Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (27 page)
And now it’s time to almost kill Wes. A technician from the defibrillator company fiddles with a small computer that
remotely manipulates the implanted device. In the corner of the screen is the company’s disquieting logo, a heart with a jagged lightning bolt through it. “We’re preparing to shock,” announces the technician. Depending on the voltage and on what the heart is doing when you shock it, the charge can either induce or stop fibrillation. “So it can kill him, or save him,” she says brightly.
This time, they’re aiming—temporarily, of course—for the former. “Here we go,” says the technician. “I’m enabling and … I’m inducing.” The jolt makes Wes’s chest muscles contract violently, jerking his torso up off the table as though he’d been kicked from below. “We have VF,” says the technician, sounding all urgent and mission-control. “VF” stands for ventricular fibrillation. On the EKG monitor, Wes’s heartbeat dithers wanly. What’s going on in his mind right now? Is he beholding the bright light? Speeding through the tunnel? Attending an appliqué class? Wherever he is, it’s a brief visit; three seconds later the defibrillator is preparing to shock his heart back to lub-dub.
Twenty minutes later, Wes is being wheeled to the recovery room. Technically speaking, anyone who makes it to a recovery room can’t have been dead. By definition, death is a destination with no return ticket. Clinically dead is not
dead
dead. So how do we know the near-death experience isn’t a hallmark of dying, not death? What if several minutes down the line, the bright light dims and the euphoria fades and you’re just, well, dead? We don’t know, says Greyson. “It’s possible it’s like going to the Paris airport and thinking you’ve seen France.”
Greyson is an inestimably patient person in a field rife with inconclusive data and metaphysical ambiguities. I ask him what he thinks, in his heart of hearts. Does the personality survive death? Surely, after all these years, he has an opinion. “It
wouldn’t surprise me at all if we come up with evidence that we do survive. I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we come up with evidence that we don’t.”
Sabom is less equivocal. I asked him, in an e-mail, whether he believed that the consciousness leaves the body during an NDE and is able to perceive things in an extrasensory manner. “Yes,” came the reply.
I asked van Lommel the same question, and got the same reply. “I am quite sure that it is not a hallucination or a confabulation,” he wrote. “I am convinced that consciousness can be experienced independently from the body, during the period of a nonfunctioning brain, with the possibility of nonsensory perception.”
Van Lommel mailed me a draft of a new article in which he presents a theory as to how this might be possible. He uses the analogy of radio or TV transmissions. All these channels, these different electromagnetic fields packed with information, are out there all the time. We can’t watch HBO if we’re already watching Bravo, but that doesn’t mean HBO’s broadcast ceases to exist. “Could our brain be compared to the TV set, which receives electromagnetic waves and transforms them into image and sound? When the function of the brain is lost, as in clinical death or brain death, memories and consciousness still exist, but the receptivity is lost, the connection is interrupted.” Then he went all Gerry Nahum on me. His paper stepped into quantum mechanics, to phase-space versus real-space, to nonlocality and fields of probability. Neuronal microtubules made an appearance. I had to set it down.
I can’t evaluate this sort of theorizing, because I have no background in quantum physics. A few months ago, I was corresponding with a Drexel University physicist named Len Finegold. I mentioned quantum-mechanics-based theories of consciousness. You can’t hear someone sigh through e-mail,
but I heard it anyhow. “Please beware,” came his reply. “There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don’t have an explanation for something, it’s quantum mechanics.”
So I’m holding out for the guys on the ceiling. As soon as someone sees an image on Bruce Greyson’s computer, you can mark me down as a believer.
*
Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear.
*
My favorite being “The Anesthetized Patient
Can Hear
and
Can Remember
,” from a 1962
Journal of Proctology
article. “Their physiologic adaptations to the stress of surgery may be profoundly disturbed by what they hear,” wrote the author, leading me to mistake him for a caring physician. Then he went on: “Medico-legal implications are obvious even if we do not care about the patient.” I sat there blinking in disbelief. I did this again twelve pages later, upon seeing the emblem of the International Academy of Proctology: a double-snake caduceus with a free-floating length of rectum standing in for the pole.
*
In checking the spelling of “Kimberly-Clark” on the web, I note that the personal hygiene empire has expanded well beyond sanitary napkins. It’s a global powerhouse spewing forth multiple brands of diapers, adult diapers, disposable training pants, bed-wetting underpants, “flushable moist wipe products,” award-winning disposable swim pants, and “cloth-like towels strong enough for big messes,” though probably not the big mess of umpteen billion used disposable hygiene products.
*
There is, of course, disagreement as to whether they are actually traveling somewhere or simply experiencing a vivid hallucination; a good discussion of this can be found in the
Skeptical Inquirer
article by Susan Blackmore listed in the bibliography. Blackmore, a parapsychologist turned skeptic, has had out-of-body experiences of her own, which you can read about on the website of TASTE, The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences.
