Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The psychotherapy taught me to understand and accept myself. It taught me to believe in my own emotions and ideas. Because of it I was able for many years to write the exact truth as I saw and experienced it. It taught me how funny we all are, and how influenced by even the best parents in the world. The self cannot develop fully until you can step outside your childhood influences and see the world with your own eyes.

  The other great influence on my life has been my thirty-seven-year attempt to learn to meditate. I’m still not very good at it. I can’t sit still long enough to sit in zazen. I can control my breathing when I am walking around a room better than when I am alone on a prayer bench. But still I have kept on trying to learn the things that Zen Buddhist masters know. Be here now. Live in the present. When you’re hungry, eat. When you’re sleepy, sleep.

  Knowing how to watch my breath and certain breathing techniques I learned from a CD by Doctor Andrew Weill are the most amazing things I have learned since I was in psychotherapy years ago. You calm yourself. You control yourself. You conquer your emotions. Then you can think straight and help out in emergencies. Then you can work. You can stop the endless fear-filled wanderings of the mind and write a book.

  Distance running is a form of Zen. Taking a long brisk walk is Zen. Paying attention to the moment is pure Zen. You can do all of these things without sitting on a prayer bench hurting your knees.

  All of these things I learned as an adult are versions of things my parents taught me when I was small.

  How to Have a Seventy-Fifth Birthday Party That Is a Surefire Success

  FEBRUARY 20, 2010

  I WAS SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD ON FEBRUARY 20, 2010. I USUally don’t celebrate my birthdays with large gatherings. I like to buy myself gifts all during the month of February instead and be surprised by the cards and small gifts children in my family send me by mail. I am happy knowing I am healthy and well and have fifteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and have had a long and blessed life.

  Usually I like to let my birthday happen as it may, knowing I am going to be glad I am alive and well no matter where I am or who I’m with. Once I gave myself a replica of a statue of Aphrodite from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Several times I was in New York on business spending glorious afternoons in museums.

  Many times I was traveling on my birthday, giving talks at universities. Twice the students found out it was my birthday and gave me wonderful celebrations. In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, they made me a chocolate cake and gave me a long maroon wool scarf and a pair of pink leather gloves that I still cherish and wear in the winters.

  In two thousand and five I was spending the winter holding the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Tulane University. I was simultaneously holding a chair at Newcomb College in the women’s half of Tulane. I chose to have my office in the women’s center because so much was going on there, not the least of which was an interesting long-running controversy about how much power Tulane could exert over Newcomb. I had been hearing about this ongoing argument for twenty years since my daughter-in-law is a Newcomb graduate and a fierce defender of Newcomb College’s right to be independent from Tulane. Besides, the women’s college offered me a much larger office and a twenty-two-year-old computer genius from Chicago to teach me to run my computer. He immediately took me to amazing sites on the computer, such as the then-new Wikipedia, and made running a computer into a maze of intellectual potential I would never have found on my own. It did bother me that the information on Wikipedia was not peer-reviewed and could be augmented by anyone on the site in any way but David Emerson seemed to think that was just part of the fun.

  Another thing the women’s center at Newcomb College did for me was plan a huge celebration on my seventieth birthday. This was in February before Hurricane Katrina happened in August of the same year and New Orleans was still in full swing as the party capital of the United States.

  There were huge signs all over the campus saying A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY, my motto for my visit, and the seminar I arranged for later in the spring. The signs were in Latin and in English and large pins were made and passed out for months. I was deep into yoga practice that year and the center even let me have a yoga demonstration as part of the writing seminar.

  The party was in McAllister Hall at Tulane, where I had once been the leader of an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. There were dozens of beautiful white roses, my favorite flower. Many of my grandchildren were there. Later, at the reception, there were three huge cakes, each one more elaborate than the last, including a chocolate Doberge tart from Gambino’s restaurant which I consider the meal you order on your deathbed so you won’t notice you are dying.

  There was a huge crowd at the reading in McAllister Hall and so many people at the reception I didn’t have time to eat cake until late that night.

  With all these lucky birthdays happening without my having to plan them I had not had a birthday party for myself in many years, if I ever had one at all.

  But this year, because the young people in my family talked me into being on Facebook, making it easy to send invitations on a whim, I sent out a Facebook feeler saying I was thinking about having a birthday cake with seventy-five candles and seeing if I could blow them all out. I have been swimming twenty laps a day for two years and thought I had the wind to make a run at seventy-five candles, it was worth the chance.

  My grandchildren and nieces and great-grandchildren and great-nieces and -nephews began writing back saying they would love to come and watch.

  I have a condominium on a beach in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, that is near where many of my progeny live and with the help of a daughter-in-law and granddaughter-in-law the party was set in motion. To make things easy my seventy-fifth birthday was on a Saturday. Our plan was to get everyone there, set the candles on fire and blow them out, then eat the cake. Of course ice cream and carrot and celery sticks would be available. Next, we planned to go down to the beach and build a huge bonfire. My daughter-in-law went to the police department and got the bonfire permit, my youngest son and oldest grandson collected the firewood from all over town and we were set.

