WTF?

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." (Aldous Huxley, English author)

            I ask myself almost every day. It's been 22 years but it is still the fresh hell that it has always been. So many questions. So few answers. As if the death of my partner hadn't shaken me to the core. Enough was enough for me. I'm not sure if it was the Bipolar activating or the encompassing grief that came with his demise. Something crossed over in me and led me into that so-called tunnel. I remember popping the 100x10 mg Valium I got from my doctor the day before. I then drove into the cemetery but that's about all I can remember. My next awareness came several days later when I woke up in the hospital. Obviously, my suicide attempt had failed miserably. I was so pissed off it hurt. It didn't matter that "it wasn't my time." All that mattered to me at that moment was my own failure. I couldn't even kill myself properly.

            My plan had been a sure one. In fact, I made sure. There was no way that it could possibly fail. I premeditated with precision and much research. I secured all that medication. I thought I knew what I was doing. The tunnel, it showed me the way. All I had to do was off myself and that seemed easy enough. I guess I am not very good at it. This was not the first time I tried to say goodbye and goodnight. Like bad foreshadowing, my survival seems so certain now. What happened before and after this event has little to do with anything. February 19th, 1995 stands all on its own. It is set in stone, this mystery. For years now, it has followed me. Over and over and over again, I have questioned exactly what happened that night. I need to know, I want a clearer picture. The not knowing, it haunts me.

            I long ago realized I could never find an answer to any of my questions. I had to learn to live with the unknown, a fact which has never satisfied my inquiring mind. For both myself and the doctors who examined me post-suicide, one thing was clear. I should never have made it through that night. Indications are that somewhere in the ether I may have passed away like I had planned. I defecated and urinated like any good corpse would. My body temperature lowered to a dangerous degree. I might even have been frozen, thanks to the deep cold of a Canadian winter, mid-February in Stratford, Ontario. You wouldn't have known it from any part of me. I was fully intact. The night was clear and cold and was supposed to ravage my exterior while the interior slept forever. With only a hoodie, jeans and my footwear to protect me, I laid down right in the crispy white snow and continued my descent. The footprints from my car showed investigators the way. I did survive but no one has been able to elaborate on just why the cold did nothing but encourage that survival. There were suggestions by the Coroner that it may have actually slowed down any metabolizing, inhibiting the Valium from doing swift damage. The stupid junk worked well enough to blind me to that night, for life, but it wasn't strong enough to kill me. All I was left with was me.

"Some days are just bad days, that's all. You have to experience sadness to know happiness, and I remind myself that not every day is going to be a good day, that's just the way it is!" (Dita Von Teese. American entertainer)

            My brother told me you could see the outline of where I laid down in the snow that night. You could follow the footprints all the way back to the car that I had left running in a snow bank. The door and my wallet were open for anyone who might have happened upon the scene. The grave was undisturbed otherwise. My trail was the only trail and stopped dead where I tossed myself on the snow and dirt. He duly noted that there was no clear indication of how I actually got from that freshly dug grave to the other side of the cemetery where I was found midday on the 20th. I spent 15 hours in that cold and unforgiving bleakness, well unforgiving for everyone but me. It's poetic justice being the only corpse to ever walk out a cemetery. There was no frostbite, no frost burn, no damage whatsoever. There was nothing but waking up absolved. There was just no consequence for any of my actions. It didn't seem fair to me that other people get to go but I am not welcome. I took the entire experience personally.

            It just goes without saying, if you've had a near-death experience, that indicates you have come close to death at some point during the process. To be frank, I am still not sure if the one I experienced that night was real or live to tape. All I know is what I remember and all I remember is what I know. The details are unimportant but if I believe in what occurred during my state that night, then it explains a few things about my location when I was found the next day. In my NDE, one of the figures present informed me that I could not go forward, that I had to go back and that "it was not my time." Apparently, even spectres get to patronize me. He came forward out of the light and he lifted me, easily, with no struggle whatsoever and he carried me away. While I don't recall any destination, I know that I was found around noon in the only spot with a clear view of the cemetery.  It was like I was planted there. There were no footprints to tell of any tale that might have happened. There was absolutely no indication of how the hell I got to that spot. There was only my body, unconscious, in peril and quite frozen. Although I have never been able to rationalize the event, the evidence seems to point in one clear direction. Sometimes you cannot know what happened and that in itself can change you. We all flounder in the unknown.

            One of the doctors who treated me after this incident told me the story of a rugby player from Scotland who passed out on the field of play. He was rather drunk and was not thinking clearly. He spent the entire night laid out on the grass. His uniform was of little protection from the overnight weather and the morning dew. It wasn't a frigid night by any means, with a low temperature of 4°C. Next morning, they inconveniently found him already quite dead from hypothermia. The same doctor then told me about a homeless man who slept on a public grate mid-winter and survived a severe drop in temperature to -23 °C (not including the wind chill factor). The man did not fall victim to the unforgiving Canadian freeze. Despite having minimal protection from the cold, and the 10 cm of snow that covered him as he slept, he got up and walked away come morning. One could argue it was the subway vent that he slept on that heated him enough to survive. Perhaps the snow insulted him enough to save him from an icy fate. The same exposure would have killed a lesser man. The same conditions that ended that rugby player probably would not have killed someone else. Perhaps, one might conclude, life is  random and often makes no sense. Sometimes things just happen and trying to explain why they happened is a fruitless effort. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to this universe. Sometimes the way it is just is. There is nothing fatalistic about it.

"People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." 

(Isaac Asimov, American writer)

            I try to go back and pick out the lessons from my history, the ones that I missed the first go round. I try not to dwell in that otherland, I just visit it on occasion (quite often as I am writing). When I re-examine the day that I died (so to speak), I have more questions than anything else. I wish I had firsthand knowledge of what happened during those lost 15 hours but I do not. It is a blank page for me. All I am left with is the unexplained. As if existing isn't mystery enough. Any conclusion is guesswork, backed up by little or no evidence. My experience is to the contrary. What I can recall from before the event and after the event melds with a foggy place. It is a blindness that comes over me and I am abandoned with nothing but even more questions. I have had to surrender to the predicament. There is that penetrating light. There are the figures and the tunnel and the experience that saved my life. At this late stage, it is a little too late to go hunting for answers. I will never have them, no matter how I search. Sometimes in life things are easy. The rest of the time is a challenge for most of us. I want to remember. When I think back on that cemetery and that night so long ago, I may never come to fully understand what may or may not have happened. Regardless, I am still here and able to try. Sometimes we aren't supposed to know, that's why they call it blind faith.

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

(Donald Rumsfeld, American politician)

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