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I died, and for one blissful moment there was no more sadness or grief or anger. There was just love. Happiness swamped me. Whatever you think you know about death, break it open. All you need to know is this: it feels like spring. Also, know that I was not alone. As I prepared to exit my body, someone met me to bring me to the other side: my grandmother.
Ann May Martin – or Mam, as I called her – had always been my favorite. We were both quiet, and when I was a girl I would go spend the night at her house and play dominos on her floor while she “watched her stories.” We didn’t have to talk, because we understood each other fully. And I was torn apart by her death when I was thirteen, because she was the best part of my childhood – as my parents’ relationship disintegrated, Mam’s home was the only place I could find refuge. But all at once, she was back. As my soul was ripping itself from my dying body on the operating table and I grew devastated and terrified at the prospect of leaving my family, I sensed that I was not alone. So I looked over and saw her: my grandma, her grey-blonde hair flowing, her dimples popping, her blue eyes shining, waiting for me with open arms. She was wearing her usual necklace, the topaz one, and she even smelled like she did in my memory, like butterscotch and Chanel. I wanted to run to her, but I couldn’t. She simply watched from beside me as the rest of it happened.
A large glowing orb appeared somewhere around me, beckoning me, and I was simultaneously terrified of this and drawn to it with more desire than I had ever felt for anything in my entire life. I was sucked back into my body on the operating table one last time and then I experienced a sort of shift, a blur, a jolt. I became less of an individual and more a part of something, a greater good – the greatest good – the love of the universe, if you will. I felt myself rising, swelling, growing and surging and becoming something else altogether, and I was changed. I had been broken and disabled by disease as a human, but all at once, I transcended myself and left all that behind. Every corner of my soul filled with air and light and sound and then I saw my body below me, thoroughly broken as the doctors and nurses milled about, and suddenly the angels started screaming and the stars started exploding and I felt the light surge into me and transform me. My stomach, ravaged and in pieces from dozens of surgeries, filled with the light and healed itself at once. My throat and chest, crisscrossed with the scars of years’ worth of scalpels, were lit aflame by the power of the sun, and the scars shivered into my skin and were no more. And that damn mark on my face, the scourge of my whole life, shivered a bit and then melted away. And right then and there, I stared down at my wrecked former body and smiled, healthy and repaired and whole at last, if only in spirit form. I was the same, but I was different – I was Summer, transformed. And I was beautiful, truly beautiful, I cannot forget that. After years of having strangers grimace at my face and then catch themselves and stammer to my mother that I had a “beautiful smile,” I was, for the first time, a beautiful girl with a beautiful smile. For the first time ever, those strangers were right.
If only I wasn’t dead.
I looked up at the ceiling and saw a blanket of stars shimmering in a blue-black sky through a hole in the world, and a roaring sound told me it was time to rise to the next step and leave all this. Mam held out her hand, and I knew what was supposed to come next. Before I let the stars take me, though, I left the room and visited my family in the waiting area as they waited for news on my surgery. I couldn’t help myself – I had to have one last visit. I was heartbroken but not defeated, because I had been set free from myself. My body was ruined but my spirit was strong. They had not been given the news that my surgery had failed, though, and so they were anxious and tense and also a bit bored. As they sat there, oblivious to the souls whirling all around them, mine included, I leaned down and gave my Cooper one last kiss on his golden forehead as he fidgeted with his shirtsleeve. Oh, how I wanted to rush back into myself and run down the hallway to him, fall into his arms and stay there until our hair faded to silver. I’d never known an urge a fraction this strong, actually. But I was on the way to the other side, and I knew I would see him again, somehow, someway. So I slipped a poem into his mind, and he took out his phone and started writing it down. It was a lover’s promise, a soul mate’s solemn vow, and I hoped he would take it to heart.
Then I caressed my little brother’s cheek one last time as he played a video game and touched my poor mother’s ear and told her not to worry about me now, that I had been freed from my body and my scars, that I would never be gawked at again. She didn’t hear me, of course, but the sentiment remained the same. I would have been happy to float in that moment forever and smile at my precious and clueless loved ones until the universe erased itself, but it was not meant to be. It was time for me to mosey on. As I smiled down at them I felt something rip, and then tear, and then blur again, and then I was sucked into the ceiling as I exited the world humans know completely, Mam at my side. And I was out of there.
That’s when I traveled to the Confluence.
I will try to explain what happened next in terms a human would be able to comprehend. Watching is not the same here, as we are all part of the same entity, and there is none of the separation known by humans. But I will try.
The worst kept secret about the afterlife – or one of them, at least – is that you get to choose. Faith chooses your fate for you, actually. Life is what you make of it, one giant leap of faith, and so is what comes after life. When you wake up on a rainy day, you can choose to lie around for hours and be depressed about the gloominess, or you can choose to work on that report or read that book or reorganize that closet. Forever is the same. So, to the humans who think we are collections of cells that cease to be alive as soon as our brains stop functioning: you are right. And to the humans who think heaven will open up and they will be sucked into love forever as soon as they pass on: you are right, too. Many humans who come across my story will get angry and debate whether or not my testimony is possible, and I could not be less interested in this debate. I’m not asking anyone to believe – I am simply telling my story as I saw it. The rest is up to you. Reality is what you decide it is, anyway. I hope you remain optimistic, though, for nobody’s sake but your own. Where this all comes into play in a galactic sense is the Confluence.
