Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife (11 page)

As Holley described my situation, Jay assumed she must have been getting the details of my case wrong. What she was describing to him was, he knew, essentially impossible. But once Holley finally had him convinced that I really was in a coma caused by a rare case of
E. coli
bacterial meningitis that no one could explain the origins of, he got started calling infectious disease experts around the country. No one he spoke to had heard of a case like mine. Going over the medical literature back to 1991, he couldn’t find a single case of
E. coli
meningitis in an adult who hadn’t recently been through a neurosurgical procedure.

From Tuesday on, Jay called at least once a day to get an update from Phyllis or Holley and give them feedback on what his investigations had revealed. Steve Tatter, another good friend and neurosurgeon, likewise provided daily calls offering advice and comfort. But day after day, the only revelation was that my situation was the first of its kind in medical history. Spontaneous
E. coli
bacterial meningitis is rare in adults. Less than 1 in 10 million of the world’s population contracts it annually.
And, like all varieties of gram-negative bacterial meningitis, it’s highly aggressive. So aggressive that of the people it does attack, more than 90 percent of those who initially suffer from a rapid neurologic decline, as I did, die. And that was the mortality rate when I first entered the ER. That dismal 90 percent crept toward 100 percent as the week wore on and my body failed to respond to the antibiotics. The few who survive a case as severe as mine generally require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives. Officially, my status was “N of 1,” a term that refers to medical studies in which a single patient stands for the entire trial. There is simply no one else to whom the doctors could compare my case.

Beginning on Wednesday, Holley brought Bond in for a visit every afternoon after school. But by Friday she was starting to wonder if these visits were doing more harm than good. At times, early in the week, I would move. My body would thrash around wildly. A nurse would rub my head and give me more sedation, and eventually I’d become quiet again. This was confusing and painful for my ten-year-old son to watch. It was bad enough that he was looking at a body that no longer resembled his father, but also seeing that body make mechanical movements that he didn’t recognize as mine was particularly challenging. Day by day, I became less the person he’d known, and more an unrecognizable body in a bed: a cruel and alien twin of the father he once knew.

By the end of the week these occasional bursts of motor activity had all but ceased. I needed no more sedation, because movement—even the dead, automatic kind initiated by the most primitive reflex loops of my lower brainstem and spinal cord—had dwindled almost to nil.

More family members and friends were calling, asking if
they should come. By Thursday, it had been decided that they shouldn’t. There was already too much commotion in my ICU room. The nurses suggested strongly that my brain needed rest—the quieter, the better.

There was also a noticeable change in the tone of these phone calls. They too were shifting subtly from the hopeful to the hopeless. At times, looking around, Holley felt like she had lost me already.

On Thursday afternoon, Michael Sullivan got a knock on his door. It was his secretary at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

“The hospital is on the line,” she said. “One of the nurses taking care of Eben needs to speak with you. She says it’s urgent.”

Michael picked up the phone.

“Michael,” the nurse told him, “you need to come right away. Eben is dying.”

As a pastor, Michael had been in this situation before. Pastors see death and the wreckage it leaves behind almost as often as doctors do. Still, Michael was shocked to hear the actual word “dying” said in reference to me. He called his wife, Page, and asked her to pray: both for me, and for the strength on his part to rise to the occasion. Then he drove through the cold steady rain to the hospital, struggling to see through the tears filling his eyes.

When he got to my room the scene was much the same as it had been the last time he had visited. Phyllis was sitting by my side, taking her shift in the vigil of holding my hand that had been going on without a break since her arrival on Monday night. My chest rose and fell twelve times a minute with the ventilator, and the ICU nurse went quietly about her routine, orbiting among the machines that surrounded my bed and noting their readouts.

Another nurse came in, and Michael asked if she’d been the one who called his assistant.

“No,” she replied. “I’ve been here all morning, and his condition has not changed much from last night. I don’t know who called you.”

