Just then, the sun breaks over the tree line, setting the trees aflame. It is the kind of art that no master could ever capture on canvas, but it’s here for the viewing every single day.
I understand what Kitomi is telling me: Trying to figure out what happened to me isn’t important. It’s what I do with what I’ve learned that counts.
There are more people on the reservoir trail now.
All of us are grieving something.
But while we are, we’re putting one foot in front of the other. We’re waking up to see another day. We’re pushing through uncertainty, even if we can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We are battered and broken, but we’re all small miracles.
“I’m here most days before the sun comes up,” Kitomi says. “If you want to join me.”
I nod, and we walk a little further. Just after we part ways, my phone dings with a notification.
It is a Facebook message from Eric Genovese, with a cellphone number and an invitation to call.
Eric Genovese tells me that in his other life, he lives in Kentwood—a suburb of Grand Rapids he’d never heard of before and had never been to, before he was hit by a car. “My wife’s name is Leilah,” he says. “And my little girl is three.”
I notice he uses the present tense. Lives. Is.
“I do computer programming there, which if you know me here is laughable,” Eric says. “I can’t even figure out my TV remote.”
“When I was in the Galápagos, months passed,” I tell him. “But here, it was days.”
We have been on the phone for an hour, and it is the most liberating conversation I’ve had in over a month. I had forgotten that I messaged him, it’s been so long—but Eric apologizes and says he doesn’t use Facebook much anymore. He completely understands what I’m talking about when I say that I was somewhere else while I was lying in a hospital bed; that the people I met there are real. He doesn’t just give me the benefit of the doubt—he dismisses the people who are too narrow-minded to know what we know.
“Same,” he says. “My wife and I have been together for five years in Kentwood.”
“How did you get back here?”
“One night we were watching Jeopardy! like we usually do, and I was eating a bowl of ice cream. And it was the damnedest thing—my spoon kept going through the bowl. Like it was a ghost spoon, or something. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I couldn’t go to bed, either, because I had the weirdest premonition that this was just the beginning.” He sighs. “I don’t blame my wife. Leilah thought I was going crazy. I called in sick to work and stared at the spoon and the bowl the whole day. I kept telling her that if the spoon wasn’t real, maybe nothing was. She begged me to call the doctor, and when I wouldn’t, she took Maya and went to her mom’s place.” He hesitates. “I haven’t seen them since then.”
“What happened to the spoon?”
“Eventually, it got bright red, like a coal. I went to touch it and burned my hand and it hurt like hell. I started screaming, and then the room fell away like it was made out of paper, and all I heard was yelling and all I felt was pain. When I opened my eyes, there was a paramedic pounding on my chest and telling me to stay alive.”
I swallow. “What about after that? When you came back?”
“Well,” he says. “You know. Nobody believed me.”
“Not even your family?”
He pauses. “I had a fiancée,” he admits. “I don’t anymore.”
I try to reply, but all the words are jammed in my throat.
“Do you know what an NDE is?” he asks.
“No.”
“Near-death experience,” Eric explains. “When I got out of the hospital, I became obsessed with finding out more about them. It’s when someone who’s unconscious remembers floating over his body, or meeting a person who died years ago, or something like that. Ten to twenty percent of people report having them after an accident, or if their heart stops.”
“On Facebook, I read about this farmer,” I say excitedly. “In the middle of bypass surgery, while he was under anesthesia and his eyes were taped shut, he swore he saw his surgeon do the Funky Chicken. When he said something after surgery, his doctor was shocked, because he does wave his elbows around in the OR—it’s how he points, so he doesn’t contaminate his gloves.”
“Yeah, exactly. It even happens during cardiac arrest, when there’s no brain activity. Have you ever seen the MRI scan of someone with end-stage Alzheimer’s?”