on the stretcher and within fifteen in the operating theatre. They said that the operation took three hours and that they transfused thirty litres of blood because the liver had been damaged and the liver loses a lot of blood. I was in a coma for three days and in intensive care for a week and
remember
very little about any of it.

What I do remember very clearly is that shortly after I was admitted to hospital I had what is known as a ‘
near-death
’ or ‘out-of-body’ experience.

I have a vivid recollection of a body lying on an
operating
table. I could see the doctors and nurses, the urgent looks on their faces, people shouting and people running. I viewed this scene from the top left-hand corner of the room, tucked in somewhere near the ceiling. The ceiling was very high and seemed to fade into a pale, blue-green haze, similar to the colour of the surgeon’s operating gowns.

I could hear, in this dreamlike memory, very faint music playing. The music was very high, not quite like anything I have ever heard. The nearest would be the high female voices in a Russian Orthodox church singing from behind the rood screen. I came in closer to the body on the table and could see that it was me. The abdomen appeared to be split open and there was an awful lot of blood.

I felt anxious in this memory when I recognised who I was seeing, but not very anxious. After this I studied the faces of the doctors and nurses around me. I can still see them clearly.

Later, when I was a little better, I asked two doctors to sit down and take detailed notes of my descriptions of the people who were working on that body. The doctors checked the records to find who had been in that team and the descriptions were very accurate. They both agreed that there was no way I could have been conscious or otherwise known who had been there, and they didn’t seem to
consider
very seriously that somebody had set this up. They said my experience was a classic one and decided to pass this on to some organisation which was carrying out research into near-death experiences.

There is one final part of this dream or memory, I don’t know what to call it. After the memory of the operating table I felt as if I were being propelled along a dark corridor to a bright light at the end, like being in a railway tunnel when the train lights are out and seeing the daylight
shining
enormously bright at the other end. I wanted
desperately
to reach this light, like a drowning person trying to break the surface of the water. I am not saying that this proves that there is life after death. Perhaps, on the contrary, this ‘tunnel of light’ is some distant memory of being born. I am quite prepared to believe that at the moment of death or near-death there are processes which occur in the brain which give rise to visions or
hallucinations
, and I am also prepared to believe that there may be a moment of super-consciousness before the system finally shuts down.

There is another strange thing which I am told is fairly common. After I came from surgery and was in a coma I was aware of Harriet’s presence, even when they thought I was unconscious. It was simply the feeling that when
Harriet
was there everything was all right and when she was absent it was not. It is similar to the feeling I had that when I believed in God everything was all right and that when I had lost my faith everything felt wrong.

I felt safe when Harriet was there because I knew she would protect me, because I was afraid then that they would pronounce me dead. I thought that they could perform all those tests and that I would be aware of them and feel pain, but not be able to move or rouse myself.

My injuries were fairly serious. I had a ruptured liver,
which had caused most of the bleeding, a fractured pelvis, and both legs had been broken in several places. My skull was also fractured. At first, when I regained
consciousness
, I had no memory at all of the accident, and this caused Harriet a lot of pain, because the taxi driver had sworn to the police that I had seen him coming, had stared right at him, and had thrown myself in front of him deliberately.

I could not remember ever having seriously
contemplated
suicide, though in moods of deep depression I
suppose
I had sometimes thought about it, wondering what it must feel like, for example, to jump from Beachy Head, and whether you would regret what you had done halfway down. But such had been my state of mind in the days and weeks leading up to the accident that I couldn’t dismiss it as a possibility. Harriet, then, was left at my bedside for several weeks, believing that she had failed me and that she and the children meant so little to me that I didn’t want to live.

T
he Psychiatrist

After I moved out of intensive care and began slowly to recover, they sent a psychiatrist to see me. He was quite a young, good-looking man, and he seemed to have
unlimited
amounts of time. He asked me about my childhood, my mother’s death, and of course was fascinated to discover that this was by suicide. He kept asking me how I felt about these things, as if anything which I could put into words could reflect the agony which I had felt. He kept saying, ‘We have to sort this out. We can’t have you going home until we’ve found out what really was behind this… you may need a little bit of help.’

At first his approach irritated me, so I argued with him. ‘I’m not sure that I did want to kill myself. Anyway, even
if I did, I am very glad to be alive. I don’t think that it would happen again.’

‘What reasons do you have for feeling that?’

Everything with him was answered by a question. In a way it was exhausting, though in time I came to look
forward
to his visits as a break in the boredom of the
hospital
routine. At first I was rather cautious about what I told him. I was happier talking about my childhood than about the present. But one morning when he came to sit down beside me, as usual holding the file with my notes – which I would have loved to have had a chance to glimpse – I decided to tell him about my experiences with the man who had died.

