A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 30

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: The Mysterious Power of Near-Death Experiences.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had a few close calls, incidents that, had they taken place a second or a minute later, might have changed my life — or ended it. I’ve never had the classic near-death experience, the one that includes an out-of-body moment, when one’s spirit floats away from one’s body, to hover in a state of heightened awareness from the ceiling or some higher plane. I don’t know what it’s like to have died and come back, only what it’s like to momentarily feel that I might have possibly come close to dying.

“Nou tout ap mache ak sèkèy nou anba bra nou,” my mother had been casually saying for years. “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or, “We are all constantly cheating death, ” which is how I usually translated that Creole phrase to my mother’s doctors and nurses whenever she asked me to, usually after they tried to reassure her, during some agonizing diagnostic test or another debilitating chemotherapy session for her stage IV ovarian cancer, that everything was going to be okay. “Media vita in morte sumus” might have also been another suitable translation: “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was apparently afraid of death until he had a near-death experience of his own. One day, he was thrown off his horse after colliding with another rider. He ended up unconscious for several hours and believed himself to be dying. Then, as he recovered from his accident, Montaigne realized that dying might not be so bad. He’d felt no pain, no fear. The limbo state of being alive while feeling dead is what he found to be most intolerable.

“I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself,” Montaigne wrote, in his essay “De L’Exercitation,” translated as “Use Makes Perfect.”

This is, perhaps, why we have so many tales of near-death experiences, firsthand testimonials and fictional accounts whose authors are attempting to understand — and explain — what it’s like to exist in a body that’s hovering between life and death. There’s so much to imagine, so much to project into that inexplicable void of people’s medical and spiritual purgatories as they swing between living and dying.

This is where my mind went upon reading this New Yorker article. Imagine Ashley, a young woman living in an urban environment. As with many people living in first-world cultures, she has had no direct experience of death. Yet she is haunted by nightmares which have filled her with am impending sense of dread, so much so her fear of death is causing her to become anti-social, lose her job, and many of her friends.

Every trip to the grocery store. Each time she steps out of the front door of her apartment building. She feels a gnawing sense of fear, that death could be around any corner.

Then as if by fate, she spots a flyer stapled to a telephone pole: “Afraid of dying? I can help.” And a phone number.

After several days and false starts, Ashley calls. Voice mail. She begins to leave a message, but overcome with uncertainty, she hangs up. Her phone immediately rings.

“You just called.”

Ashley voiceless.

“You’re afraid of death.”

She shudders, eyes flitting about in confusion.

“Don’t hang up… I can help.”

And so this is how Ashley finds herself at a second rate bistro seated across the table from Chance. Frizzy haired, unshaven, his attire a riot of mismatched thrift store cast-offs. Taking a sip of green tea, he offers a small wave of his hand as if to say something, grimaces, then finally glances at her.

“I have this kind of… superpower.”

Ashley blinks. Jesus, I’m sitting with a psycho.

“I know what you’re thinking. I’m a psycho.”

Ashley blinks again. Lucky guess or… She shifts uneasily in her chair, casting a quick glance at the door. Her getaway.

“I have a way of finding near-death experiences. Or… they have a way of finding me. Anyway, for a fee, a person can accompany me and experience what it’s like to almost die. Once you do that, you realize… there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Ashley half-hears Chance’s pitch, how most deaths occur in the most mundane circumstances… how “we are all carrying our coffins with us everyday”… how it’s the fear of death which is scarier than death itself. The words drift through the whirlwind of thoughts flitting through Ashley’s mind as she keeps coming back to the line: Once you do that, you realize… there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Chance’s fee is quite modest: $100. Plus, at least one meal and a pack of cigarettes. “But I’m down with buying a beer and a shot to put you in the right mind.”

Unconvinced, Chance offers Ashley the opportunity to shadow he and that day’s client: An old woman named Laetitia. And, indeed, after four hours trailing the pair — bookstore, bar (for a beer and shot), art museum — as Chance and Laetitia cross a street, a bus careens out of control through a red light. Laetitia stands frozen moments from being crushed to death.

Chance yanks her out of harm’s way at the very last instant. Ashley joins a crowd of gathering onlookers, staring down at Laetitia on the ground, bruised forehead, gasping for breath. A thick silence, then… a smile widens across the old woman’s face.

“I saw… it. My death. It’s warm… it’s fine… it’s…”

And she chuckles, then laughs. Convulsive laughter. Then tears of joy. She embraces Chance.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Someone in the crowd claps. Now everyone joins in, applauding, hooting, slapping backs. They help Laetitia to her feet, Ashley amazed at the look of wonderment on the old woman’s face. Her gaze meets Ashley and she plants a kiss on Ashley’s cheek.

Five twenty dollar bills. Later that night, Ashley slides the money across the bar to Chance. He pockets most of it, then waves a bill at the bartender.

“A beer and a bump for my friend here.”

Thus begins a journey into the night… and day… Ashley and Chance… conversations about the meaning of life… the inanity of life… the beauty, the silliness, the ordinariness of life…

And the fear of death.

All the while looming under each moment together, the question: When and where will their near-death experience happen?

And this: What if Chance’s record of never having died in one of these experiences comes to a violent end with Ashley?

It’s Before Sunrise meets Wings of Desire.

There you go, my thirtieth — and final — story idea for the month.

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.