Proof of Heaven

been there for these events myself.
Very quickly, both sisters told me later, the brother they had known
became visible again, through the thick fog of paranoid chatter.
“It was amazing,” Betsy later told me. “You were just coming out of
coma, you weren’t at all fully aware of where you were or what was going
on, you talked about all kinds of crazy stuff half the time, and yet your
sense of humor was just fine. It was obviously you. You were back!”
“One of the first things you did was crack a joke about feeding
yourself,” Phyllis later confided. “We were prepared to have fed you
spoonful by spoonful for as long as it took. But you’d have none of it.
You were determined to get that orange Jell-O into your mouth on your
own.”
As the temporarily stunned engines of my brain kicked back in ever
further, I would watch myself say or do things and marvel: where did that
come from? Early on, a Lynchburg friend named Jackie came by to visit.
Holley and I had known Jackie and her husband, Ron, well, having bought
our house from them. Without my willing them to do so, my deeply
ingrained southern social graces kicked in. Seeing Jackie, I immediately
asked, “How’s Ron?”
After a few more days, I started having occasional genuinely lucid
conversations with my visitors, and again it was fascinating to see how
much of these connections were automatic and did not require much
effort on my part. Like a jet on autopilot, my brain somehow negotiated
these increasingly familiar landscapes of human experience. I was getting
a firsthand demonstration of a truth that I’d known very well as a
neurosurgeon: the brain is a truly marvelous mechanism.
Of course, the unspoken question on everybody’s mind (including
mine in my more lucid moments) was: How well would I get? Was I
really returning in full, or had the E. coli done at least some of the
damage all the doctors had been sure it would do? This daily waiting tore
at everyone, especially Holley, who feared that all of a sudden the
miraculous progress would stop, and she would be left with only a portion
of the “me” she had known.
Yet day by day, ever more of that “me” returned. Language.