Chapter 1 –
Setting the Stage
Sarah was a darling girl with sweet dimples and a quick and endearing smile that revealed an inner innocents and good intentions. She was both engaging and mildly dangerous. In high school (where she did well enough) she met and fell in love with David in her junior year. He was a lady’s man and everybody knew it, even Sarah. After school he went away to do his two years in the military. When he returned he picked up with Sarah again and they appeared to be firmly on the path to living the good life as it was defined in 1959.They both had jobs, cars and starry-eyed hopes and dreams though not necessarily the same hopes and dreams as it turned out.
Sarah wanted to marry. She wanted to marry David. She wanted to marry David soon. David said he wanted to marry. He also said he wanted to marry Sarah. To David two years in the future was soon enough.
In August of 1959 Sarah decided to take a few steps on her own down the road to marriage and rented a small two-bedroom tract house in one of the new neighborhoods on the edge of town. It was clean and new with a small yard in front and a fenced one in back, a detached garage and was only $100.00 a month. David liked the house and especially liked the garage where he could keep his red Ford truck which he tricked out and work on it in his spare time .Sarah loved having the truck in her garage and David often stayed late, sometimes overnight (though they were careful about that).But not careful enough.
Sarah knew for sure by November that she was going to have David’s baby. She didn’t tell him, but stepped up the pressure to get married. David, on the other hand, wasn’t progressing toward marriage at all. His heels were firmly dug in and he still wanted to wait for at least two years. After all, they were just barely old enough to drink and David was really enjoying his life with Sarah as a single man.
Sarah was starting to feel panicky and she was very worried that she might be driving David away. But, she decided she had to tell him that she was nearly three months pregnant and convince him that getting married was the best answer for all three of them. She was scared and anxious, but it was the best thing to do and it needed to be done right away.
On December 20 it snowed and the roads turned to packed, crusty ice. David said he’d take Sarah to work so she didn’t have to drive on the bad roads. His truck had fat tires with good treads and he knew how to drive in snow and ice from being stationed in Germany. They set out in plenty of time. Sarah decided that this was the perfect time to tell David about their baby.
Knowing Sarah, I am sure she was sweet, kind and gentle in her delivery, but David’s response was deadly. He ran off the road at a wide curve, through the guard rail and over a steep bank; the truck turned over twice and ended up 25 feet down the edge of a ravine upside down in a fast running creek.
David was dead. Sarah was not. No one knows for sure how they were found so quickly, but probably someone saw the wreck happen and stopped at the gas station about half a mile further down the road and called the police. The police report shows that it took the rescuers 45 minutes to get Sarah up the embankment and into the ambulance. She was a mess. Their report says that they expected her to die on the way to the hospital. She didn’t.
It took several days to get enough equipment to the site to move the truck and retrieve David’s body. He had died instantly.
When Sarah arrived at the hospital she was quickly given every possible kind of care with incredible speed and after many hours in the emergency room she was sent to the ICU for 24 hour monitoring by the special section’s nurses and staff. She was in a coma and remained on the brink of death as they wheeled her into the special room.
Sarah was essentially an orphan. Her mother had died suddenly the previous year and her father had long ago wandered out of her life to pursue a variety of addictions and no one knew where he was or even if he was alive.
David’s parents came to the hospital to see her several times, but they were overtaken by their own loss and grief of their only son. They cared for her, but were no help to her. What could they do for a young woman who appeared to be on the edge of dying? Pray. Which they did.
Sarah’s only real help was her doctor. He did everything he could think of to help her; made her as comfortable as he could, checked her regularly and thoroughly. Her head was badly cut and concussed, her brain had been jolted and bruised, her right arm was broken and her right leg was bruised, cut, battered and swollen. She had several serious muscle strains, hairline fracture to four ribs and one ankle was broken. They checked her for internal bleeding, and tried everything to get a cognitive response. She was patched, sewn, taped, supported, medicated and tenderly looked after. She was in a deep coma and she was alive, but not very as reflected on the myriad of monitors which carefully measured every shallow breath and other functions.
Unknown to her diligent doctor and the attentive staff, Sarah was very much alive and watching from a corner in her room. When they had done everything medically possible to help her and brought her to an ICU, as they raised the high bed’s side rail she smoothly slide out of her body and became her own observer
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It took me several days of sorting, rearranging and long hours of reading the contents of the two big cardboard boxes to bring some order to the “cherished bits and pieces”. It took me two weeks to figure out that the story actually began with the wreck’s awful results and the first of Sarah’s experiences sans body. That discovery was very off-putting for me and I nearly gave up on the project yet again. I am orderly, practical, and down to earth. I understand that there are things all over the place that we don’t understand fully, or even partially. But to know that a member of my family was a participant in a woo-woo out-of-the-body experience was troubling. I shared DNA with this gossamer whiff of intelligence that drifted away from Aunt Sarah’s physical construction. For a brief moment I entertained the idea that I might be able do the same thing. It was a frightening thought. I dispelled it immediately.
If I hadn’t had the evidence of the next four decades of her life spread out on tables and shelves before me I would have been sure that she had not left her body but had actually died. She not only was not dead she was magical.
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As Sarah hung out, easily and comfortably, in the corner of the room she watched nurses, her doctor, housekeeping and other help as they came and went. Some paused to look her over, one nurse always reached over and squeezed her hand and when she had a free moment or two she came in a rubbed Sarah’s feet with loving tenderness. The doctor sometimes sat for a while and talked to her about his medical opinion and her condition. He frequently hoped out loud for her return to consciousness. He worried with kindness. One of the housekeepers always sang while he worked and blessed Sarah when he was finished tidying her room. Through the day her vitals were taken and retaken and she was checked and rechecked for progress, healing and every big and little sign that she was still present.
