Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles

The single most horrific moment of my entire life, by far, yet most profound, occurred a year ago tonight. My first conscious realization was that I was completely and totally paralyzed, lying there in the dark unable to move even an eyelash or twitch an eyelid. Forget about squeezing a hand or wiggling a finger.

But, it was much worse than that. Tubes were protruding everywhere – from my mouth, from my nose, from my neck, where multiple I.V.s came out of a large central line in a neck vein. I was catheterized, of course, but what hurt most was the what seemed gagunda tube protruding from the center of my chest.

No – actually, it was the tube down my throat.

Other than that tube, I really wasn’t hurting, although my chest had been sliced open from top to bottom, ribs splayed apart and heart stopped and iced down for several hours.

No, I didn’t hurt – but I was not only literally, but also figuratively petrified. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t communicate in any way at all. That was the very worst thing.

I could not communicate anything. Fear. No, terror. Absolute, abject terror.

Pain. Uncertainty. Anxiety.

It was as if life had ceased for me except within my own mind, where I dwelt all alone in the entire universe.

I had no one except myself to talk with or reason with or ask questions of or from whom to find answers. I was without hope of change and very, very afraid.

It is really an indescribable thing to try to describe to anyone who has never been there. How can you explain such a situation as that?

At the same instant, though, that I was feeling and experiencing all of those things in the first second or two of consciousness, the most profound experience of my life occurred.

Someone took my right hand in his right hand and spoke to me, telling me that everything had gone just fine and that he loved me very much and everything was okay. Someone’s voice I knew so very well. And someone who I loved so dearly.

It was Tom’s voice I heard and whose hand that I felt, but I felt as if it were God. Reaching out to me in the darkness giving me hope and bathing me with love and filling me with the desire to go on, to struggle, to breathe, so that I could truly be alive again and live and love in this world, which I knew now would go on for me.

And it was God. The hand of God.

"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world . . . for I was sick and you looked after me . . . [for] whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me’." Matthew 25: 36, 40.