Eben Alexander - Proof of Heaven

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.”

Each 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.

At some point, I came up to the edge of the Gateway and found that I could not reenter it. The Spinning Melody—up to then my ticket into those higher regions—would no longer take me there. The gates of Heaven were closed.

Once again, describing what this felt like is challenging in the extreme, thanks to the bottleneck of linear language that we have to force everything through here on earth, and the general flattening of experience that happens when we’re in the body. Think of every time you’ve ever experienced disappointment. There is a sense in which all the losses that we undergo here on earth are in truth variations of one absolutely central loss: the loss of Heaven. On the day that the doors of Heaven were closed to me, I felt a sense of sadness unlike any I’d ever known. Emotions are different up there. All the human emotions are present, but they’re deeper, more spacious—they’re not just inside but outside as well. Imagine that every time your mood changed here on earth, the weather changed instantly along with it. That your tears would bring on a torrential downpour and your joy would make the clouds instantly disappear. That gives a hint of how much more vast and consequential changes of mood feel like up there, how strangely and powerfully what we think of as “inside” and “outside” don’t really exist at all.

So it was that I, heartbroken, now sank into a world of ever-increasing sorrow, a gloom that was at the same time an actual sinking.

I moved down through great walls of clouds. There was murmuring all around me, but I couldn’t understand the words. Then I realized that countless beings were surrounding me, kneeling in arcs that spread into the distance. Looking back on it now, I realize what these half-seen, half-sensed hierarchies of beings, stretching out into the dark above and below, were doing.

They were praying for me.

Two of the faces I remembered later were those of Michael Sullivan and his wife, Page. I recall seeing them in profile only, but I clearly identified them after my return when language came back. Michael had physically been in the ICU room leading prayers numerous times, but Page was never physically there (although she had said prayers for me too).

These prayers gave me energy. That’s probably why, profoundly sad as I was, something in me felt a strange confidence that everything would be all right. These beings knew I was undergoing a transition, and they were singing and praying to help me keep my spirits up. I was headed into the unknown, but by that point I had complete faith and trust that I would be taken care of, as my companion on the butterfly wing and the infinitely loving Deity had promised—that wherever I went, Heaven would come with me. It would come in the form of the Creator, of Om, and it would come in the form of the angel—my angel—the Girl on the Butterfly Wing.

I was on the way back, but I was not alone—and I knew I’d never feel alone again.