EP 124 - The Friend at the End (Reprise) - Part II

(Reprise Episode)

This episode is the second in a series of excerpts from my upcoming book, “The Friend at the End,” which tells the story of the major stroke that I suffered in 2011. As the first episode began, I was 62 years old, at a wonderful stage in my life, with everything safe and secure. It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and I was looking forward to the summer, which was just over the horizon.  

    But when I had gone down to the pool at our condo, after a short while, I started feeling a little nauseous. Soon after, an unusual and disturbing white light appeared in my upper left peripheral vision. At first, I thought the light was coming from somewhere on the outside, but I soon realized that it was coming from within me, which was extremely alarming.  So, that marked the end of the first episode, now the story continues…

    In reality, vision impairment is a classic symptom of a stroke, but I just didn’t know that at the time. If I had, I would have dropped everything and gone straight to the emergency room. But I didn’t have that information.  That’s the real   Catch-22 when it comes to knowledge. You never know what you don’t know. You just can’t. By definition, the unknown remains unknown until you finally find it out. And hopefully, by then, it’s not too late. 

    Anyway, I felt a little tired and laid back down on my lounge chair and tried to relax. I’m not sure what happened next, but I must have drifted off to sleep. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I woke up and opened my eyes, I was met with a complete shock.  My entire field of vision had radically changed.

    I could still see, but it was like looking at the world through a splintered kaleidoscope, a bizarre Picasso painting of bright colors and random fractal patterns. I had never experienced anything like it before and obviously, things had taken a major turn for the worse. It was seriously disconcerting. Oddly though, the feeling of nausea was gone completely. Other than this bizarre vision issue, I felt fine. 

I opened and closed my eyes a few times, but nothing changed. I still saw the world in the same splintered, fractal way. I closed my eyes for a moment to try to stabilize myself and the vision suddenly appeared within.  

 I opened my eyes again, and to my shock and dismay, I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were opened or closed. It didn’t matter. Opened or closed, my field of vision remained exactly the same. I still saw the same set of broken, fractal lights.

What had been bad had suddenly gotten much worse. This was, by far, the most alarming thing that had ever happened to me physically in my life, and immediately, a chilling fear came over me. “Oh my God! I’m going blind!” I thought. 

It was earth-shattering. I felt like a bug splattered on a speeding windshield, and my mind went wild with a flood of terrifying images of me, living my life as a blind man. The horrible scene went on for quite a while, before I could finally pull myself together.  

“Whatever’s going on, this is much worse than I thought,” I said to myself, as I recognized how seriously things had deteriorated. “This is bad. This is really bad.”  I was stunned and had no idea what to do. 

“Yeah, this is definitely much worse than you thought,” I thought. “And you know what, it might actually be much worse than you think it is now. Forget about going blind. You might actually be dying. This could be the beginning of the end.” 

The unwelcomed idea hadn’t occurred to me before and it stopped me dead in my tracks. “Now wait a second,” I responded, “Let’s not go to extremes here.”  

I quickly tried to pull myself together. Even though I was definitely in bad shape, I certainly didn’t want to entertain any thoughts of dying. Why let that in? It couldn’t possibly help. So, I quickly decided to put it out of my mind. But a few moments later, it came back again. 

“Look, of course, the idea is upsetting to you, to say the least. And obviously dying is the last thing in the world you want to think about. But still…”

“But still, what?” I countered, sharply.

“Still, you don’t really have a choice. The way things are going, at this point you have to consider everything. You really do.”

Okay, so this was the rational, non-emotional side of my mind talking to me in its rational, non-emotional way. And it was probably right to consider the worst-case scenario. But I instantly dismissed the idea again. Sure, it was normal for me to have had a passing thought that I might be dying, but that’s all I wanted it to be - just a passing thought.  As far as the actual reality of it was concerned, I would have none of it.  “No. It can’t be. Not like this. Not now. No way.”

“Well, why not?” Mr. Rationality responded rationally. “You know it’s going to happen someday; it has to. There’s no way around it. It’s written in stone. So why not now? And why not like this? Just because it’s sudden and you weren’t expecting it, that doesn’t mean anything. Look what happened to Daddy.” 

 There was no refuting the logic of it. And bringing up my father was a major factor for me. He had died instantaneously of a massive heart attack at the age of 52, and I’m sure he never knew what hit him. Here one minute, gone the next. I was sixteen years old and along with the terrible shock and grief, it really drove the point home that any one of us can go at any time. Nobody operates with any guarantees here. That’s not the way it works. 

