Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
Later, people would ask her what it was like...
"Death?" Nora would ask casually, as if she were a frequent traveler to this other realm with a return ticket. "Nothing like you could ever imagine." Which she knew wasn't terribly illuminating, but it was the best she could do. It was beyond her ability to account for her near-death experience. How could she adequately describe finding herself wedged into the frayed seam between life and death, neither alive nor dead, like some philosophical riddle on a college entrance exam?
Her response was inevitably followed by a pause in which the listener would politely wait for her to imagine for them. But that was all she had the words for. "You kind of had to be there," she'd say.
She hated when people said that.
She didn't want to be coy, but that extraordinary event was too precious, and too complicated, to try to put into words. It separated her new, improved life from the life she'd had in the Before, and it was deeply personal. Dying, then coming back to life, had altered her at the cellular level. She felt reimagined and reinvigorated, capable of things she'd never even contemplated, like rock climbing and trigonometry. Not that she intended to tackle either of those things—at least she didn't think so; it was simply knowing that she could. How hard could anything be after surviving death? Her optimism was as high as if she'd been shot through with vats of B12 and Pacific sunsets.
She had no idea how she'd shown up at death's door or how she'd died. And yet, the facts were irrefutable—she'd been clinically dead, having spent several minutes underwater.
The November family was not particularly religious except when it served a purpose... like when an important client invited them to Easter church services and her father made them all attend. Still, Nora was familiar with the traditional symbols and had expected pearly gates and cherubs with lutes flitting around her. At the very least, the angel Gabriel checking in newcomers. Or Lucifer ushering the ones who'd found themselves at the wrong entrance into the fiery pits of h ell. But when she died, there was nothing to suggest that she'd entered another realm.
Early in her legal career, she'd represented a family whose car had been hit by a casket. A truck was carrying several of the company's best sellers when the chain holding them on the back of a flatbed broke. The caskets bounced off and onto the highway, piling up like a giant version of the game Jenga. In preparation for that case, Nora had seen so many caskets that it was inevitable she would think about being stuck in one and planted six feet deep in the ground for all eternity. Not unreasonably, given the dimensions of your average casket, she'd imagined cold and lonely, dark and cramped.
It was a great surprise, therefore, to discover that death was, in fact, deliciously warm, like the first spring day after a long winter or the warmth she remembered feeling in her grandmother's kitchen.
It wasn't dark either—she'd found herself lying in a field bathed in soft gold light, the color of dusk on an autumn evening. Not the light of the sun, exactly, but something richer, soaking into her like cream on cake.
Nor had she anticipated beautiful, ethereal birdsong. It reminded her of childhood summers she'd spent at the family ranch in the Hill Country, where she'd wake every morning to the chirping and singing of mockingbirds. She'd loved their chatter.
Her father had not. "What is making all that racket?" he'd bellow. Then one morning a man in a blue work shirt and stained trucker hat pulled up in a pickup truck hauling a strange-looking cylindrical thing. "This will get rid of the birds, the neighbors, and anything else you don't want," he'd said and patted it like it was a dog. It turned out to be a cannon, which he and Dad gleefully fired, the massive 'boom' reverberating through the hills like a Revolutionary cavalry. In the kitchen, two empty glasses shimmied right off the edge of the counter and shattered on the tile floor.
The mockingbirds didn't come back. Neither did the squirrels.
On the day she died, Nora thought maybe the mockingbirds were in that golden field with her. They sounded better than a symphony, the only thing she knew to compare it to... but even that description trivialized what she heard.
The sensations—the warmth, the light, the sound—had put her in a state of perfect tranquility, and while she'd understood she was most likely dead, she couldn't grasp why she was dead.
...
