by Joe Derkacht
Episode Thirteen
Having relived so much of the old life, I might have expected to find myself where I found myself the first time after death. So many people once spoke or wrote of traveling through a dark tunnel at high speed until they emerged into a bright light, where they encountered a wonderfully loving, beneficent Being. As I have recounted elsewhere, for myself, it was nothing like that at all—which makes sense, the tunnel being nothing more than the dark cavern of the body from which the soul emerges fully into the realm of the spirit. The explosion, the obliteration of my brain, allowed for no “tunnel” experience, I guess. Even then, one might have expected my soul would stand immediately before the Beneficent One for approval or disapproval.
Instead, my memory of experiencing death is of first hearing a voice saying: “The Most High is Love.”
Meaning what? I wondered. Whatever those words meant, they seemed to pour into my soul like water upon parched land. The voice faded into the background and was followed by a welter of images not unlike those I sometimes experienced when felled by epilepsy. The next thing I knew, I felt the old familiar giddiness that so often came after reviving from one of my episodes.
When the giddiness passed, I found myself sitting alone on a weathered old stone bench that overlooked a vast rolling lawn sprinkled with groupings of trees and flowers and shrubs. The bench was set in a space much like an alcove, although this was a sort of stone niche in a hillside with slopes rising far above me.
The birds were what I noticed next, their melodious songs far more complex and meaningful than any bird song I’d ever before heard or imagined possible. While I was wondering about the strangeness of their singing, I saw I wasn’t alone as I had first supposed. Much further down the slope, children played, their happy voices reaching me as if they were merely fifty or sixty yards away, when in reality they must be at least two hundred yards distant.
I rubbed my eyes. Must be dreaming, I thought, seeing a circle of dancing children, their leaps carrying them ever higher, with feet much further off the ground than was possible. Unless maybe I’m on a different planet, I thought, grinning to myself, watching them float back to earth together, hands still linked, as if spinning around an invisible maypole.
What a dream!
Funny, though, how very awake I felt, like I’d never ever really been awake before. I wished real life could be like this! As I continued looking, I began to marvel at how clearly I could see; no matter where I turned my eyes, whether to the far horizon or the velvety, perfect grass at my feet, I could see better than, more acutely than, if I were looking through powerful binoculars.
Far more people were here than I’d thought at first, including adults and teenagers. Curiously, I found no old people, not if one judged by canes or eyeglasses, or wrinkles and stooped shoulders, though I did see white-haired women and men among them.
Fascinated, I looked further. Where were the blemishes we all have? Where the occasional chipped tooth or slightly twisted nose, results of that childhood bicycle accident or fistfights with the neighborhood bully? The white scar tracks left by an old dog bite on the forearm? All were the kind of distinguishing marks my own body carried. How was I to fit in with people like these?
What wonderfully remarkable, compelling faces they were, though! As I let my gaze wander in among them, I couldn’t worry for long. Not really. Most fascinating of all wasn’t the lack of those features I’d taken for granted all my life; while every face seemed different, in the shapes and colors we are so used to, each was singularly beautiful or handsome in its own way, glowing with a kind of family resemblance far beyond my capacity to explain.
Suddenly, I felt incredibly eager to see if I might actually recognize anyone among all those people. As I searched, letting my vision zoom in and out like one sees in special-effects movies, individuals among them occasionally glanced my direction with a smile and waved, though I knew they couldn’t possibly be waving at me; surely they must be waving at someone else, someone nearer (though I saw no one nearer, to intrude between). Still, finding it impossible to not smile, as if in mutual recognition, I waved in return. How difficult it became, though, to simply pass on from one face to the next, as if discarding one for another.
Gradually, I realized that for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel any anxiety, not even a tinge, at the sight of strangers. Then I reasoned that all these people were quite distant, that I didn’t have to speak to them, stammer out my name or some other inanity. Why should I feel anxiety? If anyone started walking toward me, I could simply pretend not to notice, get up, and nonchalantly walk the opposite direction. They’d never know why; it’d be my little secret.
Just as gradually as I’d become aware of my lack of anxiety, I became aware of two men standing several yards to my left. How they’d come to stand that close without my noticing, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps my thoughts had drifted, daydreams filling my mind more than the scenery before my eyes? But, oh yes, wasn’t this exactly like a dream?
Both men were barefooted. As my eyes traveled upwards, I became aware of their strange clothing. It was as though they’d stepped from a movie set, because they were wearing what I thought of as Roman togas, though these were whiter than any I’d ever seen and much neater looking. If their clothing was strange, strange like this place in which I found myself, at least their faces were much more familiar and immediately comforting. Both men grinned, their faces beaming with light as my eyes met theirs.