“You have to understand something,” this part of me went on. “There are no rules now and anything can happen.” It paused for a moment. “Face it. This really could be the end of the line for you. You very well might be dying.”

The weight of the reality of death began to sink into me like a ton of wet concrete sliding out of a cement mixer, and it rattled me to the core. Just a few minutes ago, I was facing the fear that I was might be going blind, and that was absolutely devastating. Still, you can learn how to live with it. Millions of people have. But while you can learn how to live with being blind, you can’t learn how to live with being dead. No. This wasn’t about coming to a major crossroads in my life. This was about coming to the actual end of it, and it was staggering. I was in a whole new world and I knew it. 

I started to feel disoriented. “Oh my God!” was the last thing that came into my mind before it went blank. I think I went thoughtless, and it might have been for fifteen seconds, fifteen minutes, or even more.  In that state, who knows? Anyway, at some point, I could think again.  “Could it really be true?” I asked myself, soberly “I mean, could this really be it?”

“Well, you can’t rule it out,” I answered myself. “Look, you’ve never experienced anything like this before. Things are obviously getting worse, and there’s no telling where this might lead. Anything can happen. You just have to face facts.” 

“Yeah. Okay,” I thought, still stunned.

 “Listen, Dying isn’t a question of ‘if,’ it’s only a matter of ‘when.’ And as far as what it’s going to be like when it actually does happen, well, nobody really knows that until they get there,” the rational side said.  “Then you find out for sure.” 

It was obviously true. We have no idea of what our actual death is going to be like. We have no frame of reference for it. It’s not like you’re going to a new beach where you’ve never been before. But you know what to expect from a day at the beach, so you throw a bathing suit and a towel into a bag, grab a beach chair, and you’re good to go. No, it’s nothing like that. This is 100% uncharted territory. And although we may all have our ideas about it, that’s all they are – just ideas. 

At that point, I realized that I had no idea what to do. So, I just sat there, with this bizarre field of colored. fractal vision filling my head, whether my eyes were opened or closed. I was stuck. Checkmate. 

Then something hard to describe happened. Call it a stroke of insight or a flash of intuition, but suddenly two critical points became unmistakably clear to me. And they were both seriously disconcerting.  

The first one was that I knew for sure that I was in serious trouble and that my life was on the line. I knew that I very well might be dying and it was beyond any doubt to me. I had no further questions about it at all. 

The second one was more subtle and much harder to grasp. I knew intuitively that some of the thoughts I had been thinking weren’t actually coming from me. This little conversation that had been going on inside my mind wasn’t just between me, myself, and I. I felt like there was something or someone else, a presence of some kind, speaking to me through the instrument of my own mind. 

Now, the very idea that I was receiving some form of mental telepathy was deeply unnerving, to say the least, and I hoped I wasn’t just losing my mind. I mean, after all, dying is bad enough, but I didn’t want to go nuts on top of it.  

It was quite an intense moment and a strong wave of anxiety washed over me. But still, almost within that wave, there was another feeling that was equally as strong. I felt that this presence, or whatever it was that was talking to me, was somehow familiar. It was like an old friend that I had forgotten so long ago that I didn’t even have a distant memory of it. Just a vague feeling that I had forgotten something, but I couldn’t remember what it was. The only thing I could remember was that I had forgotten. But whatever this thing was, I knew that I knew it.  I just didn’t know how. It was too out of reach. 

 As this wave of familiarity kept radiating to me from just beyond my awareness, somehow, I could sense a rightness to it and something within me seemed to surrender to the situation. Any remaining doubts I had got set aside and I felt myself go all in. It felt uncomfortably strange, yet strangely comfortable at the same time. 

“Ok, good,” it finally said, seeming to respond to my new state of mind. “You’re getting clear now. Stay as clear as you can. There may be a lot different things coming up for you soon, and clarity will help you stay focused on what’s important. Clarity will keep you strong.”

Another long pause seemed to happen, then it continued, “So, you have to understand where things are now. You are coming to a major turning point.” Somehow the level of communication had crystalized considerably. Like a cell phone that suddenly becomes static-free, my reception was much more clear. 

 “This truly is the possible end of your life on earth,” it continued.  “And it’s time to start wrapping things up. And at this point, one question becomes critically important for you.”  We sat in silence for an endless moment of eternity. Then a very firm, but very kind voice, it asked me, “Are you ready?”  

So that’s the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.