90 Minutes in Heaven_ A True Story of Death & Life - Don Piper [24]
Between friends, relatives, and church members, I felt as if a line stretched from the front door of the hospital to my room. Eva came in one afternoon and realized how much the visitors disturbed me. She chided me for allowing it.
I think she figured out that I wouldn’t tell anyone not to come back, so she asked the nursing staff to cut back on the number of visitors they allowed. It didn’t stop everyone from coming, but it did cut down the traffic in and out of the room.
Besides the pain and the flow of people in and out of my room, I lived in depression. A large part of it may have been the natural result of the trauma to my body and some of it may have been my reaction to the many drugs. I believe, however, that because I faced an unknown outcome and the pain never let up, I kept feeling I had little future to look forward to. Most of the time I didn’t want to live.
Why was I brought back from a perfect heaven to live a pain-filled life on earth? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t enjoy living again; I wanted to go back to heaven.
Pain has become a way of life for me since the accident, as I am sure it has for many. It’s curious that we can learn to live with such conditions. Even now, on rare occasions when I am lying in bed after a good night’s sleep, I will suddenly notice that I don’t hurt anywhere. Only then am I reminded that I live in continuous pain the other twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes of each day.
It took a while for me to realize how profoundly my condition affected my emotions.
I prayed and others prayed with me, but a sense of despair began to set in. “Is it worth all this?” I asked several times every day.
The doctors and nurses kept trying to push medications on me for my depression, but I refused. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I had so much medicine in me, I didn’t want any more. Besides, I didn’t think more medicine would do any good.
I wanted to be free from my miserable existence and die. Obviously, I felt wholly unequipped to deal with that turn of events. I now know that I was a textbook depression case.
Soon everyone else knew it too.
“Would you like to talk to a psychiatrist?” my doctor asked.
“No,” I said.
A few days later, one of the nurses asked, “Would you like me to call in a therapist? Someone you could talk to?”
My answer was the same.
Because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, what I called “stealth shrinks” began to creep into my room.
“I see you’ve been in a very severe accident,” one undercover psychiatrist said after reading my chart. He tried to get me to talk about how I felt.
“I don’t want to talk about the accident,” I said. The truth is, I couldn’t. How could I possibly explain to anyone what had happened to me during the ninety minutes I was gone from this earth? How could I find words to express the inexpressible? I didn’t know how to explain that I had literally gone to heaven. I was sure that if I started talking that way, he’d know I was crazy. He’d think something had gone dreadfully wrong with my mind, that I had hallucinated, or that I needed stronger drugs to take away my delusions. How could I put into words that I had had the most joyful, powerful experience of my life? How could I sound rational by saying I preferred to die? I knew what was waiting, but he didn’t.
I had no intention of talking to a psychiatrist (or anyone else) about what had happened to me. I saw that experience as something too intimate, too intense to share. As close as Eva and I are, I couldn’t even tell her at that time.
Going to heaven had been too sacred, too special. I felt that talking about my ninety minutes in heaven would defile those precious moments. I never doubted or questioned whether my trip to heaven had been real. That never troubled me. Everything had been so vivid and real, I couldn’t possibly deny it. No, the problem