Proof of Heaven

new reality.

The only problem was that I didn’t sleep. I kept them up all night, going on about the Internet, space stations, Russian double agents, and all manner of related nonsense. Phyllis tried to convince the nurses that I had a cough, hoping a little cough syrup would bring on an hour or so of uninterrupted sleep. I was like a newborn who did not adhere to a sleep schedule.

In my quieter moments, Phyllis and Betsy helped pull me slowly back to earth. They recalled all kinds of stories from our childhood, and though by and large I listened as if I were hearing them for the first time, I was fascinated all the same. The more they talked, the more something important began to glimmer inside me—the realization that I had, in fact, been there for these events myself.

Very quickly, both sisters told me later, the brother they had known became visible again, through the thick fog of paranoid chatter.

“It was amazing,” Betsy later told me. “You were just coming out of coma, you weren’t at all fully aware of where you were or what was going on, you talked about all kinds of crazy stuff half the time, and yet your sense of humor was just fine. It was obviously you. You were back!”

“One of the first things you did was crack a joke about feeding yourself,” Phyllis later confided. “We were prepared to have fed you spoonful by spoonful for as long as it took. But you’d have none of it. You were determined to get that orange Jell-O into your mouth on your own.”

As the temporarily stunned engines of my brain kicked back in ever further, I would watch myself say or do things and marvel: where did that come from? Early on, a Lynchburg friend named Jackie came by to visit. Holley and I had known Jackie and her husband, Ron, well, having bought our house from them. Without my willing them to do so, my deeply ingrained southern social graces kicked in. Seeing Jackie, I immediately asked, “How’s Ron?”

After a few more days, I started having occasional genuinely lucid conversations with my visitors, and again it was fascinating to see how much of these connections were automatic and did not require much effort on my part. Like a jet on autopilot, my brain somehow negotiated these increasingly familiar landscapes of human experience. I was getting a firsthand demonstration of a truth that I’d known very well as a neurosurgeon: the brain is a truly marvelous mechanism.

Of course, the unspoken question on everybody’s mind (including mine in my more lucid moments) was: How well would I get? Was I really returning in full, or had the E. coli done at least some of the damage all the doctors had been sure it would do? This daily waiting tore at everyone, especially Holley, who feared that all of a sudden the miraculous progress would stop, and she would be left with only a portion of the “me” she had known.

Yet day by day, ever more of that “me” returned. Language. Memories. Recognition. A certain mischievous streak I’ve always been known for returned as well. And while they were pleased to see my sense of humor back, my two sisters weren’t always thrilled with how I chose to use it. Monday afternoon, Phyllis touched my forehead and I recoiled.

“Ouch,” I screamed. “That hurts!”

Then, after enjoying everybody’s horrified expressions, I said, “Just kidding.”

Everyone was surprised by the speed of my recovery—except for me. I—as of yet—had no real clue how close to death I had actually been. As, one by one, friends and family headed back to their lives, I wished them well and remained blissfully ignorant of the tragedy that had been so narrowly averted. I was so ebullient that one of the neurologists who evaluated me for rehab placement insisted that I was “too euphoric,” and that I was probably suffering from brain damage. This doctor, like me, was a regular bow-tie wearer, and I returned the favor of his diagnosis by telling my sisters, after he had left, that he was “strangely flat of affect for a bow-tie aficionado.”

Even then, I knew something that more and more of the people around me would come to accept as well. Doctors’ views or no doctors’ views, I wasn’t sick, or brain-damaged. I was completely well.

In fact—though at this point only I knew this—I was completely and truly “well” for the first time in my entire life.

26. Spreading the News

“Truly well”—even if I did still have some work to do as far as the hardware side of things went. A few days after moving to outpatient rehab, I called Eben IV at school. He mentioned that he was working on a paper in one of his neuroscience courses. I volunteered to help but soon regretted doing so. It was much harder for me to focus on the subject than I had expected, and terminology I thought I had fully back suddenly refused to come to my mind. I realized with a shock just how far I still had to go.

But bit by bit that part came back, too. I’d wake up one day and find myself in possession of whole continents of scientific and medical knowledge that the day before I had been without. It was one of the strangest aspects of my experience: opening my eyes in the morning with even more of the nuts and bolts of a whole lifetime of education and experience at work again.

While my neuroscientist’s knowledge crept back slowly and timidly, my memories of what had happened during that week out of my body loomed in my memory with astonishing boldness and clarity. What had happened outside the earthly realm had everything to do with the wild happiness I’d awakened with, and the bliss that continued to stick with me. I was deliriously happy because I was back with the people I loved. But I was also happy because—to state the matter as plainly as I can—I understood for the first time who I really was, and what kind of a world we inhabit.

I was wildly—and naively—eager to share these experiences, especially with my fellow doctors. After all, what I’d undergone altered my long-held beliefs of what the brain is, what consciousness is, even what life itself means—and doesn’t mean. Who wouldn’t be anxious to hear of my discoveries?

Quite a few people, as it turned out. Most especially, people with medical degrees.

Make no mistake, my doctors were very happy for me. “That’s wonderful, Eben,” they would say, echoing my response to countless patients of my own who, in the past, had tried to tell me about otherworldly experiences they’d undergone during surgery. “You were very sick. Your brain was soaking in pus. We can’t believe you’re even here to talk about it. You know yourself what the brain can come up with when it’s that far gone.”

In short, they couldn’t wrap their minds around what I was so desperately trying to share.

But then, how could I blame them? After all, I certainly wouldn’t have understood it either— before.

27. Homecoming

I came home on November 25, 2008, two days before Thanksgiving, to a home full of gratitude. Eben IV drove overnight to surprise me the following morning. The last time he’d been with me I’d been in full coma, and he was still processing the fact that I was alive at all. He was so excited that he got a speeding ticket coming through Nelson County just north of Lynchburg.

I’d been up for hours, sitting in my easy chair by the fire in our cozy wood-paneled study, just thinking about everything I’d been through. Eben walked through the door just after 6 A.M. I stood up and gave him a long hug. He was stunned. The last time he’d seen me on Skype in the hospital, I’d been barely able to form a sentence. Now— other than still being on the thin side and having an IV line in my arm—I had returned to my favorite role in life— being Eben and Bond’s dad.

Well, almost the same. Eben was aware of something else that was different about me, too. Later, Eben would say that when he first saw me that day, he was immediately taken with how “present” I was.

“You were so clear, so focused,” he said. “It was as if there was a kind of light shining within you.”

I wasted no time in sharing my thoughts.

“I am so eager to read all I can about this,” I told him. “It was all so real, Eben, almost