Michael Reece: BOO!
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Physician’s note: After being restrained by guards, patient received intramuscular injection of phenobarbital and was transferred to the psychiatric department for further evaluation.
Acknowledgments
The idea for this novel came from one of my characters. If you’re familiar with the Queens & Monsters series, in book three, Savage Hearts, Riley is kidnapped by Malek, a Russian assassin. As one does when one is recovering from a bullet wound and being held hostage in the middle of a remote Russian forest, she starts to write a book during her captivity to pass the time. It’s about a woman who doesn’t know she’s dead. I really liked that idea.
So thank you for that, Riley.
There are also several other sources of inspiration for this novel that I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention. In no particular order, they are the movies Ghost, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense, The Others, Pan’s Labyrinth, and especially Jacob’s Ladder, which I saw when I was twenty years old and never emotionally recovered from. Also the brilliant novels Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the play Hamlet by Shakespeare, and the narrative poem The Divine Comedy by Dante. And finally the ancient Greek legend of Eurydice and Orpheus, which served as both an influence on the story and a name for Kayla’s boat.
There’s one other major influence that’s much more personal in nature: my father’s death.
My father was on hospice care at home for three weeks before he died. I sat with him at his bedside in the house I grew up in and watched him deteriorate until finally, he was no longer there. I’ll spare you the details, but it was heartbreaking. I’m still not over it, and it’s been eight years.
But two significant things happened in those weeks that I will tell you about, because they permanently altered me.
The first thing is that before Dad got to the point where he could no longer speak, he asked me to bring him his address book. He kept it in a big wood roll-top desk in his office, under the framed posters of Amelia Earhart and WWII fighter planes. The book contained the names and phone numbers of all his lifelong friends and extended family members. （He’d put a line through a name if the person had died, but never removed the listing.） Because he was too weak to do it, I dialed the numbers from the book and held the phone to his ear as he called everyone he loved to say goodbye.
Listening to those conversations is one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
It is also one of the most painful.
To know you’re dying is not an easy thing. To face your imminent death with courage isn’t easy, either. But my father didn’t make a fuss. He simply went about dying as he went about living. With competence and quiet dignity, doing what needed to be done despite whatever he might have been feeling about the situation.
He wasn’t what you’d call an emotionally demonstrative guy.
He grew up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. His own father died when he was a child. His mother, my grandma Ella, was about as cuddly as a cactus. He went to college on an engineering scholarship, and eventually became an aerospace engineer. I never once saw him cry, get drunk, or lose his temper. He was the poster child of the Greatest Generation’s ethics: personal responsibility, self-sacrifice, humility, frugality, integrity.
I could go on, but my point is that the man was more stoic than the Stoics. He’d never be accused of being whimsical.
Which is why it came as such a shock when he matter-of-factly declared that his mother had visited him.
My grandmother had been dead at that point for thirty-two years.
Then he told me about the angels.
“They’re right there,” he said, gesturing to the ceiling above his bed. So were all of his old friends who’d already passed on. Everybody was just patiently waiting for him there in the beautiful white light.
I cannot express how overwhelming it was to hear him talk like that. He wasn’t on morphine. He wasn’t drugged in any way. He was weak, yes, and very tired, but indisputably lucid.
And he was seeing angels and dead people.
When I spoke to the hospice nurse later to find out if that was unusual, she told me that visions of the afterlife are one of the most common experiences among the dying. They see loved ones. They see angels. They see brilliant white light. The closer they are to death, the clearer the visions become.
I was dubious, to say the least.
“But couldn’t these hallucinations simply be oxygen deprivation to the brain?” I asked. “Chemical imbalances? A side-effect of the body’s systems shutting down?”