I Swear
June 27 - July 3, 2016
Brush with death recalled (part 4)
By Vic Fleming
In the past three columns, I’ve told how, in February 2002, I had a major reminiscence of my role in saving the life of a heart attack victim-in-denial 20 years earlier. In March I received annoying emails about how to survive a heart attack while alone. In early April I dreamed of my heartland being under attack.
Then, on April 21 I had a myocardial infarction while alone in my back yard, avoided denial, got to the hospital, and coded during angioplasty after two of three stents were installed. Engaging humor and laughter through it all, I was aware of healing as it took root in my heart, soul, and psyche.
In a 1975 article in The Christian Century, Dan Via Jr. argued that comic narrative stems directly from a “fundamental life rhythm of upset and recovery,” which itself is an outgrowth of the Death and Resurrection archetype. Comedy opens the door to the “indeterminate bundle of possibilities for renewal and victory which that archetype contains.” Hmm.
Monday morning, April 22, 2002, I laughed so hard when I heard the story of the previous night’s prayer session that I nearly fell out of the hospital bed. I slept through breakfast and by noon was really hungry. Tuesday morning Food Services left a note for the CCU nurse: “Three clean plates in a row? We don’t get many of those.”
On Tuesday the second angioplasty went smoothly. On Wednesday I was discharged, with marching orders from Doc Murphy: Do nothing for two weeks.
By the end of the first week, I felt a mysterious emptiness. My humor had held the high ground for too long. I recognized that grief itself was welling inside me. I knew a good cry would be a helpful release of energy. But crying is no easy task for me. Unlike some, I can’t just make it happen.
A friend came by the following Monday. For some strange reason, he gave me a DVD titled “Down from the Mountain.” I declined to watch the DVD Monday. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. That night I dreamed that I was 100 feet off the ground on a circus platform. I dropped something and needed to go down and get it. I realized I was higher than I intended to be.
A need to get down? “Down from the Mountain?” I get it, God!
I watched the DVD, a documentary about the music from O Brother, Where Art Thou? What a wonderful bunch of tunes!
Near the end, Ralph Stanley, the old-time bluegrass performer, sings a knock-your-socks-off a capella rendition of a song I’d never heard before:
O Death! O Death!
Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?
…
“Whoa, Death!” someone would pray,
Could you wait to call me another day?
…
O, Death, please consider my age.
Please don’t take me at this stage.
It took me by surprise. My tear ducts erupted. I wept through the entire song. And most of the next two—“Angel Band” and “I’ll Fly Away,” both about the resurrection side of death. When it was over, I felt refreshed, renewed, alive again. Ready for another fifty years. The healing had taken itself to another level.
So, I had a brush with the transformative archetype of Death … and its counterpart, Resurrection. But, 14 years later, the inner transformation toward which it pointed is hardly complete.
The descent into the depths was suffused with laughter and tears, upset and recovery, grief and joy, and other sets of opposites, all shaped from the material of ordinary life by eternal energies that accompany us all on our journeys.
I am more convinced than ever that the Divine communicates through dreams, intuition, outer events, literature, music, art, and more. That themes and messages are constantly filtering into our conscious lives from the realm of the personal and collective unconscious. And that all you gotta do to tune in to this cosmic podcast is pay attention.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
