What follows is an excerpt from my Near-Death Experience (NDE) memoir, Die-Hard Atheist: from NDE-Denier to Full-on Woo-Woo. The year is 1994, twelve years after my NDE, which I’ve long since dismissed as nothing but a hallucination. I’m 34 and living as a reckless pseudo-nihilist.
.
This one particular night begins like countless others. I go to a kegger near downtown Olympia, a ton of young people, loud music. The cool boy was there, I’m told, but he left. Shit! He might come back, though, so I drink.
I fall down multiple times. There’s a goddamn step somewhere in the middle of the basement, where the keg’s at, that keeps tripping me. Each time I’m going down, I hear that chorused “Whoa!” from everybody nearby – as if it matters whether one’s body is vertical or horizontal. People make such a big deal.
Now it’s late. My friends Megan and what’s-their-name get in my car and drive me to a house one or two blocks up the street, where they put me in someone’s bedroom. I’m supposed to sleep there on some stranger’s bed. Driving’s what I’m not supposed to do – they’ve taken my keys. No, no, no driving, Louisa! You’re so shitfaced you can’t even walk! But as soon as they leave, I decide, fuck this. I get up and stagger my way to the stranger’s kitchen, where they’ve foolishly left my keys right there on the table.
Ha! Tell me what to do! 
In the car, I’m able to figure out which key is the one but not able to find the thing. I stab again and again at the steering wheel shaft, but the goddam ignition is nowhere. It’s AWOL. I feel with my fingertips for about ten hours because it’s too dark to see and my eyes won’t focus anyway. Finally I get it and the engine starts. Yes! I’m such a rebel! No pleasure but meanness – I just don’t friggin’ care. I might die. That’s fine. I’m so fucking tired of everything.
I’m speeding down the two-lane highway that winds into Thurston County, 80 mph in a 50-mph zone. Smack into a tree – that would be best. First prize is a Get-Out-of-Everything-Free card, and second prize I end up just crippled with brain damage. Finally no one will expect me to do stuff or be likable. “Such a shame,” they’ll say, “she had potential” – but at least they won’t expect me to function. My parents – well, they have three other kids, right?
What’s this? Here come reflectors for a skinny bridge over some railroad tracks. I see the diagonal black and white stripes, but they’re tripled or so, so they blur across the whole goddam road. I just kind of shoot for the middle, sort of like bowling.
Whoosh! It’s behind me!
A few minutes later, I roll into my driveway and marvel at my drunk driving skills, how I’ve made it home alive. The night is clear, the sky starry. I slop out of the car and, hanging onto the open door, look up, thinking: “Damn, I’m a bad-ass!”
But something hits me, hits my brain, my mental arena. ZAP!!! It’s like a voltage shot into my consciousness, a bolt of intention powerful enough to blitz everything else from my head:
This is the last time I can help you! And you DO know right from wrong!
The blast of this knowing – out of nowhere – astounds me. It’s like getting struck by lightning, but the lightning is thought. It seemed like it came from that starry sky, so admonishing it’s as if somebody meant to physically slap my face: Wake up!
I feel shaken, bowled over, my billowing ego punctured.
I wonder in a sliver of thought: Is that God? Is it you who were with me in the light?
The next morning, I find the kitchen a mess and can’t say how it got like that. A carton of milk – mine, not my roommate’s – is sitting out warm on the counter. Oatmeal’s dribbled on the stove and half eaten from a saucepan. All this I must’ve done in a black out. Yet so clearly, so vividly, I remember that moment of whizzing between the bridge reflectors! So perfectly, I remember getting shocked by that thought bolt, that pronouncement, that powerful knowing I did not make.
What the hell was that? Who was that? How could that happen?
In the weeks following, I can’t get drunk enough to stop wondering. You DO know right from wrong! It comes back while I’m drinking, when I’m hungover, if I’m trying to impress people I know are shady. And trailing after the memory is a weird, implacable sense that, yes, someone has been helping me, saving my life time after time. And now they’re sick of my stupid, dangerous games. Go ahead and die: they pretty much straight up told me so.
For me to hit rock bottom takes about a month. I’ve lost all fight, all rebelliousness.
I’ve sunk.
…………I give up.
…………………I just can’t.
On January 29, 1995, I resolve to take one of two possible actions. Either 1) buy a gallon of vodka and chug it down as fast as I can before I pass out and or 2) call the phone number a sober friend has scrawled on a scrap of paper when, as I exited her house, I mentioned being super hungover and conceded that I might possibly have just a tiny bit of a maybe slight potential drinking problem.
I know where the paper is, next to the wall phone. The allure of suicide gleams brighter, though, that absolute freedom of throwing in the towel. You’ve been rescuing and rebuilding a card house that keeps partially collapsing, and finally, instead of trying to prop it up yet again, you just flatten the fucker on purpose.
That’s my life. I’ve tried and tried. No one, I believe, really cares about me, in part because no one’s ever seen past that “like me!” tap dance I trot out to please every goddam asshole. I hate that fuckin’ dance. I hate being me.
But I guess I have to call AA first, in part because, out here in Olympia in 1995, you can’t really buy a gallon of vodka on a Sunday. Liquor stores are closed. So, fuck it. I’ll call the AA number first and figure out the gallon thing second.
I call.
So much kindness from the woman who answers floods me with feeling. She tells me a meeting time and place, yes, but it’s her sweet voice, her grandma way of assuring me that, as I insist, this meeting will be far enough from town that nobody will know me. She calls me “honey,” tells me “don’t you worry!” I want to weep so badly, so gut-wrenchingly, but my eyes are broken.
At that first AA meeting of my own, I feel contempt for everyone as I’m clearly much too cool to be here. And yet… there’s something in the room, some energy I can’t put my finger on. It feels good and warm and safe, a lot like that grandma’s voice.
….and I’ve not had a drink since.
Available on Amazon – Kindle or Paperback
A Spiritual Evolution 