By eleven, Holley, Mom, Phyllis, and Betsy were all in my room. Michael suggested a prayer. Everyone, including the two nurses, joined hands around the bed, and Michael made one more heartfelt plea for my return to health.

“Lord, bring Eben back to us. I know it’s in your power.”

Still, no one knew who had called Michael. But whoever it was, it’s a good thing they did. Because the prayers coming to me from the world below—the world I’d started out from—were finally starting to get through.

M
y awareness was larger now. So large, it seemed to take in the entire universe. Have you ever listened to a song on a static-filled radio station? You get used to it. Then someone adjusts the dial and you hear the same song in its full clarity. How could you have failed to notice how dim, how far away, how entirely untrue to the original it was before?

Of course, that’s how the mind works. Humans are built to adapt. I’d explained to my patients many times that this or that discomfort would lessen, or at least seem to lessen, as their bodies and brains adapted to the new situation. Something goes on long enough, and your brain learns to ignore it, or work around it, or just to treat it as normal.

But our limited earthly consciousness is far from simply normal, and I was getting my first illustration of this as I traveled ever deeper, to the very heart of the Core. I still remembered nothing of my earthly past, and yet I was not the less for this. Even though I’d forgotten my life down here, I had remembered who I really and truly was out there. I was a citizen of a universe staggering in its vastness and complexity, and ruled entirely by love.

In an almost eerie way, my discoveries beyond the body echoed the lessons I had learned just a year earlier through reconnecting with my birth family. Ultimately, none of us are orphans. We are all in the position I was, in that we have
other family:
beings who are watching and looking out for us—beings
we have momentarily forgotten, but who, if we open ourselves to their presence, are waiting to help us navigate our time here on earth. None of us are ever unloved. Each and every one of us is deeply known and cared for by a Creator who cherishes us beyond any ability we have to comprehend. That knowledge must no longer remain a secret.

B
y Friday, my body had been on triple intravenous antibiotics for four full days but still wasn’t responding. Family and friends had come from all over, and those who hadn’t come had initiated prayer groups at their churches. My sister-in-law Peggy and Holley’s close friend Sylvia arrived that afternoon. Holley greeted them with as cheerful a face as she could muster. Betsy and Phyllis continued to champion the
he’s-going-to-be-fine
view: to remain positive at all costs. But each day it got harder to believe. Even Betsy herself began to wonder if her
no negativity in the room
order really meant something more like
no reality in the room
.

“Do you think Eben would do this for us, if the roles were reversed?” Phyllis asked Betsy that morning, after another largely sleepless night.

“What do you mean?” asked Betsy.

“I mean do you think he’d be spending every minute with us, camping out in the ICU?”

Betsy had the most beautiful, simple answer, delivered as a question: “Is there anywhere else in the world where you can imagine being?”

Both agreed that though I’d have been there in a second if needed, it was very, very hard to imagine me just sitting in one place for hours on end. “It never felt like a chore or something that had to be done—it was where we belonged,” Phyllis told me later.

What was upsetting Sylvia the most were my hands and feet, which were beginning to curl up, like leaves on a plant without water. This is normal with victims of stroke and coma, as the dominant muscles in the extremities start to contract. But it’s never easy for family and loved ones to see. Looking at me, Sylvia kept telling herself to stay with her original gut feeling. But even for her, it was getting very, very hard.

Holley had taken to blaming herself more and more (if only she had walked up the stairs sooner, if only this, if only that . . .) and everyone worked especially hard to keep her away from the subject.

By now, everyone knew that even if I did make a recovery,
recovery
wasn’t much of a word for what it would amount to. I’d need at least three months of intensive rehabilitation, would have chronic speech problems (if I had enough brain capacity to be able to speak at all), and I’d require chronic nursing care for the rest of my life. This was the best-case scenario, and as low and grim as that sounds, it was essentially in the realm of fantasy anyhow. The odds that I’d even be in that good of a shape were shrinking to nonexistent.