She liked being away from her body as she no longer experienced any pain or discomfort. But she was not sure what to do next. Did people in a coma just hang out in two places until something or someone came along to meld them back into life’s realness?
She was aware of everything going on around her and since everyone else thought she wasn’t aware of anything they thought nothing of talking, singing, and fussing over her all the time, day and night. A few days into her hospital stay Christmas came and went and the hospital was noisy and lots extras in the form of carolers, preachers and gift bearers increased the traffic. It was, apparently, a few days before Christmas when she slipped her skin, as the hospital was quieter. But still she had slept only in grabs and snatches. She apparently dozed off for nearly two days and awoke to some people from her work visiting for New Year’s Day. They didn’t stay long and in some ways were more uncomfortable than she was. There is no training for visiting the comatose.
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One person who came every day, at first, was her brother, my father, who faithfully brought her favorite flowers, peppermint candy (the nurses liked it) and me. I was tiny and have no actual memory of the visits, but now and then as I worked to recreate her story I seemed to have memory nudges and vague visions of her motionless body in the high white hospital bed.
My dad told me years later that he had a very hard time with this turn of events. Sarah was his only sister and they had both pulled each other through their mother’s recent death besides having shared a plethora of sibling squabbles and celebrations. They loved each other very much. It became more and more difficult for him to make his visits and finally he was reduced to seeing her every Sunday. He did that for the whole time she was in a coma – 12 weeks. On his second Sunday visit he took a book of baby names to read to Sarah in hopes that it would inspire her to return to consciousness. If he had known that Sarah was absent from his reality and actually watching him, he would have been speechless. Maybe even ticked off.
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In January of 1960 Sarah remained on her perch in the corner of her room and her body’s life, such as it was, took on a regularity that was boring and totally routine. She decided to see if leaving the room was possible. Amazingly, the thought instantly propelled her to the wide pale green hallway. Her new found ability was to prove useful and entertaining. She carefully thought herself up and down the walls and across the ceiling and then mentally mapped out an adventure. She went to the cafeteria, the lounge, admissions and found her way to the nursery for new babies. Then it hit her with a jolt that sent her instantly back to her room. She didn’t have her baby with her. The baby was still in her hurt and damaged body.
The thoughts of her baby immediately sent her traveling self back into her comatose shell. The pain was awful; worse now that she knew what being without it was like. She knew, though, that she couldn’t leave the baby behind again. The baby (she was pretty sure it was a boy) seemed fine. She knew that it was her thoughts and intentions that moved her out of her damaged body but could her thoughts also move her baby’s self away from the pain and discomfort or did the baby even realize that she was hurt?
She was not alone in her concern for her unborn child. Her doctor was worried too and always checked the baby’s condition first when he checked for Sarah’s vitals and looked for any improvement. The second day after the crash he had told Jake (my dad, her brother) about the baby and my dad was stunned and said nothing to anyone. The Doctor and my father agreed that it was best not to tell anyone that Sarah was unmarried. It wasn’t the baby that was the secret it was why there was a baby that had to be hidden. It was to be a short lived agreement.
What captured Sarah’s attention, besides the pain, was that while she was away her body had operated just fine without her. She realized that she was really, really hurt and that her body had plenty to do, but she was amazed and delighted with the ability of her physical being to manage her situation. Except for the pain. After many hours of mulling over her injuries, she realized that the pain was the problem for both her traveling self and her coma self. She decided it might be that her whole self was better off in two parts.
Even when her traveling self returned to her coma self she knew that they were not fully connected like they used to be and that the lack of complete integration was what the coma was about. It was a way to manage the pain. Her traveling self could hardly stand the pain and her coma self didn’t know the pain, only the lack of full connection. And coma self was very busy trying to make all the repairs that were required so that the full reintegration could happen. Coma self had lots of help, traveling self was unknown and unassisted. Sarah decided to take her traveling self and her baby away from coma self. The thought did it.
Instantly, there she was where she left off about two weeks earlier, in the nursery at the hospital. She was not sure if she was alone or had the baby with her. She lingered on a gurney in the long hall for a while to think about her situation. No amount of concentration seemed enough to tell her if the baby traveled or not. She decided that since the baby was a part of her, that he had and she just couldn’t tell. She was pretty sure, though, that moving the baby back and forth from her coma body was not a good idea. Ultimately, she concluded she and the baby were together. At least the traveling parts were all traveling, she reasoned. In an odd way she felt very whole, a delightful lighter-than-air wholeness that was euphoric. She was pretty sure the baby was also feeling good.
Though she felt more confident about where they were she was not sure what to do next. A part of her vaguely missed her physical self, the way it used to be before the wreck. A kind of heart-felt yearning came to her for the way she used to walk, sit, and seamlessly flow through space. She knew that she wanted that back, but she didn’t know when or how that was going to happen. In the meanwhile, she had a delicious opportunity to explore the world from a secret and very special place. But she soon realized that she wasn’t alone.
She was moving along the corridors of the big hospital and now and then would encounter odd energy; little eddies of moving air and temperature changes. Suddenly, she saw a perfectly round tube moving with precision down the center of the hallway. It reached from floor to ceiling and was about five feet across. She followed. She thought there might be something inside the tube, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Then suddenly it disappeared. Her thoughts propelled her traveling self to search for it and zipped up and down the wide hall past the nurses station and up the stair well.
No sign of the mysterious big tube. She stayed in the stair well to ponder recent events when suddenly the tube returned to exactly her position and whooshed her traveling self on the greatest trip imaginable.