They Held My Funeral While I Was Still Breathing. Then My Seven-Year-Old Nephew Looked Into the Coffin and Said, “Mommy, Aunt Madelyn Is Looking at Me”

For me.

And I was not dead.

I have tried, since, to describe what that understanding is like, and I have never found words equal to it.

It is not fear, exactly, though there is fear in it.

It is closer to a kind of vertigo of the self — the ground of every certain thing dropping away at once.

You spend your whole life assuming a few things are simply true and do not need checking: that you are alive, that the people around you know it, that if you were in danger someone would come.

And in the space of a few seconds in that box, I lost all three.

I was alive and no one knew it.

I was in the gravest danger of my life and the people close enough to touch me were the danger.

There is no panic loud enough to match it and, mercifully, my body would not let me panic anyway; it held me still and silent while my mind ran in circles that had no exit.

Later, people would ask me whether I thought I was going to die in there, and the honest answer is stranger than yes.

For those first minutes I did not think about dying at all.

I was too busy trying to believe I was awake.

Chapter 2 — The Last Thing I Remembered