Fredrick frequently fanaticized about being shot dead—though done properly, with one hollow point bullet through his heart—by an armed robber or someone of similar (lack of) moral persuasion. Far better, he mused, what about diving onto a live grenade thrown amongst a group of, say, a dozen young children gathered at, say, a busy mall by a zealot of this or that ideological or religious cause … Somehow, I would see it coming. The live grenade gets rolled, like a bowling ball, into the midst of the helpless, little kids as the perpetrator dashes away towards the emergency exit and makes his getaway. I then immediately, without even a hint of hesitation, yell at the youngsters, “Children, quickly move away, right now!” just a couple seconds before I land my abdomen onto the live grenade. It of course detonates one or two seconds later, throwing me, and foremost my torso, up a good foot from the mall’s (once-intact) ceramic-tile flooring before dropping what’s left of my body, having absorbed the entire shrapnel explosion. Throughout the screaming and mayhem, I lay there with my head turned to one side, my lifeless stare fixed towards many stunned, traumatized onlookers cowering in the mall’s food-court seating area. “Man Gives Own Life to Spare Those of Children From Terrorist’s Attack,” the headline would read. A genuine hero ... Now that’s the way to go. “To die with honour,” as the Klingons on Star Trek would say is the only dignified way to go. “Today is a good day to die.”
That, or to get fatally shot through the heart. However, Fredrick could then hear through his mind’s ear, Be careful what you wish for, Freddy, because you just might get it. Yes, he was afflicted with heart arrhythmia—a depressing aspect of his corporeal existence—but such a heart-function abnormality did not at all put the fear of death into Fredrick.
When it came to his mentally dysfunctional life, no one, he sincerely believed, could relate to his death wish. But just like everyone else, Fredrick required his REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement), otherwise eventually he would lose the remainder of his sanity, not to mention experience terrifying hallucinations, etcetera.
When he went to bed (unknowingly) for one last night, his normally flawed heart functioning was typically troublesome, and his thoughts were likewise. Regardless, Fredrick found REM sleep within an hour while excessive, confrontational nightmares found him.
Suddenly finding himself amongst scumbag mafia men who sought to shoot him dead at every turn, he evaded them a half-dozen times, but in the end things didn’t go in Fredrick’s favour.
It all seemed so real and vividly frightening. His life and death were at issue, for he somehow seriously offended the scumbag mafia men; thus, they felt that he should suffer serious recompense via a couple of bullets into his chest—and that was that, as was the case in so many other similarly themed nightmares.
He was ‘fatally’ shot but not killed, and he felt not a single pinch of pain. Yet it was a REM-sleep reality which frequently begged the question from a somewhat bewildered Fredrick: Why am I so mentally brave against the bullets during my death-wish daytime, and such a chicken s— in the nightmares?
A gun’s a gun, after all, and bullets to the heart will always do their part.
Even so, his self-queries of such contradictory conduct on his part were irrelevant, for Fredrick would not again experience the REM-sleep nightmares and have them dissipate into consciousness, him being fully awake and physically ready for the day ahead. Rather, that night, during the said scumbag mafia men nightmare concluding with two bullets into his chest, Fredrick’s heart was pounding fast and very hard while he was physically in bed as well as stuck in the nightmare, all much exacerbating his lifelong heart arrhythmia.
Initially being typically painless upon penetrating his REM-sleep mid-chest, that nightmare’s fatal bullet wounds were not followed by a relieving opening of his eyes but instead nasty pinching sensations in his chest and upper, left arm. A few moments later, the nasty pinching became sharp stabs.
As Fredrick fully awakened, the sharp stabbing intensified; he found the pain incomparable to anything that he ever experienced during his 44 years on Earth. His eyes opened wide, he threw his right forearm upwards across his mid chest, with the hand grabbing his upper, left arm. Imminently, the intense stabbing pain became one great jab to his heart, and whatever seemingly impaled him such felt like it remained such.
“Oh, God! What’s happening?!” The latter was a rhetorical question, for he knew what must be happening—his heart arrhythmia was coming home to roost. Within only a minute after awaking, Fredrick could already feel his consciousness, his awareness of being alive, dissipating until his cognitive faculties dimmed out entirely.
The following sensation that he experienced was a consciousness completely alien to him. Most noticeable to Fredrick was that, not only did all the vicious chest pains cease, but he also was, for the first time that he could recall, totally free of the lingering anxiety (i.e. anxiousness without any notable relief) with which he always suffered. He in fact felt so fully at peace with himself as though there was nothing at all for him to worry about any longer, including no more of the uncomfortable, ants-in-the-pants-like sense of time and neither the plethora of anxiety-inducing connecting events and tasks accompanying it. For the first time in memory, he experienced complete and genuine contentment and not a trouble in the world.
Fredrick was dead, of course—dead for real. He could see his own corpse lying in his own bed, his eyes frozen-like wide open and arm across his chest.
Although he took his existential shift quite well, I really doubt that Mom’s going to take it anywhere even near as well, and neither will be the others.
It was then as though something extra-dimensional procured Fredrick’s new reality, one of nonlinear time existence. For, during the one-tenth second that it took him to blink, he left his deathbed scene (along with its space-time) and entered a graveyard scene (and its own space-time). There, he was next to his even more aged and unwell mother on her hands and knees, wailing at a gravestone while dressed in her finest clothing. It was apparent to him that he was a few years ahead of where he had just been, sometime during a to-be family graveyard visit.
Also present were his older brother, who stood to one side of the gravestone, and his sister, the eldest sibling, to the other side. As Fredrick’s sister wept, his brother, though perhaps only superficially, remained stoic, though Fredrick could sense the sorrow his brother felt for their mother’s great heartbreak.
Then, but a blink later, Fredrick was witnessing his mother’s own death due to a powerful stroke almost a year after that visit to his grave. It dawned upon him that he had been just thinking, I wonder what will come of Mom? when he suddenly disappeared/reappeared elsewhere in space-time.
In thus a manner Fredrick would exist, much deviated from what he always figured corporeal death would entail. It was to be for him a reality outside the bounds of time and space, as experienced by the three-dimensional, physical realm. He basically was at the mercy of his own curiosities and concerns leading him to think about, for example, the Earthly status of some person or people with whom he had a good or even bad time, before again and again finding himself witnessing a completely different occurrence in time and place.
Most often, though, Fredrick thought about his brother and sister or his mother, but he also occasionally wondered about so and so in such and such situation with this or that aspect, etcetera …
… I’d never have believed it to be this way had I not experienced it, Fredrick thought, just before blinking, then finding himself or his disembodied consciousness back in his bedroom, yet again beholding his own wide-eyed corpse in bed with his right arm lying across his chest.*
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.