I was whipped out of the hospital and past the silvery horizon, sucked through a rip in the side of everything I knew, into the stars or somewhere between the stars. Then came a roaring sound, and a wormhole that made me bleed out of myself, and finally the Confluence. Just imagine a tornado of souls, a storm of former humanity. A cyclone of lives streaking through the sky, a mass pulsating and undulating at the center of the only universe we know, billions of souls arriving and leaving and staying and existing, shimmering and vibrating with all the knowledge and all the power that has ever been. There is no such thing as color or vision here – color is an optical illusion visible only to the human eye, which we don’t have – but I would compare the sense to a massive tube of vibrant pinks and golds and oranges, coming together and separating, blending and morphing, as large as the sun and as small as a pin all at once. This is the meeting of the souls that are coming up from Earth and the souls that are in transit from other places, swirling and shifting, traveling together in an ultimate exodus of humanity. It is where fate decides where it is going to send you, basically. Except none of it really exists at all, according to human standards, at least. You know the thing you call your mind’s eye, where you imagine something in your brain and you can see it, but you can’t exactly pinpoint where it is, or if it is even real – it’s just there, somewhere? That’s where the Confluence lives. That’s where we are. We are in the mind’s eye of the universe, and only the truly faithful will ever exist here. I hope you make the right decision.
At the Confluence, I sensed I had a choice because of the way I had lived my life: stay, or move on. I could take my chances and move on, hope I landed on the right side, or stay in the grey area and watch, observe. Obviously I had business to finish, so I knew immediately that I would stay. It’s not like I had much of a choice, either: I felt a certain inevitability holding me back, a force preventing me from bleeding into the cosmic sunset. And that’s when I knew that it had been written.
I saw others moving on inside the Confluence – grandmothers from Germany, uncles from Sri Lanka, a migrant worker from the suburbs of the capital of Venezuela – and I kissed them on the cheek and wished them luck as they soared forward and upward to whatever would come next for them. It is all a journey, and we are all transients passing through. I knew they would need all the goodwill they could collect. And at the end, when it was clear that I was staying, Mam soared up to me. There was so much I wanted to say to her – that she was the best part of my childhood, that her death had made the sun stop shining, that I missed her every day, that those afternoons on her floor had meant more to me than I had ever been brave enough to tell her, that she’d taught me how to love – but somehow I could sense that I didn’t need to say a word. She knew. She’d always known.
“I was here,” Mam nodded, reading my thoughts somehow. “I never left. When you sent up that balloon from your fourteenth birthday party because you missed me and you wanted me to be included in the celebration, I kissed it. It was purple, do you remember?”
“My God,” I said, “it was. With yellow letters.”
She nodded. “I’m so sorry I had to leave you, Sum. I wish I could’ve gotten a million more years with you.”
“I know,” I said, filled all the way up with emotion. “Oh, God. I know it all now.”
I did something else then. Only now was I realizing that my lips had never been courageous enough to form the words “I love you” to my grandmother, not even as she died. My family was led into the room as she faded away on a gurney, and even as she lay there, unconscious, I could not bring myself to tell her I loved her. I simply leaned down and awkwardly kissed her gown as she died.
But all at once, that changed.
“I love you,” I said, bestowed with the strangest new strength: an absolute lack of fear. “You saved my childhood. My house was a wreck after my dad left, and those sleepovers with you were the only times I could ever hide from the storm and feel like a normal kid. I love you so much.”
“And I love you,” she said back to me, smiling, and it sounded like triumph. “You didn’t have to say it that day in the hospital – I knew. I know.”
And I was breathless, even though I had no lungs at all. “You – you knew? You heard me? But you were…you were dead…”
“Oh, Summer, there is so much you have to learn. And we’ll get those million years together. Don’t worry. Until then, you’ve got some business to attend to first.”
“Business?”
She reached out, caressed my cheek, melted into the vortex, and returned to wherever she’d come from. And that’s when I realized how much power I had, now that I was no longer afraid of my own feelings. I was shocked by the intensity of what I felt, too, because this was all so far removed from anything I’d ever known. The day before, I’d been twenty-four, filled with all the normal things any normal twenty-four-year-old felt. But suddenly I was ageless, feeling ageless emotions, experiencing ageless urges, bestowed with ageless knowledge. I didn’t know much, but I did know this: everything was different now. What would I do, who would I become, what could I accomplish, now that I had no fear?
That’s when I headed to the grey area and learned another truth. It goes something like this:
Close your eyes and picture this. You walk into a blinding white room. You look at a table sagging with turkeys and yams and cookies and see that every soul you have ever loved and lost, from your beloved grandparents to your childhood puppy to your great aunt who drank herself to death to that middle school friend who died in that car crash, are all sitting there smiling at you, watching you, protecting you, enveloping you in their warm love.
