Status Updates From In My Time of Dying: How I ...

Finding yourself alive after almost dying, is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

He didn’t believe in anything as simple minded as heaven or extravagant as reincarnation, but he also never looked up at the stars because he said he found the immensity overwhelming.
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… like a wave on the ocean. Souls are made of something we don’t understand yet, he said in waves are just pulses of energy, moving through a medium. My father believed that when we die, our souls are subsumed back into the vast soulmatter of the universe like waves subsumed back into the sea.
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The problem with rationality is that things keep happening that you can’t explain, and I was never able to explain the dreams I had about my father. But maybe I didn’t need to; maybe they’re just a the kind of coincidence that people love to find meaning in. My father was a devoted rationalist who nevertheless believed that humans have souls, and that each soul briefly exists as its own entity, and …
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A worldwide belief in spirits could then develop that evolved a special caste of shamans, priests, and sorcerers who ferried messages back and forth between the tiny, beautiful world of the living and the vast tracts of the dead.
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For hundreds of thousands of years, presumably, people have returned from the twilight world of hemorrhagic shock and low blood oxygen to report meeting the dead, hovering over their own bodies, and experiencing universal consciousness. Those experiences could be entirely the result of neurochemical changes in the dying brain but still mistaken for actual trips into the afterlife.
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Some researchers point to similarities between so-called near-death experiences and religion as evidence of an afterlife, but it’s equally possible that religions have those traits precisely because that’s how people experience dying.
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Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get. Religion does its best to impart this through a lifetime of devotion, but one good look at death might be all you need.
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It’s an open question whether a full and unaverted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it. One could say that it’s the small ambitions of life that shred our souls, and that if we’re lucky enough to glimpse the gargoyles of our final descent and make it back alive, we are truly saved.
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“It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”

The nurse who had told me I’d almost died came back for a visit about an hour later. She was middle-aged and gave the impression of being compassionate but also very businesslike, as if dying was not a particularly big deal and you might not want to be overly dramatic about it.
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You cannot visit a place of such violence and death and not expect it to follow you home, I thought; you cannot seek out another man’s suffering and not become part of it. One day, it will paint your ceiling and fill your mind and hijack your dreams. One day it will appear on hospital equipment above your head when there is nothing left to do but hope Egbesu hasn’t decided you were lying the entire time.

If my mother had really pushed – which she never did – he would probably have answered that believing things you don’t understand is either obedience or desperation, and neither leads to the truth. Would we believe in God if we didn’t die? Would we believe in energies if all illness was treatable?
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My father loved my mother with a childlike devotion, and my mother loved him back with a kind of maternal exasperation. She would ask why he couldn’t just believe in something he didn’t understand, and I would watch my father frown and ponder that question as if it, too, might prove useful in some hyper-rational way.
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