Author's Note: I'm often asked why I write in the present tense (and, in the case of this story, from the reader's perspective) - as readers find the deviation from the traditional way of telling a story in third-person/past tense to be disorienting. One reason is that this story is coming from a deeply personal subject, so it felt more natural to write it from a personal perspective - plus writing in the present-tense gives the action a greater sense of immediacy, that something unexpected could happen (much tougher to pull off when writing in past-tense). But the big reason is that I want to force the reader to exercise a different set of mental muscles and push people out of their comfort zones.
***
You walk down a brightly lit hallway of a hospital to visit your mother, who is dying from terminal ovarian cancer. You are carrying a plastic Disney Store bag, inside it is a large stuffed Winnie the Pooh toy you picked up on the way to the hospital. While scanning the signs next to the door frames for her room number, you notice that for early afternoon, there is a distinct lack of people milling through the hall. In fact, you don’t see any people until reaching the nurses’ station directly across from your mother’s room.
Upon entering, you feel a slight change in the air - a few degrees cooler than the hall, and the faint scent of lunch from an hour ago - and pause before shutting the door behind you, to see her sitting up watching Judge Judy on the ceiling-mounted television. Despite the feeble light of the overcast sky coming through the large windows, you can clearly see that she looks less jaundiced than yesterday, and her eyes have regained some of the sparkle and alertness that had been taken away by the chemo.
You try to shut the door as quietly as possible, but despite your best efforts, the air pressure from the hallway buffets between the door and jamb before being sucked closed with a gentle thud. You see your mom’s gaunt frame leaning forward as she calls out, “Is that my sweet Bozo?” Heh, ‘Bozo’...she’s going old school today.
“Tis I, thy sweet Bozo, who comes bearing pressies!” you tilt your head back and respond in a voice laden with jovial grandiosity, followed by a hearty chuckle of equal theatricality, eliciting mom’s own chuckle from the other side of the privacy curtain. Upon seeing you, she lights up and opens her arms wide - “There’s my boy. Come give yo’ mama a hug.”
You happily oblige and set the Disney Store bag in her lap, eager to see her reaction while you roll the high-backed vinyl guest hospital recliner next to the bed. She opens the bag, clucks her tongue once and grins weakly as she pulls Pooh out and lovingly tucks him under her arm, carefully avoiding the IV line plugged into her porta-cath, “Oh sweetie. You’re so good at this.” - a reference to the significance of the fluffy yellow bear in the tiny red t-shirt, the first stuffed animal she had ever given you, awaiting you in your crib when she brought you home from the hospital for the very first time.
She holds out her free arm for another hug. You swoop in for another one, surprised at how much strength she still has as she hugs you tightly, “Thank you, honey. He’s exactly what my day was missing.”
As you settle back into the recliner, you notice on your mother’s rollaway tabletop sits a gallon of sweet tea from Chik-Fil-A, tucked into a pile of shaved ice, an unused sitz bath repurposed to hold it all, and you salivate a bit when you see the red-capped transparent jug, half-filled with that sweet caramel-colored nectar. Your mother picks up the remote, switches Judge Judy off, and changes her expression to one reserved for matters of the utmost seriousness, which causes a flicker of alarm to ripple through you. “Haven’t seen that look in a while,” you say.
“I have something important to tell you, but I don’t want you to freak out, okay?” she asks, raising her eyebrows slightly to make sure we’re both on the same page. You nod, feeling another, stronger, flicker of alarm. “Okay.”
She shifts closer to the mattress edge, snakes her free arm through the opening in the bed’s guardrail and holds open her hand, which you quickly take - again surprised at the strength in her grip. She takes a deep breath, glances at the ceiling and returns her gaze to you, then begins, “Last night, from 1:02 until 1:04, I was clinically dead.”
You feel alarm draining the blood from your face and causing your eyelids to open wide. A smile of empathy and a light squeeze of your mother’s hand helps bring the rising panic under control, snapping you back to reality. Seeing this, she continues, “While I was gone, I learned the truth of this universe, and what reality really is.”
Of all the things you anticipated talking to your mom about, this is not one of them. Not even close.
"What?" you ask in a flat voice.
***
Your mother’s smile tells you she was expecting this precise reaction, “Let me see a credit card for a sec and I’ll show you. Doesn’t matter which one.”
You fish your wallet from your pants pocket, flip it open and hand her a Visa card, mindlessly setting the wallet on your lap.
She holds it between the tips of fingers in front of you, making sure you're seeing the back of the card, "Now, I'm guessing you already know what a hologram is?" your eyes flick to the square of shimmering rainbow colors stamped into the bottom corner - the three-dimensional shape of an eagle in flight - then slowly moves the card around, causing the colors and the eagle’s position to shift, “The universe we live in and experience, it’s all an illusion.”
