by Studs Terkel
Whatever study the psychologist was doing, maybe it didn’t fit the pattern of where she wanted it to go. My question is: Does the mind continue to work after the heart stops? You know how people talk about going way above their body? I never saw that. So let’s say even that my heart had stopped for two minutes. I might not have seen the vision of my children until it got started again. But that first thought, the pain is gone, must have occurred after the heart had stopped beating. It happened so fast . . .
My children being left alone was very important to me. I was amazed later when the doctor had said to me, “Stop screaming about your children.” I had been in an arrest and, somehow, my voice was coming out afterward about them. They were twelve, eleven, and ten at the time. It was the fact that I hadn’t had a chance to say anything to them, that it happened quickly . . . When people say, “I hope I go quickly,” I say, “Why would you want to go quickly? You only die once. Wouldn’t you want to go a little slowly so you can think about it and talk about it?”
I used to read the obituaries as a child. I don’t know if it’s because I knew Tommy, who was the little boy from the funeral home, or what. By the age of nine, ten, I was reading the obituaries as a matter of course. I notice my children don’t read them. I still do.
Karen Thompson
She is currently a graduate student at Northwestern University. She was in a coma for two years. She appears to have recovered somewhat, though she still takes a considerable number of medications. She no longer has a walker or carries a cane. She is preparing to move to Berkeley to attend the University of California’s course in screenwriting.
I’m fifty-one, an African-American woman. As far as I know, my father is dead. My mother died when I was sixteen. My mother was an architect. I’m the fourth generation of architects in my family. My grandfather was Albert I. Cassell. He built most of Howard University. My mother worked seventeen years on the gothic National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—she was one of the chief engineers. She did the Rose Window and the south transom. She was a graduate of Cornell University, magna cum laude. At sixteen, I came to Chicago to attend IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology]. I had studied a great deal with my grandfather and my mother, so I really knew a lot about architecture before I came here. I was pulled out of school and apprenticed with Mies van der Rohe. Oh yes, I knew him. He was quite a character, very taciturn, very dry kind of humor. Then I worked for C. F. Murphy Associates, as well as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. I went to Perkins and Will for a while, too. For a year and a half, I worked for Milton Keynes overseas. Then I came back to Skidmore. It was about ’82, ’83. I was working sixteen, eighteen hours a day . . . A lot of the times I would stay overnight, underneath my drafting table. [Laughs] And then I got sick.
IT WAS STRESS. I was very ill. I was malnourished. And I had walking pneumonia. I had taken some over-the-counter medicines, you know, Primatene and Robitussin, trying to keep going. After several months, I realized that my whole condition was much weaker than it ever had been. I had just moved into a new apartment. I had a respiratory failure. I called the ambulance and I told them, “I’m having a very difficult time breathing, please come at once.” They came and got me to the hospital. They stabilized me and gave me epinephrine and injections. I was on the inhalator for a while and I was taking cephalin, and after a while they said, “All right, you’re OK, you can go home.” They gave me a penicillin prescription. When I got home, I was at my kitchen counter, and I was feeding my cat, and I realized, My God, it’s happening again—and this time I’m going to die. I don’t have anyone. No one—I’m by myself. This was 1986. I didn’t wake up until April of ’88.
I know people describe the white tunnel and all of that, but I did see what looked like a blaring white light. It looked like a lightning flash. I felt faint but I felt very charged. It made my knees buckle, but it was like a surge of energy. I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. It didn’t feel like a heart attack or anything like that. It just felt like this is it. I didn’t see the white tunnel, nothing like that . . . But I saw something quite different inside the coma. That’s a very long scene . . . [Sighs]
First of all, I have always been a Buddhist. I was born into a family that had been Lutherans and Baptists and Episcopalians. In the meantime, my mother, since she was dealing with battling death all the time, with cancer, began to investigate Buddhism through people like Alan Watts. We would talk about perception and how you view yourself and whether there’s a soul.
So when I was standing there at the kitchen counter, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid, not at all—’cause I’m not afraid of dying. I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again.
You believe in reincarnation?
It’s not a matter of belief, I know. I know I’ve been here before—that was what was confirmed inside the coma. And I think it was probably the greatest blessing in my life. It was like being reborn.
The coma lasted how long?
Two years. From 1986 to April 1988, I was hooked up to machines and tubes in a hospital. And it’s a good thing that I didn’t have relatives because they told me later, after I’d been out of the coma, that if you have relatives, they can sign and they would cut off the life support and I would be dead. Most of the time, if you’re poor, after a very short time, all of your medical insurance is used up. Because I didn’t have anyone to vouch for me, no one came . . . [Laughs] They didn’t think I was going to ever wake up. I was very, very lucky not to have anyone. [Laughs] It kind of reinforces the idea that you really are here alone. It’s wonderful to have friends, but ultimately you’re here by yourself. You’re a spiritual being who has come for this particular journey. Also, inside of the coma, I was shown other lives that I’ve had.
