A MESSAGE FROM ANGELS
Richard John Neuhaus on a near-death
experience that taught him that `everything is ready now'
THE operation took several hours and was an unspeakable mess. The tumour had expanded to rupture the intestine; blood, faecal matter and guts all over the place. My stomach was sliced open from the rib- cage down to the pubic area, then another slice five inches to the left from the navel for a temporary colostomy. After they had sewn me up, the haemorrhaging began. The doctors debated. To open me up all over again might kill me. On the other hand, if they didn't find and stop the haemorrhaging, I was surely dead.
Of course they went in again. The source of the effusion of blood was the spleen, 'nicked', as the surgeon said, in the ghastliness of the first surgery. The spleen removed and the blood flow stanched, they sewed me up again and waited to see if I would live. 'It was an interesting case,' one doctor told me later. 'It was as though you had been hit twice by a Mack truck going 60 mph. I didn't think you'd survive.'
My first clear memory is of the next morning. I was surrounded by doctors and technicians talking in a worried tone about why I was not coming to. I heard every- thing that was said and desperately wanted to respond, but I was locked into absolute immobility, incapable of moving an eyelash or twitching a toe. The surgeon repeatedly urged me to move my thumb but it was impossible. Then I heard, 'The Cardinal is here.' It was my bishop, John Cardinal O'Connor. He spoke directly into my right ear, repeatedly calling my name. Then, `Richard, wriggle your nose.' It was a plea and a command, and I wanted to do it more urgently than anything I have ever wanted to do in my life. The trying, the sheer exercise of will to wriggle my nose, seemed to go on and on, and then I felt a twinge, no more than a fraction of a mil- • limetre, and the Cardinal said, 'He did it! He did it!' I didn't see anything,' said the surgeon. So I tried again, and I did it again, and everybody saw it, and the Cardinal and the doctors and the technicians all began to exclaim what a wonderful thing it was, as though one had risen from the dead.
In intensive care I was struck by my dis- position of utter passivity. There was abso- lutely nothing I could do or wanted to do, except to lie there and let them do whatev- er they do in such a place. Indifferent to time, I neither knew nor cared whether it was night or day. But a couple of days after leaving intensive care something extraordinary happened, and readers may make of it what they will. It was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed star- ing intently into the darkness, although, in fact, I knew that my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a colour like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two `presences'. I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the pres- ences — one, or both of them, I do not know — spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: 'Everything is ready now.'
That was it. 'Everything is ready now.' It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.
Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as any- thing I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were Ito deny either I would surely be mad. `Everything is ready now.' I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos sim- ply means 'messenger'. There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the mes- sage was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. It was obvious enough to me that I was not pre- pared for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine.
After a month or so I could, with assis- tance, walk around the block. I have lived in New York for almost 40 years and have always been a fierce chauvinist about the place. When you're tired of London, you're tired of life, said Dr Johnson. I had always thought that about New York. Now, shuf- fling around the block, I found I was tired of it. Death was everywhere. The children in the playground at 19th Street and Sec- ond Avenue I saw as corpses covered with putrefying skin. The bright young model prancing up Park Avenue with her portfo- lio under her arm and dreaming of the suc- cess she is to be: doesn't she know she's going to die, that she's already dying? I wanted to cry out to everybody and every- thing, 'Don't you know what's happening?' But I didn't. It didn't Matter. Nothing mat- tered.
After some time I could shuffle the few blocks to the church and say Mass. At the altar I cried a lot, and hoped the people didn't notice. To think that I'm really here after all, I thought, at the altar, at the axis mundi, the centre of life — and of death. I would be helped back to the house, and days beyond numbering I would simply lie on the sofa looking out at the backyard. That birch tree, which every winter looked as dead as dead could be, was budding again. Would I be here to see it in full leaf, to see its leaves fall in the autumn? Never mind. It doesn't matter.
There was still another major surgery to come, to reverse the colostomy. You don't want to know the details. It was not the most dangerous surgery, but it was the third Mack truck and for a long time afterwards I barely had strength to lift my hand. Then, step by almost imperceptible step, I was recovering and dared to hope that I would be well again, that I would stride down the street again, that I would take on new pro- jects again. Very little things stand out the first time I was able to take a shower by myself. It was dying and rising again in bap- tismal flood. When one day I was sent home from the hospital after another round of tests I was told that, if I did not urinate by five o'clock, I should come back to the emergency room and someone would put the catheter back in. My heart sank. It was quite irrational, but going back to the emer- gency room would have been like recapitu- lating the entire ordeal of these last several months. I could not endure the thought. When at four o'clock I peed a strong tri- umphant pee, my heart was lifted on high, and with tears of gratitude I began to sing with feeble voice a Te Deum. I thought, 'I am going to get better.' And I allowed myself, ever so tentatively, to be glad.
That was seven years ago. I feel very well now. They tell me I might be around for another 20 years or so. Medical sci- ence, perhaps arbitrarily, says five years is the point of complete recovery when you are reassigned to your age slot on the actu- arial chart. There is nothing that remark- able in my story, except that we are all unique in our living and dying. Early on in my illness a friend gave me John Donne's wondrous Devotions upon Emergent Occa- sions. The Devotions were written a year after Donne had almost died and then lin- gered for months by death's door. He writes, 'Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little time, by the further- ance of a vehement fever.' So I, too, have been to a good university, and what I have learnt, what I have learnt most important- ly, is that, in living and in dying, everything is ready now.
Richard John Neuhaus is editor-in-chief of First Things. This essay is adapted from the Introduction to The Eternal Pity: Reflec- tions on Dying, an anthology edited by Father Neuhaus (University of Notre Dame Press).
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