Dying to Tell You This

By Tom Love © 2005

I died yesterday morning. I slipped in the shower and fell on my touchie. My head made a 'splat' sound as it hit the edge of the tub. Oh, it didn't hurt. It never hurts when you die. Just a little boink, then you open your eyes and are amazed to find that you are not crippled or bleeding or blind or in a lot of pain. None of that. See this wasn't the first time I had died. The first time was in 1971 of an accidental drug overdose.

It's what happens in the days surrounding your death, before and after that are curious. In my case I told my wife several times how much I loved her, how we had gotten through all the rough parts of our relationship and that as far as I was concerned we "would live happily ever after." I also sent her an e-mail telling her that I needed to make out a will and went on to detail how my life insurance was to be parceled out. The next morning, I was dead in the bathtub. The neat thing is that it was an accident. I had double indemnity so the final figure was somewhere around $720,000!

I know that Debby was fairly calm when she discovered my body later that day. She's like that in an emergency. She felt me, cold and stiff, checked my pulse and then called 911. She had already been through this one time before. Her first husband died in the bed beside her in 1989. Interesting how patterns repeat. So she didn't panic. Probably cursed a few choice words. My daughter was really upset. We weren't real close and she probably felt guilty about that. Then there's my friend Dale. It hit him pretty hard. He got drunk and cried long and hard. It was the next day when Debby called to tell him that he was in my will to the tune of $50K. Tears of sadness turned to tears of joy. He had no idea that I would do something like that.

That's how it affected everyone else. As for me, when I opened my eyes I saw the streams of water from the shower, felt the warm water on my legs, so I knew I wasn't paralyzed. I slowly got up, turned off the water. I dried with a towel, still amazed that I wasn't badly hurt. You see, I heard the slap of my head hitting the tub rail. But here I was standing, not feeling a bit of pain.

I got dressed and started to go to work, then changed my mind, thinking that for some reason I really didn't have to worry about that today. I drove around aimlessly for awhile and ended up back at home. It was then that I realized the truth. There was a quality of stillness in the air, a quiet feeling about the place. My vision was very clear, colors more vivid than I had seen in a lot of years. It dawned on me that the usual complement of voices inside and outside of my head had fallen silent. I went back to the bathroom and sure enough, I could almost make out the ethereal traces of my body there in the tub. There was a lot of blood too. Blood I spilled in that other reality, the one I left behind.

I'll tell about the changes that occur after death in a later post. My funeral starts soon and I sure don't want to be late.

Tom Love is a songwriter/guitarist and a nut case from Atlanta, GA. You can visit his blog: My Reality.