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.

And there was a presence with me, watching alongside, not scolding, only interested, the way a good teacher is interested. It asked me -- and this is the closest I can get to the words -- what did you learn, and did you love well. Not, did you succeed. Not, did you win. Did you love well.

I had to answer honestly because there was no way to lie there. Lying was simply not possible; you were made of truth in that place. And I saw the places I had loved well and the places I had held back out of pride or fear, and I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, another chance to do the second kind over.

Maybe that wanting is what sent me back. I felt myself falling, quick and hard, back into a body that hurt everywhere, and a machine was shrieking and someone said there he is, and I opened my eyes to that untied shoe.

The surgeon told my daughter it was the worst scare of his career. He said my heart was out for almost four minutes. I recovered slowly. But I came back with an assignment I gave myself on that table, and I have been working at it ever since. I call people I have wronged. I say I am sorry and I do not explain it away. I tell my daughter I love her at the end of every call even when we have just argued, because I have felt, from the inside, what my love does to her, and I will not waste another year of that. Did you love well. I think about it every single day.