Bond had been kept from hearing the full details of my condition. But on Friday, at the hospital after school, he overheard one of my doctors outlining to Holley what she already knew.

It was time to face the facts. There was little room for hope.

That evening, when it was time for him to go home, Bond refused to leave my room. The regular drill was to allow only two people in my room at a time so that the doctors and nurses could work. Around six o’clock, Holley gently suggested that it was time to go home for the evening. But Bond wouldn’t get up from his chair, just beneath his drawing of the battle
between the white blood cell soldiers and the invading
E. coli
troops.

“He doesn’t know I’m here anyway,” Bond said, in a tone half bitter and half pleading. “Why can’t I just stay?”

So for the rest of the evening everyone took turns coming in one at a time so Bond could stay where he was.

But the next morning—Saturday—Bond reversed his position. For the first time that week, when Holley stuck her head into his room to rouse him, he told her he didn’t want to go to the hospital.

“Why not?” Holley asked.

“Because,” Bond said, “I’m scared.”

It was an admission that spoke for everyone.

Holley went back down to the kitchen for a few minutes. Then she tried again, asking him if he was sure he didn’t want to go see his daddy.

There was a long pause as he stared at her.

“Okay,” he agreed, finally.

Saturday passed with the ongoing vigil around my bed and the hopeful conversations between family and doctors. It all seemed like a half-hearted attempt to keep hope alive. Everyone’s reserves were more empty than they’d been the day before.

On Saturday night, after taking our mother, Betty, back to her hotel room, Phyllis stopped by our house. It was pitch dark, with not a light in a window, and as she slogged through the soaking mud it was hard for her to keep to the flagstones. By now it had been raining for five days straight, ever since the afternoon of my entrance into the ICU. Relentless rain like this was very unusual for the highlands of Virginia, where in November it is usually crisp, clear, and sunny, like the previous Sunday, the last
day before my attack. Now that day seemed so long ago, and it felt like the sky had
always
been spewing rain. When would it ever stop?

Phyllis unlocked the door and switched on the lights. Since the beginning of the week, people had been coming by and dropping off food, and though the food was still coming in, the half-hopeful/half-worried atmosphere of rallying for a temporary emergency had turned darker and more desperate. Our friends, like our family, knew that the time of any hope for me at all was nearing its end.

For a second, Phyllis thought of lighting a fire, but right on the heels of that thought came another, unwelcome one.
Why bother?
She suddenly felt more exhausted and depressed than she could ever remember feeling. She lay down on the couch in the wood-paneled study and fell into a deep sleep.

Half an hour later, Sylvia and Peggy returned, tiptoeing by the study when they saw Phyllis collapsed there. Sylvia went down to the basement and found that someone had left the freezer door open. Water was forming a puddle on the floor, and the food was starting to thaw, including several nice steaks.

When Sylvia reported the basement flood situation to Peggy, they decided to make the most of it. They made calls to the rest of the family and a few friends and got to work. Peggy went out and picked up some more side dishes, and they whipped up an impromptu feast. Soon Betsy, her daughter Kate, and her husband, Robbie, joined them, along with Bond. There was a lot of nervous chatter, and a lot of dancing around the subject on everyone’s mind: that I—the absent guest of honor—would most likely never return to this house again.

Holley had returned to the hospital to continue the endless vigil. She sat by my bed, holding my hand, and kept repeating
the mantras suggested by Susan Reintjes, forcing herself to stay with the meaning of the words as she said them and to believe in her heart that they were true.

“Receive the prayers.

“You have healed others. Now is your time to be healed.

“You are loved by many.

“Your body knows what to do. It is not yet your time to die.”

E
ach time I found myself stuck again in the coarse Earthworm’s-Eye View, I was able to remember the brilliant Spinning Melody, which opened the portal back to the Gateway and the Core. I spent great stretches of time—which paradoxically felt like no time at all—in the presence of my guardian angel on the butterfly’s wing and an eternity learning lessons from the Creator and the Orb of light deep in the Core.