Death isn’t peaceful.  It isn’t a transcendent experience and one doesn’t come out of it feeling an overwhelming sense of rapture and completeness.  

Death is like being struck by lightning.  It is three hundred kilovolts of energy slamming into you so hard that for a brief moment you’re airborne before you skid across the ground in a broken heap.  

Then there’s a roaring sound that manages to be deafening and ominous at the same time, and it’s elicited so mercilessly that one can’t help but try to scream in the vortex.  Except there is no screaming, because your lungs don’t work, your heart has stopped and your body has already started decomposing.

I woke up from that once, in a body that looks and feels like my own, but isn’t.  It’s mobile and functioning, but it’s a hollow shell.  My heart tends to pound as if jumpstarted.  The result is 100 painful beats per minute, as if my body is still trying to convince me that it’s alive.  It’s a reminder that I ride the line between the living and the dead and don’t fit in either category.  

Sometimes, I get so sick that my throat burns and I feel like I’ll take that final plunge into the abyss and come out of it either gasping for air or floating toward the bottom.  I always, always come back screaming.