I’ve spent most of my life paying attention.
To light. To people. To the way systems behave when they’re stressed. Places where decisions are made minute to minute, second to second, with blood on the floor. I’ve held my premature twins fighting for their lives. I’ve been beside dying parents. I’ve seen what fear does, and what competence looks like when it matters.
So I’m not easily surprised.
Which is why what happened to me, three years ago, feels worth saying out loud, and without trying to make it into something it isn’t.
Pneumonia
I don’t remember being admitted to hospital. I know my wife brought me. I know I walked in. I know now that by then my kidneys had stopped working and that infection had moved into my blood. At the time, I didn’t experience drama or panic. Moments like this the world gets narrow.
I don’t remember the Intensive Care Unit, or my wife being ushered away. I was beyond all of that.
Full of antibiotics, breathing cylinder oxygen. Something changed. My body was collapsing, struggling with fever, organs failing, lungs full of disease. Somewhere, somehow, I just let go. Not letting go of life, just the letting go of the effort of holding myself together.
People talk about a bright white light. That wasn’t my experience. There was no image. No spectacle. It was more like entering a condition. Or realising I was already inside one. A total field. No edges. No form. No physical dimension. Just light, not the vision of light, but the experience of light. An incredible, pure and perfect energy.
The sense of being a self, a body, a history, a set of concerns, simply fell away. It dissolved with extraordinary gentleness. I’ve been in situations where the self fights very hard to stay intact. This wasn’t that.
There was no fear. None. I’ve known fear in many forms. This wasn’t it. There was only calm. And love, not as feeling, but as state. As the underlying condition. It was extraordinary and I was, literally, beyond happy to be there.
Then, slowly, I returned.
Back into the body. Back into time. Back into the ward, where a man would die in the bed beside mine the following day, and another would arrive later in terrible distress, screaming and raging, threatening death on everyone around him. Care continued. Life had returned, as it always does; uneven, episodic, strange and curious, messy at close quarters.
Three years on, I don’t try to explain what happened. I don’t treat it as revelation or proof. Experience has taught me to be wary of that impulse.
I only know that, for a short time, I was entirely released from the work of being myself, and that there is another place entirely beyond language, just beyond our reach. And it is what, not who, we are.
For someone who has spent a lifetime observing how fragile and contingent things are, that felt like a rare moment of complete sufficiency.
With profound thanks for the care from everyone at the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
