Get A Death, Get A Life
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday April 14, 1997
There's nothing like a brush with the hereafter to focus the mind.
MOST people are aware of that famous Kerry Packer quotation about what lies waiting beyond the grave. Jolly well nothing, said Packer (or words to that effect), after he had experienced death for a while on the polo field.
Of course, his close encounter with oblivion is not shared by everyone. In fact "Near Death Experiences", which more accurately should be dubbed Very Short Death Experiences, often make fascinating stories, sparkling with lights and meadows and choral warbling and radiant, enveloping feelings of peace and love.
I've never really understood why the people who come back from such NDEs seem compelled to change their lives completely and take up yoga or meditation or making pottery or living in Byron Bay.
Maybe a conviction that there is something wonderful beyond this existence gives people the courage to take a few risks and splurge a little with life on this side. Or maybe the whole neurological incident has just addled their brain in a New Age kind of way.
I personally know only one person who has had a Near Death Experience and it was a very humble little one, devoid of the usual son et lumie`re. When he was 19 (45 years ago), Michael was in hospital with meningitis and found himself floating up in the corner of the room peering down in considerable surprise at his supine form.
He says he felt absolutely no fear but was quite keen to get on with the death thing, until God's voice - he's not sure how he recognised it, having never chatted before, but he is quite sure it was God - told him it wasn't time for him to die just yet.
So he popped back into his body, but with the legacy that he has been completely unafraid of death ever since. (He also developed a lovely touch with pot-throwing which has saved him a fortune in weddings, birthdays and christening presents over the years.)
The idea of spending your life feeling calmly anticipatory about death and complacently confident that there is a higher power watching approvingly as you get on with your little life makes me green with envy.
After all, why should the rest of us be left to wallow away in doubt and existential anxiety? It would only be fair if everyone had a Near Death Experience; let's share the serenity around a bit.
However, I realise that it is scarcely practical. Byron Bay would hardly be able to cope with the influx.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald