30.

Back from the Dead

And the drawing near    of  Death,  which   alike   levels  all,    alike

impresses   all with    a   last    revelation, which   only    an  author  from    the

dead    could   adequately  tell.

—HERMAN MELVILLE    (1819–1891)

Everywhere I went in those first few weeks, people looked at me like I

had risen from the grave. I ran into one doctor who had been present at
the hospital the day I’d come in. He hadn’t been directly involved in my
care, but he’d gotten a good eyeful when I was rolled into the ER that
first morning.
“How can you even be here?” he asked, summarizing the medical
community’s basic question about me. “Are you Eben’s twin brother, or
what?”
I smiled, reached out, and shook his hand firmly, to let him know it
was really I.
Though he was of course joking about whether I had a twin brother,
this doctor was actually making an important point. For all intents and
purposes I still was two people, and if I was going to do what I’d told
Eben IV I wanted to do—use my experience to help others—I would have
to reconcile my NDE with my scientific understanding and knit those two
people together.
My memory went back to a phone call I’d received one morning
several years before, from the mother of a patient who’d called as I was
examining a digital map of a tumor I was to remove later that day. I’ll
call the woman Susanna. Susanna’s late husband, whom I will call
George, had been a patient of mine with a brain tumor. In spite of
everything we did, he died within a year and a half of diagnosis. Now