She hands the card back, which you drop because your hands are shaking. Without warning, a question flashes in your mind, Did the chemo do this to her mind? You reach down to pick up the card, causing the wallet to drop to the floor, the cards clattering across the tile.
How the fuck am I supposed to respond to that? you wonder while replacing the cards in the wallet, the wallet back into its pocket.
As if reading your thoughts, “I know, honey. I wouldn’t know what to say to that, myself. But you also know I’d never lie to you.” She reaches for your still-shaking hand and clasps it between both of hers
Christ, look at yourself, man! If this is your idea of being strong for your parents -- Dad! Oh god, he must have--
Again, your expression conveys your thoughts to your mom, “No, your Dad doesn’t know yet. You’re the first person I’ve told. They were about to call him - and you - so that you could be here in time to say goodbye. But then I suddenly started to show a pulse, and they were able to stabilize me,” she explains.
Something about this puzzles you, “Why are you telling me about it first? And separately?”
“Because I haven’t figured out how to tell him yet without coming off like a crazy person,” for emphasis, she tilts her head slightly, raises her hand from Pooh, points at her head, twirls her finger while crossing her eyes and poking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth.
You realize your eyes are still bugging out and your mouth has dropped open at some point, which mom apparently finds hysterically funny, because she breaks out laughing. Hard. This triggers your sympathetic laugh as you suddenly realize how ridiculous you must look, and within seconds you’re both reaching for Kleenex to dab away the tears. “Oh Lord, I needed that,” she manages to get out after a few moments. “I haven’t laughed that hard in ages.”
A timid knock from the door. One of the nurses pokes her head in and whispers, “Everything okay in here, Franny dear?”
Your mother sheepishly flashes you a guilty smile as she leans forward, “I’m so sorry, honey! We got a little carried away. Yes, everything’s fantastic!”
Mock-sternness from the nurse, “You must be in here taking advantage of handsome young men again?”
Mock-offense taken by your mother, she demurely dips her chin and raises her hand to her chest with fingers spread, eyelashes batting, "Now Katy, you know I was raised a Catholic girl."
Both women, simultaneously, "So...yes." Riotous giggling follows from both, which continues on the other side, muffled by the door.
Even though you can't help but grin and shake your head in wonder at your mother's antics in the face of the greatest challenge she has ever had to face, your thoughts return to the subject of her strange experience. “How?” you ask, finding she’s cupped your hand between both of hers. But then again, her hands have always been cold. Cold hands, warm heart, indeed, you muse.
A squeeze from her hands, “How what, honey?”
“How did you...you know - know?”
She appears to ponder how to answer, lightly gnawing on her bottom lip for a moment, “When my soul left my body, it was no longer held back by the limitations of my senses. I instantly knew I was experiencing our reality as it truly is - and it’s because of those limitations that I’m not capable of even describing reality to you - not beyond the crude analogy with the credit card anyway. I’m sure a theoretical physicist could explain it better. But it’s just dumb ol’ mom trying to explain this the best she can with what she's got up here," she taps the side of her head, "so bear with me if I stumble along the way."
"And as I understand it, everything that we experience in our universe as having three dimensions, everything we perceive as solid and tangible - and verified by all of the sophisticated scientific machines built by our most brilliant minds - is no more real” than the eagle on the back of your credit card. Our three-dimensional "reality" is basically nothing more than a movie that's being projected onto a flat two-dimensional surface. I was about to learn what that surface is and why it - the universe we thought we knew and love - exists."
She pulls your hand towards her, gives it a quick kiss and a pat, “Now, help your dumb ol’ mom sit up. She’s parched.”
You stand, slipping your hand under her shoulder for better leverage as she scootches upright and pushes the button in the guardrail to raise the top of the mattress, the tiny whir of the motor stopping when she drops her hand back on her lap. You refill her cup nearly to the top with ice and pour roughly a thimble-full of tea into the remaining space. Mom’s familiar, comforting hand softly strokes your back, then picks up her cup of tea and takes a long pull on the bent-neck straw. “Thank you, my sweet boy. Now go sit back down, because mama’s got more to tell you.”
***
You are momentarily distracted by the first warming shafts of sunlight to appear in days breaking through the window, causing the atmosphere in the room to shift again - from a nondescript, melancholy slate, tinged with unseen anxiety into a divinely tranquil gold, imbued with the promise of revelation.
