Children of the Rainbow

Left school crossed the street heading up to where I catch the bus to BART. There was re-modeling going on in a building I was passing under. The work was being done on the artifice several floors up. I heard a noise and looked up to see a large object falling towards me. It had just passed a scaffold. I could instantly tell that I was about to be hit but it was all so fast I had no time to react, I was not even able to register any fear or speculate as to whether this would seriously injure me or even bring about my demise.

The very next instant the object struck me full on in the head and I started to feel terrific pain before all went black and I thought and felt and was no more. Just like that I ceased to be.

There hadn’t even been time for my life to pass before my eyes. There was, after in an indeterminate time but probably no more than seconds, the very real sense that my soul was escaping my mortal physical body. As if from above I could clearly see my body sprawled on the sidewalk with my head a bloody twisted pulp. Oddly this was not at all upsetting. It was more in the manner of seeing a cloud in the sky. Just something there. I could see, too, people rushing towards my body and there was even a co-worker of mine among them. Former co-worker that is.

I thought of how everyone at work would feel. They would be horrified, shocked, saddened. They would talk about me and about how full of life I had been that very day. They would tell stories about me and swap reminisces and a few tears would be shed. Perhaps some sort of memorial would be held. But I quickly passed over these thoughts and instead considered my family and how they would be devastated by this. Especially, of course, my wife and daughters. I felt a profound sadness deep within my soul. But it too passed and the realization that this was just the way of the world spread throughout me. At some point or another we all must shuffle off this mortal coil. My passing was perhaps a few decades earlier than one might have expected but hardly the stuff of tragedy. Life would go on for those left behind.

I also felt a great loss for what I might have done. The stories and poems yet to be written, the lessons never to be taught, the insights I would never share, the humorous jibes that would never be told. I thought too of all that I had left unread, unlearned and unseen. The movies, the books, the places and most of all the people never to be experienced. This pain was overwhelming but temporal. Soon I was very light and I was free of pain or suffering or worries or anger or confusion. Indeed all was a perfectly marvelous clarity as I ascended ever higher enveloped in a euphoria that would have seemed impossible moments ago or for that matter ever. I was experiencing for the first time in my existence true freedom and a resultant exhilaration that propelled me ever high in greater and greater jubilation.

I gradually lost all thoughts of my mortal life. What I had so recently experienced became distant memory then vanished entirely. I was whole and new and joyous and something entirely fresh and I was all set to begin again.

A new adventure awaited.