The last thing that I remember inside the coma was: Don’t explain. As soon as I came out of the coma I started to try to tell people because it was so astonishing to me, even though I was a so-called Buddhist. It’s very hard to deal with these tight, compartmentalized definitions of religion. I couldn’t walk, and I didn’t remember very much. I looked like I had cerebral palsy. I was shaking, everything was atrophied. The doctors were just astonished. They couldn’t believe it. No one can . . . [Laughs] It’s a blessing.
What did you see inside the coma?
Oh, I remember very vividly. I was conscious of it happening to me while I was inside the coma. It was incredible darkness. I’ve never had a darkness that surrounds you like that . . . But very, very, very comforting. A soft darkness. In this soft darkness, I had the sensation of flying. After I recovered in ’92, ’93, I went to a Tibetan monastery and institute in Ithaca, New York. I told them in great detail. They were interested and they believed me completely. And they were telling me what it meant. Inside the coma I was shown all the different lives that I’ve had to this point. For instance, one of my questions had been: Why do I have bad lungs? What happens is all the various lives you have had, you die at a certain point. If you believe in reincarnation, your soul lives forever. Death is part of life. Life is not separate from or in opposition to it—there’s not the duality. As humans evolve, they will realize it’s not either/or. It’s not lack of light. It’s not good or bad. It’s many things at once. You have to learn to deal with paradox. And not to have to find the answer. You have the answer—it’s just, you have to listen for it.
I’m not afraid of death at all. It’s part of life. So I will continue. I will come back as another form of human being. I hope it’s as a black woman. [Laughs hard] This is the first time I’ve been a black woman.
You think you’ve been someone else before?
I know it. Why do you keep saying “think”? I’ve been an Irish woman, I’ve been an Egyptian boy. I’ve been an Inuit Eskimo Indian. I was in Africa—a young boy. I have not been a black American woman before. One of the reasons I have bad lungs is because of my life as an Irish woman. [Laughs] I was also the Egyptian boy who died in the 1600s. I’m not competing with other people. I’m tryin
g to be a better soul myself. I’m not trying to beat someone or get the highest this or do the highest that. I’m just trying to be the best person for myself. We belong to ourselves. You have to be personally responsible. It’s a spiritual thing that we’re all going through.
Did you feel this way before the coma?
Yes, but not as articulately. I was on a great deal of medicine when I came out of the coma. And a lot of it made me sicker—a lot of it was steroids. That was supposed to help my breathing but they made all my muscles ache, they made my adrenaline go haywire, they made my immune system collapse. So I slowly but surely got off of all the steroids and all the medication, but I can’t get rid of the weight they put on me. I was slim, very slim. People used to say, “God, you’re as thin as six o’clock!” [Laughs]
The doctors told me at the time that I would never walk again. I was scooting around on my butt for a long time. It’s 1988, twelve-something years ago. Gosh, I was in my late thirties, thirty-eight. I wasn’t what they would consider young, so I wasn’t given the option of the Rehab Institute [of Chicago] or anything.
I taught myself. I got them to give me a walker. I didn’t have any assistance. I did get the social workers to help me with getting disability, because I wasn’t able to function at all. It’s been an uphill battle. For instance, trying to find any kind of work at all. They always associate any kind of disability with your being mentally handicapped. It took nearly three years for me to be allowed to go to school. They kept telling me that I was so severely handicapped that I couldn’t function. I was living by myself. My landlord at the time—I was incredibly blessed in so many ways. He took care of my cat that whole time. I still have the same cat.
At one point there were three different visiting nurses I got to come. The first one stole from me. The second one would bring the forms and say, “I’ll be back a week later.” She had some huge amount of cases. She said: “Just fill out the forms—I need it to get paid.” The third one wanted me to become a Christian. She said I had gone into a coma because I hadn’t been saved by Jesus. She got on my nerves more than anything. [Laughs]
When you were depressed, did you ever think of suicide?
Of course I thought of it—many, many times! [Laughs] But what would be the point? I’d come back . . . It’s not as though you escape. So, OK, I kill myself and then I have to come back and deal with all the angst and the pain and the suffering of having killed myself, and I have to deal with it ten times over because I’ve hurt all these people. I have about five or six really good friends that I’ve had for thirty years, twenty years. Suicide is self-defeating.
When was the first time you felt grief over death?
My cousin Bobby had died when I was eight—the one who was lynched outside of Montgomery. There were other deaths in my family, but the one that touched me the most was Bobby’s.
When was your first awareness that there was such a thing as death?
Oh, when I was about two.
You go back that far?
I remember when I was born.
What was it like being born?
Very difficult. [Laughs]
What about organized religion?
I dislike it immensely. I think it’s done more harm than good. I think it’s been more divisive than anything. I can recognize the need for people to have some way to organize their fears. That’s what it’s about: you need a spiritual fix. There was a time which was a turning point. People call it your satori—when you feel that things are getting darker and darker and darker, and more and more horrible, and more and more difficult—it’s just before a point where you come into your own in another way, at another level. You reach a certain kind of epiphany. I thought I would never walk. I would invent this whole regime of exercises and I would get myself down the stairs—it would take me half an hour. I would walk from my apartment to the end of the block, and then I’d walk back. Every day.