*
That is, in the near-death journals. You can find them in certain fundamentalist Christian publications. I read that in the February 1990 issue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network newsletter
Praise the Lord
, there’s an article about scientists drilling in Siberia and suddenly poking through to a hollow space from which issued screams and temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees. I spoke to a woman in the newsletter department at TBN, who apologized for not being able to send out pre-2003 back issues. “We disregard them every year,” she explained confusingly. “We shred them.”
*
And now I must reveal to you that Wes is not a defibrillator insertion patient in Charlottesville, but in San Francisco, near where I live. The human subjects committee for Greyson’s study would not allow me in the operating room. So I called UCSF Medical Center, who kindly let me observe an insertion. My apologies to the reader, and my thanks to UCSF Medical Center (number six on
U.S. News & World Report’s
2004 list of the nation’s best hospitals). And to the unconscious Wes, who later wrote and apologized for “not having been more sociable.”
S
OMEWHERE THIS past year, I read that the most powerful influences upon your opinion about paranormal phenomena are your friends and family. The closer you are to the teller of a ghost story, the more likely you are to believe that the ghost in the story was a ghost, and not a raccoon or a temporal lobe seizure. Your beliefs are formed not by researchers or debunkers or television psychics, unless perhaps one of them is your mother or your good pal. Your beliefs are formed by your own experiences and those of your inner circle. And then validated by the researchers or the debunkers or the television psychics.
Now that you’ve spent 275 pages with me, I suppose I almost fall into the category of a friend, or anyway, someone that you know. And you might be wondering what it is, at this
point, I believe. Has my year among the evidence-gatherers left me believing in anything I didn’t believe in a year ago? It has. It has left me believing something Bruce Greyson believes. I had asked him whether he believes that near-death experiences provide evidence of a life after death. He answered that what he believed was simply that they were evidence of something we can’t explain with our current knowledge. I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago.
Perhaps I’m confusing knowledge and belief. When I say I believe something, I mean I
know
it. But maybe belief is more subtle. A leaning, not a knowing. Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people who’ll tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know that the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing. I remember once standing in the kitchen of my friend Tim, having a conversation about organic milk. I explained, in my usual overagitated, long-winded way, why I wasn’t yet convinced of the need to part with an extra dollar a quart. I didn’t
believe
in organic milk. Tim, who buys organic milk, listened to me for a while, and then he shrugged. “It’s just a decision,” he said. In other words, you don’t have to go out and read every published paper on antibiotics and bovine growth hormone, weighing those that speak for milk’s safety against those that
warn of its dangers, before you can decide to believe in buying organic. You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination.
Perhaps I should believe in a hereafter, in a consciousness that zips through the air like a
Simpsons
rerun, simply because it’s more appealing—more fun and more hopeful—than not believing. The debunkers are probably right, but they’re no fun to visit a graveyard with. What the hell. I believe in ghosts.
P
EOPLE ASSUME that authors are experts in the field about which they have chosen to write. Possibly most are. Possibly I’m the only one who begins a project from a state of near absolute ignorance. But I do, and it makes me an especially irksome presence in my sources’ lives. I ask naive, misguided questions and giggle at the wrong moments. I stay too long and grasp too little. The following names are listed in order of diminishing exasperation: Kirti Rawat, Bruce Greyson, Gerry Nahum, Gary Schwartz, Michael Persinger, Julie Beischel, Vic Tandy, Allison DuBois, Grant Sperry, and Karl Jansen, please accept my thanks for your patience and generosity and my apologies for the limits of my experience and the blind spots of my mindset.
For miscellaneous offerings of wisdom and arcane fact, a
formal bow to Jürgen Altmann, Peter Copeland, Marco Falconi, Jürgen Graaff, Lew Hollander, Jr., Nan Knight, Greg Laing, Anne LeVeque, His Excellency Pasquale Macchi, Peggy Pearl, Dean Radin, Eric Ravussin, Colleen Phelan, Julie Rousseau, Michael Sabom, Pim van Lommel, and Valerie Wheat. A tip of the hat to Kim Wong, Susan Grizzle, and Wes Lange, who got me into the operating room and out of a logistical pickle; to everyone at the Grotto; and to the ever-miraculous interlibrary loan staff of the San Francisco Public Library.
Lester, Ruby Jean, and Lloyd Blackwelder must have their own paragraph, because they not only helped me and trusted me with their story, they practically adopted me. If I could bake, I’d send you a persimmon pie.
I hesitate to thank Jay Mandel as my agent, because that is only one of the many hats I force him to wear on my behalf: reader, advisor, hand-holder, career counselor. You make it all easy. Similarly indispensable guidance and good humor came from Jill Bialosky, who has the gall to be as gifted an editor as she is a writer. The two of you have taken me on an incredible trip, for which I am deeply, unabashedly grateful.
A book is a collective undertaking, and this one, like the last, benefited tremendously from the talents of Bill Rusin and the rest of the Norton sales staff, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Erin Sinesky, and Jamie Keenan, whose covers make my heart fizz.
And then there is Ed, to whom every mushy cliché applies and none does justice.
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