On the Operating Table I Watched My Whole Life Play Back

It was supposed to be nothing. Gallbladder, keyhole surgery, home by dinner, that is what they told me. My daughter was going to pick me up. I remember counting backward from ten and getting to seven.

I did not get to six for a long time.

Somewhere in there, a vessel I will not pretend to understand gave way, and my blood pressure fell off a cliff, and my heart, which had never once complained in fifty-one years, simply stopped. I know all this from the report and from a nurse who was kinder than she had to be with the details. What I know from the inside is different.

I know that I was suddenly up and to the left, near the big round lights, and I could see the top of the surgeon's cap and the part in the anesthetist's hair and a nurse's shoes, the left one untied. I noticed the untied shoe. Later I asked the nurse if her shoe had been untied and she went white and said yes, she had nearly tripped on the lace during the emergency, and how could I possibly know that.

I was calm up there. That is the part that unsettles people when I tell it. I watched them work on my body with the mild interest of a man watching neighbors fix a fence. And then the room dissolved, not into a tunnel exactly but into a kind of gathered brightness, and my life began to play.

It did not play in order. It played all at once and yet I could follow every thread, which is a thing bodies are not built to do and souls apparently are. I was six on my father's shoulders at a parade. I was twenty-two and cruel to a girl who loved me, and I felt her cry in a stairwell I never saw. I was thirty-eight, holding my daughter the night she was born, and I felt what she felt, safe and furious and new. I lived it all again and from every side.