1. Dying, to Live

She held a pack of Tarot cards between her plump, cupped hands. An older lady with a steady stare, short grey hair and a soft Brummie speak. We sat in an old pub on a quiet sunny Gloucester Sunday. I was at a turning point in my life. After preliminaries, she laid three cards face down before me; my past left, a future right, and the present between. I was interested but sceptical.  

She had to convince me that she knew my past, before convincing me of my future: so with the past, we started. She slowly turned the card over. A young man, pained looking, in a dark dungeon. It was a portrait of me in my recent life. The one card in the pack that would sum it up so perfectly. My shuffled life, this card from a shuffled pack, meeting by chance? We both looked intently into it, me transfixed as connection with the image went to greater depths. A dungeon with a locked door, for which I had the key. “Oh, you have had a difficult time, haven’t you.” she said knowingly.

I had been trying to pass the final postgraduate surgical examinations, difficult under the best of circumstances, but long working hours, sleep deprivation and exhaustion held out against me. Much of the FRCS material would be worthless for my chosen career in Emergency Medicine, which blunted my interest. I needed a pass to get there. To optimise my study I sought unemployment. I chose to live alone in a one bedroom flat and found myself in a bleak Victorian neighbourhood in the back streets a northern city, where I had worked out my last job. I was going to live off savings. As we went into winter flat became damp and icy, with scant heating; the leaky sash windows may just as well have been left open. Neighbours kept themselves to themselves, except when complaining to me about other residents, in ways that made me feel responsible for their misdemeanours.

I was isolated, there were no friends or family within hundreds of miles which might have been a contributing factor to my having one time contemplated suicide. This was my urban bleakness. This was the end of my road. If I passed this exam I was through to the sunny uplands of a career if I failed, I was shut out. My journal entries were full of emotional pain; misery, exasperation, and terms like depression, despair and desperately lonely, but also a resolve to put those aside and grind on keeping total focus. I cannot overestimate the suffering and struggle.

At this time I was fortunately befriended by a consultant surgeon. I had assisted him in a small number of operations in my last job and he had been grateful. He took me under his wing and into his surgical clinics. He taught me examination technique, to have a more surgical persona; direct in speech, to answer confidently whether right or not, and be forthright in manner.

I passed the exam in late January. Slowly my world would open up and I could now seek longer term work stability, say three years, running free in my career of choice, Emergency Medicine. Those closing gates in my career had swung open.

A week after passing the examination, while trying to find myself again after a long absence in study, I had a dream;

I was sitting with others around a large table which was covered by a clean, bare, white cloth. Nothing much was happening, not even conversation. Maybe a meal had finished, everything cleared away and we were just sitting there. But something was happening. People were disappearing. Not before my eyes as such, but when after looking away I looked back to see them, they were no longer in their seat, they had vanished. More than that, I knew that on disappearing, they had died. 

After a while, there were several of us left, and I knew it was my turn to go next. Naturally, I was apprehensive; would there be pain? Any moment, I would die, and be gone like the others, and what happened to us after that? 

Suddenly I was in complete darkness and felt a terrifying intense vibration running through me. As a teenager, I had gone to rock concerts, stood by the large speakers and felt the sound vibration go right through me. Turn up that amplitude many times, and keep turning to feel what I was experiencing. It was as though every atom in my body was vibrating back and forth to the point where they might separate into a puff of dust or gas. I drew deep breaths and opened my eyes. The sun was beaming brightly through my windows, but the vibration continued. I shut my eyes and tried to relax into the mattress, but the intense vibration and loud rumbling noise that went with it persisted. I was now fully awake. I thought I would not be able to hold myself together, my chest and abdomen would burst open, my organs would disintegrate. Not knowing what to do I shut my eyes and relaxed again while waiting for it to pass. Then a voice came to me as though from the other end of a long dark tunnel. “Don’t worry Tony, Jesus will save you!” which caught me by surprise. The amplitude of the vibration and the rumbling gradually diminished until it was gone. 

I got up, put on my dressing gown, made a cup of tea and sat down in an easy chair. What on earth had all that been about? Had I died in my dream as anticipated, and experienced death in this way? I had once heard the term “Jesus Saves”, not knowing what it meant. I had never been tempted away from my agnostic view in relation to Christianity and God. After some fruitless contemplation, I decided to let it go, filed away in the back of my memory under ‘explanation pending’. 

I had bought some books after the exam, to open my mind again after the mental constrictions and restrictions of intense study and isolation. Several days later I picked up The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I had been interested in Buddhist ideas for eight years since visiting India. I read their account of the experience of death, which included the separation of the elements; earth, wind, fire and water. An intense vibration and rumbling noise similar to an earthquake, or being at the centre of a hurricane, or the roar of a forest fire or the turmoil of a tidal wave. I could not think of better descriptions of my dream experience. Thousands of years ago Buddhists had described my experience, as the experience of death. But being saved by Jesus? I would have liked an explanation for that too.

Some fifteen years later I sat in an easy chair recounting this dream, opposite a man, big cardiganed, in another easy chair. He told me it was an illustration from the unconscious of change; the death of an old way of life to make way for the new. Who were those who died before me at the table in the dream?

Many years later, I would read in Lampedusa’s The Leopard the account of Don Fabrizio who sat with a terrifying inner rumble in the lead up to his death. Another connection with my experience. 

I did not speak of this dream to my Brummie lady, only agreeing with her about my past. She turned over the middle card, my Present. It was a representation of change (and I was at a spaghetti junction in life), all change. I nodded and conceded a reluctant smile, not wanting to give too much away. 

The third card showed a drawing of the sun. A good sign she said, one of prosperity. Coming into money, finding a wife, going travelling with my work she continued, and more with detail than I care to elaborate here. All correct, eventually. 

I remained agnostic. There was a sense of something more going on in the background, something science and reasoned argument could not address, revealed through experience. Of course, I could find convoluted arguments to explain all this away, but they became less convincing as more followed.