One of these times, I was on this walker and I had almost gotten to the corner. It was just such a struggle. And it hurt. I was very depressed, very low . . . A whole truckload, an open flatbed truck, of white young males came along and went into the gas station. In my mind, I associate it with my cousin Bobby—these rednecks. The whole idea of young white men on a flatbed truck: danger. I just kept on walking. I was with the walker, struggling. It was painful. All of a sudden, they were standing up, all of them, and they were whistling and giving me claps and applauding and cheering. I was terribly moved. I’m still moved by that. It still brings tears to my eyes . . . [Emotionally] I can still feel how much it meant to me at the time because it was so transforming that these young white males recognized the enormity of my challenge and appreciated what I was trying to do. I still cry because it meant everything. That’s what I call chance. That’s coincidence. People say there is no coincidence—everything happens for a reason. I happened to be there, they happened to be there, they didn’t have to pay me any attention . . . They didn’t have to recognize me. But they did. I responded. I waved and thanked them—because they gave me something tremendous. It was an enormous gift.
I believe I was ready for the coma. I needed to have it. I really needed to have that knowledge. I was Buddhist before, but now I’m not so concentrated on trying to make this life work. A lot of times, you worry whether you’re doing the right thing. I don’t have to worry about that anymore because I know I am. I can relax about the kind of person I am. I don’t worry about whether people like me or not. I worry about things like justice and whether people are treated fairly, things of that sort. But I don’t have to be concerned about whether someone likes me . . .
You have friends?
Yes, I’m just much more selective about it. More women. I don’t talk about these things anymore, because people either don’t believe you or they want you to tell their future. I’m not a fortune-teller.
Dimitri Mihalas
He is ebullient, scholarly in appearance, and, incongruously, wears a ponytail. “My second wife took me to my first Quaker Meeting. The first time I was there, I felt very comfortable. The second time I was there, I became aware that something was going on. Nobody said a word, but something was going on. And by the third time, I was hooked.” Since then, he has been a devout Quaker and frequently attends gatherings.
He works as a physicist at the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, in the desert of New Mexico. It is a village unto itself, an enclave of scientists. It is a legendary spot that has become a piece of American folklore. It was here, in 1945, isolated from the rest of the world, that they created the atomic bomb.
I NEVER THOUGHT about death until 1985. And I was already forty-six years old. Now I’m sixty-one. I was living in Colorado, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. I had just finished a book on radiation hydrodynamics, published by Oxford University Press. I was riding at the peak. I was living in a beautiful house in the hills west of Boulder. I was sitting down in my study one night. I was feeling serene, listening to classical music playing, looking out at the night sky and thinking, This is really great. And then I had an utterly alien thought: How do you get from where you are to where you must be when you die? It was the first time I had ever really seriously thought about death. And I said to myself, huh?!—here I am at the peak, sitting up on this little needle point, and I’m thinking about death!
I found the answer out later that year. September 1, 1985, was the precipitating day. We moved from Boulder, pulled up all my roots because my wife had lost her job. She got a new job at the University of Illinois in Champaign. For years I had suffered from bipolar disorder. Suddenly I crashed into what the doctors in their very neutral, scientific language called major depression. It’s deadly—I got nuked. I realized that what I had done, all my life, to protect myself from all of the things that I feared in life was I had built a huge steel-reinforced concrete shell around me. I made that son of a bitch so strong that nothing was going to get in there. No illness. No disease. No fear. No loss. No pain. No
death. No nothing. But when you get nuked, it’s gone . . .
It was a downward spiral. I had only been a little bit depressed before, little up-and-down waves. I’d go a couple of years where I’d lie low. Next couple of years, I’d feel a little hypomanic. I would write all the papers—I wrote six books. Then I’d get a little low again. In Champaign, my whole foundation was gone. All my friends were gone. We’d moved to this strange place, alien surroundings. I hate the Midwest—I hate the color green. I was born in a desert. I live in a desert now. What happened was that my shell didn’t crumble, it was vaporized. And there I was naked. I was obsessing constantly about killing myself. Every minute, some quiet little voice in my head would say to me, “This is impossible to sustain. There is only one solution”—death! It’s the only way out.
I actually did try once during that year. I kept a gun at home—it was a 9mm automatic. I was sitting on the floor thinking about it for about three hours: What should I do? I finally got up and I said, “I can’t handle this. I only see one solution.” I used to keep the gun stuck in between some blankets in a closet in the bedroom. I reached in, there was no gun. Pulled the blankets out. No gun. My wife, on the advice of the doctor, had taken the gun out—she had removed it. She took it apart and she gave different pieces to different people all over the county. If she had not removed it, I absolutely would have shot myself. When she came home, all the blankets were back. I didn’t say a word about this.
