I convulse. My lungs search desperately for the air. My throat burns. My mouth opens, trying to breathe. I swallow water. The convulsions intensify, violently shaking my body. I stop moving. Finally, I’m floating, beneath the water. The melee that has been my life halts abruptly. Maybe the warrior can rest now. My mother flashes before my eyes. Not her regular self—an ethereal version, surrounded in light. Her higher self. She looks like an angel. I love you, Momma, I say, preparing to accept the end. I almost made it. Thank you for… everything.

A tingling in my chest spreads out to my whole body. Then, euphoria. A deep peace settles all over. I smile. A Buddha at last. I glance up at the moonlight one last time. Shimmering, and still dancing on the surface above. An enchanting waltz of luminosity. Beautiful. A fitting final sight.

One more convulsion. The last attempt to search for air. Then gone.

A tunnel. The same tunnel?

Moving so fast. Much faster than last time.

Gone. A break from the body again.

The speed intensifies even more. It’s too much for me to comprehend. Sleep. Rest. A blankness

with no end. Eternity spins in a circle around me. The clock holds no power here. One moment feels like hours, the next like years. Timeless and thoughtless empty space. Then a string of familiar words. The same ones every cycle: And what if I can rise? The call. A momentum of ancestral forces, the Keepers

galvanizing a stunned Earnell into action, pressing down upon him, his brother’s voice the clearest, “Try again! Keep trying!”

“Move!” Earnell says, falling to his knees to begin CPR again. He presses and pumps his hands desperately against my chest.

“She’s gone,” someone says in the crowd, but Earnell continues. He blows air into my lungs, then cries out in anguish, “No, not like this! Come back,” he demands to a God he thinks isn’t listening

to the prayers of the living. They all come here, to the realm of the infinite. I hear them echoing throughout the space. So many voices all at once. Dear God, please save my mother. I pray to you for guidance and hope. Help me, Father, I need your grace. Prayers rising against the backdrop of an ethereal hum. An unimaginable, incomprehensible power reveals itself. I have never felt such love and healing, all around, vibrating in every particle. A blanket of peace envelops me. A tunnel of white light, a brilliant luminosity, so bright and mysterious, moving toward me. I hear their voices before I see them:

Nitori awa li OLUWA Ọlọrun rẹ

Eniti o di ọwọ rẹ mu

O si wi fun ọ pe, Má bẹru

A yoo ran ọ lọwọ

A procession of ancestors walking slowly, dressed in white and each carrying a white rose. An ancient song infused with the first sounds ever to emerge from the ether: