Room 4 at Three in the Morning I Left My Body

The worst hour in a hospital is three in the morning. Everything is dimmed and beeping and half the world is asleep and the other half is watching monitors. That is the hour my heart chose.

I had come in with pneumonia, both lungs, and I was on the mend, or so the chart said. I remember waking with a strange lightness, no pain, just light, and thinking that was odd for a woman who had struggled to breathe for a week. Then I noticed I was looking at the top of my own head.

I was in the corner of Room 4, up near the curtain rail, and below me the monitor had gone flat and loud, and a nurse was already through the door before I understood what the sound meant. More of them came. Someone climbed half onto the bed. I watched them press on my chest, and I felt nothing about it, no panic, only a mild wish that they would not break my ribs, which of course they did.

I want to be careful here because I am a practical person. I balance a checkbook. I do not believe things easily. But I was out of my body, watching, and I could read the clock on the wall, and I remember it said 3:11, and I remember the young doctor's hands shaking as he called for something, and both those details were later confirmed to me by a nurse who did not know why I was asking.

Then the ward folded away and there was the tunnel, and I will not insult you by pretending it was anything but a tunnel, dark and turning and drawing me forward toward a light that was patient and enormous and glad. As I moved I saw my life laid along the walls of that passage, not painful, not a punishment, just true. I saw my mother young. I saw the son I lost at birth forty years ago, and he was not a baby, he was grown and whole and he smiled at me, and I have carried that smile every day since. Whatever else was real or not real, that was real. I will go to my own grave insisting on it.

I felt myself understanding things I cannot now put into words -- that nothing is wasted, that the hard years were doing quiet work, that the people I had grieved were fine, were more than fine. And I felt the pull of the light, and I nearly went, and then a voice I did not hear so much as feel said, gently, they are not done with you.

The next second I was slammed back down into a chest that felt like a truck had parked on it, and the room was too bright and too loud and I was crying and could not stop. 3:14, the nurse said, when they got me back. Three minutes I had been gone.

I do not talk about it much because I have watched people's faces change when I do, the little door that closes behind their eyes. But my daughter believes me, and my priest believes me, and the nurse who held my hand afterward and cried with me, she believes me. I know what I saw in the corner of Room 4. I know my son is grown and safe somewhere I am not scared of anymore. And I know that when it is truly my turn, at three in the morning or any other hour, I will not be afraid to go, because I have already seen where the tunnel leads, and it is only kindness at the end of it.