One man was my father, the other my Uncle Erke. Both were young, bursting with vitality, and exuded a certain, sublime depth of character I’d never seen in human faces, yet they were undeniably my father and my uncle.
I guess I should have been shocked, maybe even frightened out of my wits. Instead, I shot to my feet with joy.
“Where am I?” I asked, realization beginning to dawn upon me.
My father and Uncle Erke smiled, for some reason electing not to answer my question. Both had their eyes on something else, or someone else to my right.
“You should meet Leanhar,” my father said.
To my right stood an angel. If his translucent, golden body hadn’t been clue enough, the snow-white, mighty pinions growing out of his back were a dead giveaway. Like my father and my uncle, he too grinned broadly, and just as familiarly. To myself, I acknowledged I should probably have fainted at sight of him, or bolted in fear, especially considering his aura of fierce, nearly leonine wildness, except that his presence seemed every bit as natural to me as that of my father and uncle.
“Let’s take a walk,” Leanhar said, his voice pleasantly different from what I’d expected, as if it came from a horn rather than fleshly vocal cords, tongue, and lips.
Together, the four of us began ascending the hill above the bench. My father had been dead for many years, and my uncle, as well, for half as long. But here we were, very much alive, in the company of an angel—an angel!—walking side by side as if this were an ordinary occurrence. Much more slowly than it should have, my brain began to put two and two together, to come up with an answer that was much more than a mundane four. The marvels had come at me much too swiftly: this place, the birdsong, my superhuman eyesight, my father and uncle, the angel, and the rest—all had happened in quick enough succession that until this very moment I hadn’t even noticed an equally wonderful marvel—my own unimpedimented speech. I hadn’t spoken in a couple of years, yet here I spoke without the slightest hesitation or difficulty, like I never stammered in my life or suffered from the cancer to which I lost my tongue.
Was this reality? Had I at long last woken from a nightmare un-reality? A wild sort of hope began to fizz up through the broken concrete of my soul. Had I escaped the acid-scarred, crazed, half-blind Quasimodo that was the me of my earthly existence?
Silenced by the wonder of it, I didn’t speak again until we’d conquered the peak, a peak far steeper and taller than I’d realized, as mountainous as
anything on earth. To add to every marvel which had come before, each step strengthened me, poured energy through every cell of my body until at the end, called upward by some incredible sense of urgency, I yelled out my exultation and began to run. The others shouted in answer and ran, too, until we were all racing up the hill faster than any gazelle had a right to run.
Long before we crested the summit and came to a triumphant halt, I felt, rather than saw, an overwhelming effulgence looming beyond. Awe nearly struck me down. My father took my right hand in both his hands, while my uncle took my left. Leanhar turned to spread his wings and arms in my direction, as he and my father and my uncle spoke in unison:
“Welcome home, Jack!”
Floating high above us in the heavens was a City, an impossibly immense, golden cube shining brighter than the sun, flashing with improbably brilliant gemstones both familiar and unimaginable. Radiating from it as surely as the light were waves of love—and music—and security.
Gladness seemed to shout from my father’s visage as he looked back at me. “If you think this is something, wait until you see the Master!”
“How?” I asked, trembling with anticipation. “How can I reach the City? What Master?”
Leanhar smilingly raised his hand, crooking a finger for me to follow. “Come and see, fellow servant, the thorn-pierced brow that now wears the crown of crowns.”
Together, with Leanhar in the lead, we resumed our walk, now climbing stair steps of air, toward a gate of pearl glistening with all the colors of the rainbow. The pearl gate, however, was no match for that scene which greeted my eyes through the portal into the City’s interior.
But all of that, the wonderful park with its people, the stone niche where I’d sat, the birds and their birdsong, and my meeting with my father, my uncle, and Leanhar, was in the distant past. Instead of reliving my first taste of death as I’d originally experienced it in the earthly life, I found myself falling, slumping unexpectedly, as though from faintness.
Strong arms caught me. Expecting to look into the face of Leanhar or perhaps the black gate guardian, I saw neither. Before unconsciousness overtook me completely, I saw Jesus, who hoisted me up into His arms like I was a mere child. My last thought was regret, of how terribly I had failed Him and His Father. How could I have let my imagination run away with me, let the fear of the old life hold me back from doing what God wanted? After 10,000 years of unimpeded fellowship with Heavenly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how could I have let cowardice control me, keep me from stepping into the pool, no matter how dark it seemed?
How could I still be in the wood between worlds?