Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the precious things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.

Anyway, in the dream, sipping tea with Andy the Hippy, Jim, Tanya, Sean, Rod, and Ken Gale, I asked how I might reach my wife, who was still down there living her life. Perhaps there was some window through which I could watch things going on, moment by moment?

Oh, there was nothing like that, they told me. Our lot was to remain in the tearoom for an indefinite amount of time. There was no way back to the world. I would never see my wife again and never know what happened to her after I died. Furthermore, her tearoom would be different.

That was it.

We’d had our time.

On waking, I lay still in the bed, blinking my eyes, floating in the wake of this nightmare and grateful to be back in the hospital room, which is something I hadn’t felt before. Hell, I realized then, was to be fully conscious after death with memory intact.

And yet the retention of memory beyond physical death is something people seem to wish for, and seek to achieve through the worship of gods that exist always outside of us⁠—separate and silent, a raging sea we cannot enter.

No longer afraid of losing my memory⁠—wishing for it, even⁠—I began to wonder if there wasn’t some part of me that existed beyond memory, that was neither rooted in appetite and corporeal, nor an empirical self contrived over decades, arbitrarily, as a response to environment.

Imagine some part of my being that I could potentially go through my whole life without ever realizing was there.

It was quite soon after being diagnosed that I received the gift of this deeper awareness, the existence of something beyond self.

Let’s go back and I’ll tell you about it.

17.

When I first found out I was sick, two years ago, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my wife, for reasons I’ll go into later. The doctor said I had some time before the illness would start to show. A year, she said, maybe more depending on various things.

But the diagnosis was final. There was no hope for a cure.

Why should I be surprised? People die all the time. It’s what we do. Yet, I suppose I never thought it would actually happen to me. Or is it that I didn’t know when it would happen, or that I believed it would be so quick I wouldn’t realize I was dead, or perhaps so painful the release would be a final mercy?