For the sake of normalcy, let’s pretend that you are getting to know me in person rather than via this organized-chaos of hypertext. How about pretending that we are in a bar? No, let’s do a microbrewery instead because that’s where you’d likely find me if I’m not at work.
We are sitting next to one another and I’ve just pointed out my husband who’s busy behind the bar brewing craft beer. After exchanging first names I compliment your chic leopard print heels. (Don’t own a pair of leopard print heels? Doesn’t matter. I’m the one penning this fictitious meeting and I want some leopard print somewhere!). After sipping a cold amber ale, the silence between us makes you a bit uncomfortable and you ask about my profession. It takes me no more than 5 syllables to make you raise your eyebrows in skepticism…
“I’m a mortician.”
You spy my blonde hair, scan my tattoos, and examine my youthful femininity. In no way do I fit the mortician mold and you try to piece the puzzle together but it makes no sense. I give you a moment to mentally digest it all because I’m used to it and I know what’s coming next.
“What made you get into that!?” you ask.
To be completely honest, I fell into it. Literally. A serious tumble at work training a horse and death changed my life forever!
We both fell, the horse and I. It tripped and I was just along for the ride. The dreadful whiplash effect smashed my cranium against the hard-packed ground and cracked my skull in three places. That’s where my memory goes black. The rest is pieced together by those who consciously experienced the event:
I’m told that my bloodcurdling screams echoed through the ranch outbuildings and a mixture of blood and cerebrospinal fluid leached from my ears. Somewhere between the field IV sticks, the ambulance ride, and being loaded into a helicopter, I was restrained in a hospital Emergency Room because my body thrashed with the strength of a wild animal fighting for its life.
As horrible as all of that may sound, the battle my body waged against my broken head wasn’t the final nail in my coffin. Instead, my healthy heart was fighting against me by pumping a fiery infection throughout my entire fleshy being. As fate would have it, one of the field IVs had been overlooked and gone unchanged. It festered in the crook of my arm for days as I lay comatose in a hospital bed. Sepsis was bound and determined to force me to give up the ghost. Invalid and comatose with a swollen brain and poisoned blood, there was absolutely nothing I could physically do to save my own life. Other than monitoring my worsening state, modern medicine had nothing to offer either.
Then a very awe inspiring and undeniably real spiritual experience stepped in and changed my world forever. My next blog post will unravel the mysteries of my lucid experience approaching death without my broken body in tow.