  My two professional photographer daughters-in-law brought cameras and the party was ready. My granddaughter-in-law delivered the cake and since she is a professional decorator she found long slim candles that are so thin and tall they would fit on a cake. She arranged them in the center of the cake like a sheath of wheat and we set them on fire. It was an inferno! I was surrounded by a seven-year-old boy, two four-year-old boys, a tall, strong thirteen-year-old champion girl swimmer, an eleven-year-old girl star of school musical productions, and several other strong eleven-year-old girls. We could not blow them out. My twenty-eight-year-old physician grandson who is six feet seven inches tall finally leaned in over the smaller grandchildren and managed to deliver the coup de grace to the bonfire. It had been very, very exciting for several minutes with everyone’s hair and the whole kitchen area in danger of being ignited.

  We scraped tallow off the top of the cake, cut it into pieces and feasted.

  By the time we finished the cake and ice cream the sun was going down and the fire on the beach was beginning to burn brightly. It was not a small fire. Ocean Springs is still being rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina so there is always plenty of scrap wood to be found if you know where to look.

  All in all it was the best birthday party of my life. Later, to cap off the evening, my eleven-year-old and thirteen-year-old granddaughters and their twin best friends, Laura and Marin, read a long poem they had written about me praising me for not getting old yet.

  A good time was had by all and there was plenty of cake left for breakfast the next morning.

  I highly recommend CAKE FIRE parties to anyone who is old enough to deserve a sufficient number of candles and their attendant flames. But don’t get cocky about being able to blow them all out yourself. Have plenty of children standing by and even an adult or two just in case.

  SEPTEMB
ER 8, 2010

  Heaven, A Mystical Experience in Late October in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Or, Why We Need to Write and Read Books Until We Die, Which I No Longer Fear or Dream of Understanding

  THIS STORY ENDS ON OCTOBER 29, 2014, WHEN I WOKE AT EIGHT a.m., put on my new running shoes, my autumn running clothes, and walked four miles to Barnes and Noble to finish reading a book that terrified and excited me so much I had to visit the store three times in one week to get up the courage to purchase the book and take it home with me. I could no longer drive to the bookstore, the effect that the book had on me was so incomprehensible I had to walk there. It was perfect weather, sunny, clear, sixty-seven degrees, all the trees between my house and the store were turning bright red and coral and yellow and gold. Purple vines were combing fences. Some of the vines still had small, perfect yellow flowers. From the moment I had opened my eyes that morning I had known exactly where I was going and what I was going to do. I finished reading the first book at ten o’clock and walked home carrying a sack with a bottle of Fiji water and an almond croissant I bought in the bookstore café. I never eat fattening baked goods for breakfast but on this day there were no rules. I was going home and coming back in the car to buy the books, why I don’t know.

  I studied philosophy when I was young. I read and wrote poetry all my life. I searched for first causes relentlessly. For the last ten years I have been satisfied DNA is all I need to know about first causes, and I still believe that, but DNA is about connections and vast timeless love, which I have just been reminded I am a part, always have been a part, always will be. As we all are whether we know it or not. Writing may play some part in that. Certainly reading and the mystery of books is part of it. This whole experience is so mystical I am being driven to adverbs.

  The book is called Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander, M. D. It was written by a scientist and physician who has spent his life operating on the human brain. Harvard, Duke, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School are all real parts of his vitae. He is the adopted son of a neurosurgeon and the natural son of an astronaut trainee for NASA space missions who later became a pilot for Pan Am and Delta airlines.

  Nothing in his scientific life or upbringing prepared him for his weeklong coma from E. coli meningitis of the brain and the week-long near-death experience he had during that time. There was no discernible brain activity during his coma. The fact that he survived and came back to his full memory and brain activity and surgeon’s work is a miracle in itself. Of course he was in the hospital where he worked, being taken care of by his huge loving family and the best physicians and neurosurgeons on the East Coast, none of whom believed he would wake up or live or recover.

  In his near-death experience, which he remembers exactly and documented completely as soon as he recovered, he traveled in what we call space and time to what all philosophers and poets for thousands of years have described as heaven. His guide for the weeklong trip was a natural sister whom he had never seen or known as she had died before he was reunited with his natural parents and siblings.

  Several months after his near-death experience he saw a photograph of this beautiful young woman named Betsy about whom he had been strangely curious for years.

  All of Dr. Eben Alexander’s experiences since his near-death illness have continued to be mysterious and deeply meaningful to both his life and work as a surgeon. He has studied and researched everything he can find about such experiences and since he published the first of his two books about the near-death journey to heaven in which his sister guided him to unbelievably beautiful places where he met a being he called Om, having never heard the word before or known that it is the person and place Sanskrit and Buddhism call the highest reach of consciousness and all goodness and kindness and light, he has continued to investigate the phenomena.