I suppose I had hesitated to at first, for fear of being thought to be schizophrenic or psychotic, but gradually he had gained my trust. He listened to me with fascination. Later, he told me how Jung believed that man had an innate religious sense, and that ideas of God came out of archetypes – the wise man, the saviour, the virgin, the mother – which we all held deep within our minds. We all had these archetypal images, and sometimes we projected these on to people around us, imbuing them with qualities which they, as mere mortals, couldn’t possibly have, and this inevitably led to disappointments when they let us down.

As we talked, I began gradually to feel that I
understood
at last what had happened to me. Over the last few years, I had been slowly renouncing my faith, moving steadily towards the rationalist position that Christianity was a myth, a myth which held important lessons for us
all, but a myth none the less. But emotionally I was not ready to accept this. The tragic loss of my mother and the presence of a father who cared for me only in a cool and distant way had created in me a desire for unconditional love from somewhere else, together with a deep desire that the wrongs I had suffered would eventually be put right. So strong was my inner need for this personal God, the Christ of faith, the worker of miracles, that I had created him out of my imagination, and projected him on to this poor young immigrant whose face was sufficiently like that of Jesus to accept him.

T
he Recovery

As I became physically stronger, and as talking to the
psychiatrist
began to allay my fears, I slowly began to regain my peace of mind. I found how delightful it was to do nothing, and that hours could be happily spent studying the contours of a bunch of flowers, reflecting on the
infinite
shades of colour in one lilac stem, or studying the reflection of sunlight on the curtain. I now think that the accident was the best thing that could have happened to me, despite all the distress that it caused Harriet and the children. Perhaps in a way I did die, and was reborn.

Bit by bit the world seemed to become a little more real to me. People were very kind and came to see me
constantly
. They brought me books to read, magazines,
tempting morsels of food. Harriet took a month off work and was with me every day from twelve thirty till three, when she went to collect the children from school. When she could she came back in the evenings. She used to sit by me, telling me anecdotes about people in the parish, reading me stories, or just sitting in silence, holding my hand.

Towards the end of my stay in hospital, Tessa came to visit me. She told me that she had met a divorced man twenty years older than herself, that she had fallen in love, that they were getting married and that she was expecting a child. Tessa was forty-two and had never imagined that she would be a mother. She looked radiant and incredibly happy. She told me that she didn’t know any more if she wanted to be a priest and I told her I was sure this was the best thing.

She took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m so glad that what happened that day did happen,’ she said to me. ‘It was only when it all came out into the open that I realised I was wasting my time thinking only of you. In a way, it set me free. Thank you.’

T
he Prostitute's Flat

Some time after I was well again and back at work, I decided to go back to the house in St Mark's Rise. I wanted to finish off this ‘unfinished business', and I went now not in a spirit of dread or obsession, but simply to find out the truth about the young man who had been the object of my obsession. I rang the bell and the girl I had seen on my previous visit opened the door. She looked very surprised when I said I wanted to talk to her and invited me into her flat.

She was dressed in casual clothes and wore no
make-up
, and looked as if she had put on weight. She put the kettle on and sat down at the table. ‘Well,' she asked me, ‘what do you want?'

‘The man in the top flat … is he still there?'

‘He left a month ago.'

‘Do you know where he's gone?'

‘He didn't leave an address.' She didn't seem anxious or suspicious of my questions, just answered matter-of-factly.

‘So there's no way I could trace him? I wanted to write to him.'

‘I don't even know his name.'

This shocked me for a moment, but then I realised that she must have so many clients that she couldn't possibly remember their names. On the other hand, this wasn't just a client, he lived in the same house, and there had been something intimate about their coupling; I felt they knew and liked one another. ‘I thought he was your … boyfriend.'

‘Oh, well, we did, you know, do it a few times.' She looked at me and grinned. ‘I feel silly, really, saying that to a vicar.'

‘Not at all.' The kettle had boiled; she got up and made me a cup of tea. It was cheap, bitter tea, which left a deposit on your teeth, and we drank it out of grimy cups.

‘I wanted to write to him. You see, I recently had a very bad accident, I nearly died, and I believe he had also been in a bad accident … he had terrible scars.'

Now she did look at me a bit oddly. She said, ‘He had a heart operation. He told me. He nearly died. It wasn't in this country, it was where he came from, somewhere odd, you know, one of those new countries that used to be in the Soviet Union.'

When I heard this I felt as if something had fallen into place. Relief flooded over me; I felt released. Perhaps there had indeed been a rational explanation for everything. I told her that if she heard from him I would like to talk to him and gave her my number at the church. I finished my tea. Just as I got up to go, she put her hand on my arm, and said, ‘You know, he was the best thing for me. There was something about him. It was because of him I kicked the habit. He had this funny effect on people. He just looked at me, you know, and he said, “You don't want to be doing that.” And suddenly I didn't, and I stopped, just like that. I'm not on the game any more, either. I've got myself a job, and I'm getting my daughter out of care.'