Now open your eyes and look around. You don’t have to imagine this as a fantasy, because it is real. This is your life. We are all here, every day, watching. You just don’t know it yet.
~
I know nothing of what happened on Earth immediately after my death. As the human body creates defense mechanisms during life – pregnant women are often repulsed by the smell of fish, which contains substances harmful to fetuses, for example – I suspect the soul does the same for what happens after life. And come on: nobody wants to see their own funeral, anyway. Nobody wants to see themselves lying cold and alone in a refrigerated box while their family gathers miles away to prepare for the services. How bleak can you get? So we do not come back to ourselves until about a week after our deaths. I do not know what happened at my funeral, and I do not want to know. I am already guilty enough. But my first induction to the wonders of my new world did come while I waited to be allowed to return to Earth. I was taken to my Lovehall, a place I will explain in more detail later. And then I was given my reward for a life well (enough) lived. It went like this:
When I was a girl, I could not eat. I went my whole life without eating a proper meal. I had a ruptured stomach and a disintegrating throat and had to get liquid nutrition through a feeding tube in my stomach and I went my whole existence without knowing what it was like to eat a meal. And all at once, that was fixed up here. I was taken to a small room that smelled of turkey and gravy and something else, something that smelled like warm love, and I looked around as the scene opened up. A huge table was sagging with food, and everywhere I looked there were hams, casseroles, ice creams, cans of Pringles, candies, pans of macaroni and cheese with the burned bread crumbs on top, jugs of sweet tea, plates of biscuits, Funfetti cakes, and so on, forever. A family I had never seen before was swirling about, locked in some holiday feast that had occurred long ago which I was now getting to watch. The world up here often broke into the one below and cracked open memories for us to see, just to make us feel less alone, and I suppose that was what was happening on this day. Grandparents bounced babies on knobbed knees, mothers fussed over their teenaged sons, terriers tormented tabby cats in the corner. I had been slipped into their Christmas heaven, and now the only thing I had to do was partake in their joy.
So I stepped forward. Reached out. Placed a steaming turkey leg in front of my face. And for the first time ever, I ate.
One day recently I walked with a woman in a cloudy, muddy field bordered by a stream. The setting felt vaguely British, and I could tell it came from her version of Earth, not mine. (Mine looks like palm trees and smells like suntan lotion and Cooper.) I asked her why she was still here, and not somewhere Beyond, and anger creased her eyes. She said she was a dead princess, and that she had been very bogged down as an Unliving, constricted by class and society and the rules of her standing. Apparently she wanted to remain in the grey area and watch until she was sure her two sons would turn out okay. They were doing fine, but she still missed them too much to move on. I asked her for her name, and she said, in the language of the dead, that her name was Freedom. Then I asked her why she had given herself such a name if she had felt so enslaved as a human. With angry blue eyes, she said that sometimes humans’ lives were more defined by what they didn’t have than what they did have, and then disappeared into the foggy sunset.
This gave me a little idea. A few days after the encounter, once I’d been given the clear to visit Earth again, I drifted down to my hometown and found Kim, a friend who’d been born with Spina Bifida and had never taken a single step in her life. I wanted to help her with what she didn’t have – why should I get to have all the fun just because I was dead? I knew I couldn’t help her body, not yet at least, but I could help her spirit. So I sank into her dreams, where she happened to be shopping for high heels with her mom. Sometimes human dreams were dazzling and glorious, and sometimes they were as mundane as a trip to a convenience store. There really was no way to predict which. In her dreams, I sensed that Kim had never been able to walk for some reason – she was bogged down in her wheelchair just as she was when she was awake. But not anymore. In her dream, I grabbed her by the armpits and lifted her into the air right there in the shopping center. And soon she wasn’t just walking – she was flying. And she never forgot how it felt.
Do you dream? Do you see your dreams, do you feel emotions during them, do you experience them just as fully as you experience your waking hours? Then how, I ask you, could they not be real? How were those moments false just because they occurred inside your head? I am as real as a dream, as self-actualized as a memory, as fleshed-out as the echo of a lovely moment. That is where I live – inside your dreams. And if you believe dreams are nothing, the senseless ramblings of an idle mind, then I do not exist to you, either. It does not matter. Nothing is “real,” anyway, not in any sense you know about. But I know where I am. I am waiting, watching, feeling, remembering, searching for what I didn’t find on Earth.
And that, I am starting to learn, is everything this second life is about: what we didn’t have the first time around. What we never got. Food, the ability to walk, children, marriage, a future. We are searching for the missing pieces to make our lives complete before we move on. And so I guess this is why I was persuaded to stay in the grey area. My life was so brief, so unfinished, comprised of so many false starts and loose ends, that this was the one thing my soul yearned for above all else: to find absolution. To be remembered. To rise. To become immortal. And that is the reason this dead girl stayed, besides helping my loved ones along. That is what the memory of me is searching for: I think I am waiting to see if Cooper will truly love me long enough to make this dead girl live forever. He started a book about us, and helping him finish that book is now the mission of my second life. Because he told me the summer would remain…
And I am holding that boy to it.