  There is evil in the world and he could see it as he looked down on the blue orb he knew was his home on earth but goodness was always able to overcome it, if not completely destroy it.

  I have talked too long about the book. What I am telling you is not half, not a fraction, of the story this scientist has to tell you. There is a heaven, he concludes, and he finds, especially in the second book, many great thinkers and writers and scientists who also believe that the knowledge we have on earth is nothing compared to what real knowledge and infinity are to those who are no longer bound by a human body and human brain. We know that the brain is only the filter that allows an amount of knowledge a human brain can tolerate to enter our human minds and lives.

  Dr. Alexander keeps saying that our language doesn’t have the breadth and depth to describe what he experienced.

  Here is the reason the book frightened me so much when I picked it up in the bookstore and sat down and started reading. I was reading much, much faster than I normally read. I sat down at a table in the bookstore café and read about a hundred pages in what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. My brain was racing with excitement and recognition and finally fear.

  I couldn’t take any more. I went back to the shelf where I’d found the book and put it carefully back in its place and almost ran from the store.

  An hour before I went to the bookstore I had been sorting through magazine articles from various times in my adult life looking for essays to put in this book. I got up to stretch my legs and turned on the television to see the latest poll numbers from a United States Senate election I am interested in and a woman on Fox News was finishing an interview with Dr. Eben Alexander about his second book. I only heard about five lines of what he said and I put on a jacket and ran to the bookstore to look at the book. All of my behavior was as curious, mysterious, and unusual for me as were the things I had heard Dr. Alexander say.

  I have had two near-death experiences of my own that were exactly what he was describing, in the interview, and later in the book. Also, an experience in which my seven-year-old son called out to me for help from ten miles away and the message arrived so perfectly and instantly (from my child to me directly, no phones, no intermediaries) that I stopped in the middle of sitting down at a table in a restaurant on the top of the tallest building in New Orleans and ran from the room and down the elevator and got into the car so fast you cannot imagine it. I yelled at my husband to follow me and he did, he was so caught up in whatever was happening to me he did not question my behavior but followed me and helped me and drove like a madman across New Orleans to where I found my child. He had locked himself out of a mansion on Palmer Avenue by accident and couldn’t get back in and was terrified and walked out of the yard and found my car and got into it and was in the back seat hysterical when we drove up and saw him in the car screaming and crying and jumping up and down.

  He was spending the night with my husband’s parents and had awakened and gone downstairs to get some candy from a bowl on a table and had walked outside to look for me and closed the huge door behind him.

  That night, that instant communication and my and my husband’s response to it have haunted me all my life. I am as certain of what happened as I am of anything I know. Pierre called to me for help and I heard him and both my husband and I ran and hurried to him so fast it was inhuman. People who spend their lives studying such things call that communication psychic. A psychoanalyst told me many times I am “a good receiver.”

  Since then I think I know when any of my children are in danger or trouble or unhappy. If I think that, I call them or go to where they are.

  From that night, when I was about twenty-eight years old, I have believed that people communicate with each other across space and time constantly, that we know who we can trust, that we know who we should love and I also believe that my parents are somehow still alive and communicate with me. I know that the angels and fairies my mother always told me were looking out for me exist. A fairy for each leaf on every tree. A guardian angel who is always around. I also believe in lucky rocks, lucky charms people give me, and the absolute and in
expressible joy of bringing happiness to other people. Figuring out what they need and giving it to them before they know they need it is the greatest pleasure of my life. I still work at two jobs full time to have the money to fix things for my children or my friends.

  The two near-death experiences are the other times when I had a glimpse behind the curtain into the world of unbelievable light and beauty that Dr. Eben Alexander visited for seven days and believes is waiting for us all when we leave our human bodies.

  My first near-death experience was in Wyoming, on a two-lane mountain road coming down from the Grand Targhee Ski Resort in the Teton Mountains to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We were thirteen people in three cars. My older brother and his wife were in the front seat of a diesel Mercedes and my second oldest son and I were in the back seat. My father and mother and five or six of the grandchildren were behind us in a mountain truck with a covered back. It was very late, on the twenty-fourth of December and the sun had already left the mountains but there was enough light left for my one-eyed genius brother to spot an elk on a high place between two mountains. He turned to the back seat to point it out to my thirteen-year-old son and the front wheels of the Mercedes hit a slick spot and the car began to roll down the snow-covered mountain sideways. It moved very fast. I was absolutely certain we were all going to die and I looked at my child and thought, oh, no, he is too young to die. After that all I saw was wonderful white light, brighter than the sun and perfectly beautiful, surrounding myself and the car on all sides, holding us. It was so beautiful and so perfect and my only memory is of light and perfection and beauty. Everything disappeared but that light.