We went up to Brooklyn to see our new granddaughter and, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, I ended up in Kings County hospital with a severe meningitis infection in my right ear that migrated to my brain and sepsis. Those first 2 days in the ICU were touch and go. I knew it could go either way. The first night, or it may have been the second night, I experienced something that forever changed my perspective on life.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was in what I can only describe as a cubist tunnel. There were all sorts of cube type shapes flowing past me and in the center was a man sitting in a chair that I perceived to be me. It wasn’t really me, more like an avatar of me, just sitting and staring straight ahead as these objects flowed by. Everything was colored in dark tans, greys and black. I felt a type of vibration, the feeling of being immersed in an energy field, accompanied by a constant 60 cycle hum.

I can’t stress enough that this was no dream. I was there, though I didn’t want to be. It was like being in an ocean of energy, pulling me in, enveloping me. Then, of all things, a Windows file folder floated by. Yeah, just like you see on your computer screen. Maybe because I have worked in IT the past 25 years? As the folder flowed past a voice kept asking, “Have you solved the file yet?”  It was a man’s voice. I felt it as much as heard it. It was coming from nowhere, but everywhere. I kept replying, thinking really, “No, I haven’t solved it.” The voice kept repeating, “You must solve the file; you must solve the file.” It’s not like there was a keyboard or script editor or anything like that, I just knew I had to somehow solve the file, whatever it was.

This went on all night, though don’t hold me to a specific timeframe as I was in and out. It was a lonely, empty, intimidating place, very somber and intense. I felt myself being propelled forward, the tunnel compressing slowly around me.

The next day or night, I really can’t say, I closed my eyes, opened them again and was in what I perceived to be a huge classroom, like you might see in a university lecture hall, with endless row upon row of seats. It was like a tunnel in that there was immense, empty space to my back, and it tapered down in the front where there was a large table illuminated in a bright, but somehow soft yellow white glowing light. The light didn’t illuminate anything else, it just glowed. There was a seat in the first row in which I perceived myself, a shaft of the same light illuminating me. Next to me was another seat bathed in the same light, though not quite as bright. I perceived that to be my granddaughter, Amara. I’ve always had a very strong connection to her. As I observed this, from where I can’t say for sure, I felt her life force, her energy, her love flowing through me, lifting me, expanding me somehow.

Again from somewhere the voice asked, “Have you solved the file?” This time I answered, “Yes, I’ve solved the file.”  The voice replied, “Good, you can now move on.”

I feel somehow it was Amara who helped me solve it. Love is the answer? I can’t say for sure, but I opened my eyes and I was back in bed in the hospital room. In that moment I knew I had turned the corner and was going to live.

I know in that tunnel I was in a place between the here and the not here, between the light and the dark, on a knives edge between life and death. And somehow Amara’s lifeforce, her love, helped pulled me out of it.

The whole experience changed my perception of life. Many people, from all walks of life, from all over the world have related the experience of being near death and being in a tunnel with a light at the end, of being detached and floating above oneself, an observer.  My mother, Irene, told me she almost died giving birth to my brother. She said she was in a tunnel with a light at the end. She saw a figure beckoning her, which she thought to be Jesus, and rejected him saying, “No, I will not come with you, I’m Jewish.” The ultimate display of chutzpah.

These experiences have been dismissed by academics and doctors as hallucinations, reactions to chemicals being released into the bloodstream when death is near, the brain’s defense mechanism. I used to believe that. Not anymore.

I am not a religious person, I never bought into the story that when you die you get judged by this guy in a white beard sitting on a throne in the sky, sending your soul to heaven or eternal damnation in hell. I used to think the brain is basically an electrical device, sending electrical currents across our synapses to neurons to create our thoughts and awareness, just as a computer sends currents through its transistors and chips. We are conscious as long as there is a power source.  Remove that power source and it’s simply lights out, no more thought, no more anything.

Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve been to that place, I’ve glimpsed the other side, I sensed there is something there, not just a void. A giant energy field that you are absorbed by, then redistributed? Like a single raindrop falling through the sky of life that finally hits the ocean and joins all the other raindrops, losing your individuality but joining something bigger? I don’t know, all I can tell you is I don’t feel the same about death as I once did. There is something, not nothing.

This has not been easy to tell. It brings up a lot of emotions and memories that are not easy to deal with. Sometimes I think, did this really happen, did I almost die, did I have this experience? Trust me, I wish it never happened, but it did. It’s like a shadow that follows me wherever I go, whatever I do, it’s always there. I can turn out the lights, go to sleep, but when I awake and open my eyes the world appears, it’s there, this happened. I feel, I don’t know, special to have experienced it? Special is not the right word. Fortunate to have glimpsed the answer to the question we all ask? I believe the vast majority of people that have had a similar experience don ‘t get a chance to relate it to others; they die. I survived.

I almost died in Brooklyn, but maybe, just maybe, I was reborn.

Note: I was eventually transferred to Penn Medicine from Mt. Sinai hospital where Dr. Rachael Blue performed emergency brain surgery on me that cleared the infection. When I saw Dr. Blue for a follow up visit I related my experience to her. I told her I now know everything happens for a reason. I said everything that has happened to me in my life, and to you in yours, put us on a trajectory to meet in that operating room where you gave my wife back her husband and my children back their father. She thought for a second and said, “It’s interesting you say that. The operation I performed was very risky and not common. But fortunately I actually trained on it and it’s my specialty.” There are no coincidences.