I remember it vividly. My heart was racing and I heard it in my ears, and then it stopped. It was stopped a long time – it felt like several minutes but I don't know how long it really was.
I experienced the "seeing the white light up a tunnel," but even as it was happening I felt that I understood it scientifically, and so I contemplated its neurophysiology: the back of my brain was losing oxygen and shutting down first, and that is the center of the visual field, hence as the neurons shut off the visual field percept shifts to "nothing" – i.e. whiteness – and this whiteness spreads as the area of oxygen-deprived neurons expands.
I thought about many things. I considered becoming religious and rejected it, in that moment. I replayed memories, bits of my life. I had a sort of debate with myself – I can't say if I won or lost that debate. Both, maybe.
And then I heard a voice – my own voice – which said: "you're not done yet." My heart started again. I had the distinct impression that I had become a ghost – an idea which recurs to me occasionally even through the present day.
This episode is not invented or fictionalized in any way. There are a lot of surrounding circumstances that I'm less willing to share so transparently about that point in my life, but the core near-death experience was real and transformational.
From that time until now I have been living on borrowed time: "my bonus round."
I had to go to work early, because of an open house for parents. Not a lot of parents came, but some. Still, I never have much to do at these things – mostly it’s homeroom teachers meeting with them, after the director and sub-director make their talks. But they like to have me available, in the event some parent has a question or a complaint or a request, and I’m genuinely happy to be available for that – I sometimes enjoy playing a guessing game by myself, to figure out who is who’s parent, matching faces I’m seeing to the familiar faces of my students in my mind.
After this, we had a hweh-shik (회식, normally romanized as hoe-sik but that’s one case where the revised romanization is pretty inadequate to pronunciation and so I’m willing to break the rules) – the typical Korean business lunch or dinner. Hweh-shik lunches are more fun for me than hweh-shik dinners, normally, because less alcohol is involved.
We went to 보양 삼계탕 [boyang samgyetang], a fairly upscale samgyetang joint on the west side of Ilsan, with a really lovely view down a tree-lined boulevard of the Kintex convention center, in one direction, and the Goyang city stadium in another direction.
I normally really like samgyetang, which is a kind of whole-chicken-in-rice-and-ginseng-soup concoction, but both because of the sheer volume of it and the complicated spices and dismemberment of it, I really didn’t want samgyetang (remember that currently, because of my illness, eating is painful, for me). I’ve been preferring to stick to soft, squishy, somewhat bland foods, lately. I special-ordered some black sesame seed rice porridge, 흑깨죽, which was earthy and delicious. I also drank a cupful of ginseng liqueur by accident, thinking it was tea. I almost choked, and who knows how that will interact with my percocet. I survived and felt OK afterward.
Then it was back to work for a long afternoon and evening of mostly correcting things at my desk and playing around with various ambitious curriculum idea documents on my computer, which may never go anywhere but they help me to feel useful. I don’t have a dense teaching load on Fridays even on the normal schedule, and with the current test-prep schedule for the middle-schoolers (for first semester pre-summer vacaction final exams), I have even less.
I lurked at my cramped desk in the crowded staffroom and drank a lot of 보이차 [bo-i-cha = puer tea], of the teabag variety as opposed to the loose-leaf kind I like to make for myself at home. I cleaned my computer files. Next week will be plenty busy, because one of my coworkers is going on a short vacation and so I will be filling in quite a few of his classes. So I decided to just not be too stressed about not having a lot to do this day.
During my last class, I made the students do their homework during class. They don’t like this – but that’s my “punishment” when they all come to class with incomplete homework. So we were looking at a question to the tune of “Do you do volunteer work?” that was in their workbooks. One boy, Sangjin, wrote, “I don’t do this work.” That was his entire answer – it was supposed to be a short paragraph.
I asked him about it.
“I don’t do this work,” he insisted, refusing to elaborate.
“You’re not a volunteer, ever?”
“Yes.” Korean students inevitably say “yes” to English negative questions where native speakers might be inclined to say “no” or try to be less ambiguous by saying “right” or “correct.”
“It’s because you have a cold heart,” I teased.
“Oh no. I’m lazy.”
He grinned and made one of those silly two-hands-cupped-together-in-the-shape-of-a-heart gestures popularized by Korean celebrities.
When I was back in the staff room, my collegue Kwon-saem (the middle school division bujang, a Buddha-like figure who spends long periods of time playing Windows Solitaire at his desk) came over and stuck the text of a poem or song in front of me.
“Can you translate this?” he asked, good-naturedly.
It was in Italian.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “Do you want me to?” I grabbed it back from him and handily translated the first two lines on the fly. Italian can be like that, for me, given my strong backgrounds in Spanish
and French and Romance Philology.
He was surprised – I wondered if he was testing me or if he had been joking. He laughed. “You are genius,” he surmised, in his laconic way.
I was pleased, and he and I spent about 20 minutes slapping together a translation into English using the googletranslate, which he then worked on rendering, in turn, into Korean. I never did figure out why he was working on it – it’s an Italian pop song from the 1970’s.
My mood was swinging up and down a lot, today. I’m sure it’s partly this feeling that life is being turned upside down while continuing through the same rhythms and habits as always. But I had a sort of breakthrough moment while walking home, that maybe it’s the percocet, too. It’s a pretty strong, opiate-derived painkiller (and believe me, I’ve been needing it).
What I’m listening to right now.
Matia Bazar, “Stasera Che Sera.”
Lyrics:
Stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me poi respirare il profumo del mare mentre dal vento tu ti lasci cullare fare il signore o il mendicante non scordarsi mai pero’ di essere anche amante stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stringere il sole nelle mie mani toglierti i raggi come ad un albero i rami per circondare il tuo viso in calore non per fare un petalo intorno al suo fiore Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me spegnere il germe del nostro gioco sazi d’amore ma contenti di poco chiedere all’aria i suoi tesori e cosi’ nel chiuso puoi sentirti sempre fuori stasera “stasera” che sera “che sera” restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me fare il conteggio dei giorni passati sapere adesso che non sono sciupati e che tu sei sempre viva e presente ora come allora tu sei mia nella mia mente Na a ria na na na ria na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na a stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me stasera che sera restare tutto il tempo con te di notte l’amore l’amore e’ sempre una sorpresa per me…
