By Partha Chakraborty-
How would you react if you know you were already dead? No, really.
This is no hypothetical question. Scientists may have measured brain waves many seconds from a person who had just breathed their last. It was chronicled that just-guillotined women had moved their gaze away in shame from voices calling out their names in dishonor. Men’s eyes closed in horror as they realized their torso-less heads were dangling from executioners’ grasp by their hair. + has it that a dead person can sense (s)he is dead, from two seconds to almost twenty seconds. After which, finality.
I have long had – and continue to have – an illicit affair with death. Started at age 8, went through at least three “Near Death Experiences” where I (almost) kissed that girl, but I survived it. This week I marked the fifteen-year anniversary of my second heart surgery – I had two heart surgeries in 2009 within a span of two months, the first surgery was open-heart. Yes, somebody did artificially stop my heart for a few hours, and attempted to stop brain activity for ten seconds – the max permissible as I am told – by dipping my entire body in liquid nitrogen. I do remember like it was yesterday the first time I opened my eyes after a fifteen-hour surgery, and a few hours of coma afterwards.
If I close my eyes, I can easily see her – the shameless, the lascivious, yet nonchalant, one with nary a negligee on her body; always inviting me to go deep. In a previous piece – “Death as my Lover” published on March 23, 2021 – I called her “my ultimate paramour, the last affair that shall never be repeated, the highest high of escape that can be surpassed.”
I am known to have long, and vivid, dreams. Many of them involve seeing me getting dismembered – mauled, gouged, broken, torn apart, cut in a thousand slices. I wake up from these out-of-body dreams screaming, and at times I am too horrified to let out anything beyond a ghastly moan. Funny that in these dreams I am not actually feeling any physical pain, but watching another ‘me’ is revolting enough. I also dream of the most mundane everyday things that most certainly did not occur with me, but could have. Some of my dreams are without any storyline – an oft-repeated dream of mine is to “rise” from my body, my home, surroundings and feel myself in increasingly bigger backdrops – as if I am traveling a million light-years a second through the known universe away from the blue dot. A few times I have dreams within a dream – I wake up with a shudder within a dream, only to wake up later by some external stimulation.
It is not unusual for me to wonder if I am perpetually stranded in a zone between the so-called ‘life’ and the so-called ‘death.’ Part of it may have to do with my dreams being as ‘real’ as everyday life, as are dreams within dreams. The most dastardly things that happen to me in my dreams leaves no physical pain, even in my dream, yet they are real enough for me to wake up groaning and shivering. I do have a fear of being helpless – incommunicado but with cognition – under anesthesia, just like I am in my dreams, even if it never occurred in real life. In cases of dreams within dreams, I remember thinking the second layer would be fantastic if it were real – only that the ‘real’ was not real enough. The gossamer-thin barrier between reality and dreams makes it, at times, too easy to walk over and back – or so it seems.
I do not remember anything from my first near-death experience. At age eight, pneumonia almost had me, doctors are said not to find my pulse for a few minutes till they did. In college I was fished out from a pond inside the campus; I remember trying to figure out a way to stay alive till a bright light engulfed me and I lost consciousness. About a year before that I was almost crushed to death by a bus in Kolkata – my head was a fraction of an inch away from a fast-rotating tire. I do recall watching, very leisurely, sides of nuts on the tire roll in an ultra-slow motion, even if that whole thing took less than a microsecond. Just to be sure, in this instance, I did not lose consciousness and suffered only minor scratches from the fall. In each of the latter two experiences, I was hyper-aware, and my brain was working on steroids, so to speak.
That brings me back to the twenty-second sprint to finality, assuming I am not under medications, pain and whatnot that incapacitate my brain cells. Those twenty seconds are the ones – the only ones – where there is no future. What do you do when there is no tomorrow? What will I think in those fleeting seconds? As opposed to near-death experiences, trying to find a way out, or beyond, is futile there. If I have any reason left, I will most certainly not try to ‘live in the moment’, because I will have no feedback from any of my organs – nothing to experience, ever! That leaves only one possibility – ‘live in the past,’ which I ordinarily choose not to do.
How radical is it that the “future” of me will be living in my past, if for a few seconds? Is it possible that the most unencumbered living – free even from the physical self of me – that I can have will happen between two and twenty seconds?
In “Death as my Lover” I beseeched death to go tender on roughed-up remains of me, but also recognized how hypocritical it would be for me to say that given all the inconveniences I have caused – she makes me look like worth her years’ wait. Even then, I will be living in the past for those few seconds of overlap. When my organs stop sending signals to the brain that still may be able to receive one, the cerebrum (the thinking part) and cerebellum (the memory storage) should take up the entire cognitive capacity. It is entirely possible my entire life will go before my ‘eyes’ on a hyperdrive. I may be selective and choose the happy memories – especially those with my loved ones – to hold my hands as I transition into nothingness.
If ‘real’ living – or whatever approximation that I am bouncing through – means anything, I would appreciate it if seconds of my future past does not bow before surrendering. But I have no recourse. We all play multi-dimensional chess with death. I have no hope of winning, neither does anybody else. We can only pretend to keep calm and carry on.
I do and I will. C’est la vie!!
