Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

13. Wednesday

For two days, “Wednesday” had been the buzzword—the day on my doctors’ lips when it came to describing my chances. As in: “We hope to see some improvement by Wednesday.” And now here Wednesday was, without so much as a glimmer of change in my condition.

“When can I see Dad?”

This question—the natural one for a ten-year-old whose father is in the hospital—had been coming from Bond regularly since I had gone into a coma on Monday. Holley had been fending it off successfully for two days, but on Wednesday morning, she decided it was time to address it.

When Holley had told Bond, on Monday night, that I wasn’t home from the hospital yet because I was “sick,” he conjured what that word had always meant to him, up to this point in his ten years of life: a cough, a sore throat—maybe a headache. Granted, his appreciation of just how much a headache can actually hurt had been greatly expanded by what he’d seen on Monday morning. But when Holley finally brought him to the hospital that Wednesday afternoon, he was still hoping to be greeted by something very different from what he saw in my hospital bed.

Bond saw a body that already bore only a distant resemblance to what he knew as his father. When someone is sleeping, you can look at them and tell there’s still a person inhabiting the body. There’s a presence. But most doctors will tell you it’s different when a person is in a coma (even if they can’t tell you exactly why). The body is there, but there’s a strange, almost physical sensation that the person is missing. That their essence, inexplicably, is somewhere else.

Eben IV and Bond had always been very close, ever since Eben ran into the delivery suite when Bond was only minutes old to hug his brand new brother. Eben met Bond at the hospital that third day of my coma and did what he could to frame the situation positively for his younger brother. And, being hardly more than a boy himself, he came up with a scenario he thought Bond would be able to appreciate: a battle.

“Let’s make a picture of what’s going on so Dad will see it when he gets better,” he said to Bond.

So on a table in the hospital dining area, they laid out a big sheet of orange paper and drew a representation of what was happening inside my comatose body. They drew my white blood cells, wearing capes and armed with swords, defending the besieged territory of my brain. And, armed with their own swords and slightly different uniforms, they drew the invading E. coli. There was hand-to-hand combat, and the bodies of the slain on both sides were scattered about.

It was an accurate enough representation, in its way. The only thing about it that was inaccurate, taking into account the simplification of the obviously more complex event going on inside my body, was the way the battle was going. In Eben and Bond’s rendition, the battle was pitched and at a white heat, with both sides struggling and the outcome uncertain—though, of course, the white blood cells would eventually win. But as he sat with Bond, colored markers spread out on the table, trying to share in this naïve version of events, Eben knew that in truth, the battle was no longer pitched, or so uncertain.

And he knew which side was winning.