You catch mom looking at you intently, and a grin slowly plays over her face as you return from the daydream you were having and already forgotten what it was about. She glances at the wall clock, “Katy will be giving me my afternoon shot in a few minutes. It always makes me sleepy, and there are a few things I still need to tell you - so let me get through it before asking any questions, okay? Odds are, I won’t know any of the answers anyway,” a soft chuckle.
“When something ‘died’ in the ancient world - something able to have a sense of right and wrong - our ancestors created religion to cope with not knowing what lies beyond ‘death’. But out of all the people who have ever lived, only a few dozen have ever seen the truth and recognized it for what it is. Out of that small group, only a handful have spoken openly of what I’m about to tell you. The earliest were executed as heretics, then eventually labeled as crackpots and ostracized from the communities they lived in.”
You uncap the jug, pour another thimble-full of tea, return the jug to its sitz bath cradle and hand her the cup. She sips from the bendy straw before resuming, “What many people have come to believe in - with no small amount of help from the church - is that when you die, you are judged by a deity for your actions in this life. Depending on what those actions are, your soul is sent off to continue on its journey someplace else."
“What the small group I’m now a part of learned during our own journeys is that our actions in life are not being ‘judged’ for reward or punishment, but are literally being collected for a task much larger and more important than the actions of any single human being. The information about the actions of our species as a whole is what is being collected. The ultimate purpose of this task is anybody’s guess. I was actually on the verge of finding that out before my soul was slammed back into my body.
“The last thing I learned before I returned is that even ‘death’ itself is an illusion - that the actual physical universe that our simulated universe is modeled after begins beyond the plane in which our souls exist. What people call 'ghosts' are like what remains of a file in a computer after it's been deleted - some level of information about that file will linger in the hard drive until you reformat it.”
school and I took you to see Purple Rose of Cairo?" mom asks.
You vaguely recall that day, mostly because it was rainfall that had broken a 30 year record and knocked the power out. So, instead of sitting around in a dark house, you and mom hopped in the car and went to the movies to sit in a dark theater, "Was that the Woody Allen flick? Jeff Daniels steps off a movie screen --"
Everything your mother has been telling you clicks into place and you feel your eyebrows lifting and your mouth falling open, again. You slowly raise your eyes and look at your mother, hands in her lap, her nod barely perceptible, as if to say, “Now you’ve got it.”
“So, for all we know,” you gesture to the room, “this is Purple Rose of Cairo 2?” You ask, incredulous.
She pauses for a moment, looking up and to her right in consideration, then wrinkles her brow and turns a corner of her lips up in a slight frown, as if something she has just tasted doesn’t taste quite right, “In a way...yes. I do know there’s a greater purpose behind it.”
“When are you gonna tell dad?” You ask, hoping he takes it well.
“He’ll be up later, when his seminar is done. He’s bringing pizza from San Carlo’s!” She claps lightly and flashes a big smile, “Can’t wait to have real food again!”
A soft knock before the door opens to admit Katy, carrying your mom’s pills in a pleated paper cup, “Hey there, sweetness. Time for your afternoon nap.” She gently rattles the pills around as she bustles up next to the bed, clad entirely in blue scrubs, a pair of reading glasses rests on her matronly ample bosom, clipped to a brass ball-link chain around her neck, sneakers faintly squeaking on the tile.
Your mom downs the proffered pills and washes them down with a swig of tea and thanks Katy, already bustling back to the nurse’s station. “You know where we are if you need anything, dear.” Katy calls out before easing the door closed.
You stand up while mom presses the button to lower the head of the bed in preparation for her nap, then fluffs her pillow before turning on her side to face you. Again, she reaches for your hand and gives it a gentle squeeze, “I’m sure you have a thousand questions, but I’ll be out like a light in two minutes. Besides, I want you to have some time to process it all, because it’s a lot to take in. But I want you to do me a favor and keep all this between us until I’ve had a chance to tell your dad,” another squeeze of her hand, firmer, “just know I love you more than anything in the world -” she motions with a quick head tilt away from you for you to come closer, and whispers, “and I love my pressie.”
She slips her hand behind your neck and pulls you in to kiss you on the cheek, then lowers her arms, then her head and snugs the bedsheets up around her neck. You bend down and kiss her gently on the side of her forehead and whisper that you love her too,
She smiles and closes her eyes.
You walk out to the hall and shut the door behind you, this time it makes no sound. You grin at this and make your way to the elevators, pushing the down button. The elevator doors directly in front of you slide open, the motion sensor clicking as you step in. You press the button to the lobby, and as the doors are shutting you’re not quite sure if you’re actually hearing or simply imagining the faint beeping of alarms in the direction you’ve just come from.