Bouncing back from the void to stretch a second chance to the fullest

I spent Christmas week in the intermediate-care unit at Huntington Memorial Hospital. They had put me back in my old room overlooking a part of the rooftop, with a piece of snow-capped mountain in the distance.

I had a couple of tubes spliced into my veins and I was wired to a monitor in the nursing station, and every half-hour or so they came for my vitals and a sample of my blood; but altogether it wasn’t unpleasant.

I was alive, a fact that I began to savor as a Christmas present. I had arrived at the County-USC Medical Center as good as dead, and they had saved my life. To them, it was routine.

They hadn’t taken any time, I imagined, to consider whether my life was worth saving. It was just what they did, all day long, day after day. What I did with it, once they had given it back to me, was up to me.

I felt that I had been for a moment on the outward shore. I had heard of many people who had come back with fanciful tales of what they saw; but I had beheld no wonders. Nothing. Just the void. Complete.

I couldn’t remember what my last words had been before the paramedics picked me up at our house on Mt. Washington. They say I was babbling. I was not thinking about living, not thinking about dying: just fighting for breath. My mind was fading.

I didn’t even think to say “I’m dying,” much less to say something decent to my wife, like, “I love you,” or even “Thanks.” Selfish to the end.

I have always been skeptical of those famous last words attributed to great men in their death throes. More likely, I suspect, at the last they were like me--simply suffocating, and losing their mental grasp while they fought for breath.

My wife had virtually moved into the County-USC Medical Center while I was there. Now she came to see me every day, though I tried to get her to go home or go to work and get me off her mind. Obviously, I was going to live, and be as mean as ever.

Christmas Eve she brought me a green blazer I had admired at Gary Lund’s, and also a bottle of Chardonnay to share with me over my hospital dinner. Before she showed me the wine she had asked my cardiologist about it, following him out into the hall, and he had said why not.

Actually, it wasn’t very good Chardonnay, which she realized at the first sip.

“I told him I wanted good Chardonnay,” she said. “He said ‘how much did you want to spend?,’ and I said, ‘oh, seven or eight dollars.’ ”

So that was it. She knew the taste of a good Chardonnay, but she was out of touch with the price of a good Chardonnay. That was what had come of my doing the shopping for all our wine and spirits. So much for my honorable attempt at sharing the household responsibilities.

Even though it wasn’t vintage, we drank it, and we had a merry Christmas.

In the flush of celebration she talked more freely than before about our recent experience. It hadn’t been easy for her. When I lay in a coma the doctor had told her my condition was “grave,” and hinted that if I did live I might have suffered brain damage.

As she stood by the bed, holding my stiffened hand, she didn’t know what to expect if I woke up.

I hadn’t known, or didn’t remember having been told, that my heart had fibrillated and stopped. I hadn’t known about the shock treatment to get it started. I knew only that I had had something called pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure. I knew also that I had been through the void, and in that first week I had felt life returning to me, weak and giddy as I was.

When she left that Christmas Eve to go home I was suddenly very lonely and anxious. What had caused my heart to flip out of rhythm like that?

They had taken a scan in the Huntington and found that I hadn’t suffered a massive myocardial infarction, which would have resulted in severe heart damage. So I might be almost as good as before. But whatever happened could happen again, couldn’t it?--maybe right now.

I called for my sleeping pill that night.

On Saturday before New Year’s week I was stable enough to send home. The house seemed wonderful. A wonderful place to live. My den was just as I had left it. In idiosyncratic disorder.

Immediately I began to see things that needed doing. Let’s get rid of that big stereo-TV console, I told my wife; put in a smaller TV and some more record cases. I’m going to get a big brown leather recliner for my reading corner. And let’s get rid of that orange couch; get something bigger and maybe not so bold. She got into the spirit of it. She’d been thinking of getting rid of the old draperies she’d made, and replacing them with slatted blinds.

I realized what I was doing. I had been given a new run on life. I wanted to use it. To change things. To create. If only by changing the furniture around.

On Monday my wife said, “You didn’t shave today?”

“Can’t you tell,” I said. “I’m growing a beard.”

It was something else I could do. I could grow a beard.