Gossamer

In my early 30s I had pneumonia. For the better part of a week I thought I just had a bad case of the flu. Essentially I was prostrate with fever and low oxygen and dehydration. I lay in our darkened bedroom on sweaty, twisted sheets. I didn't eat for days and drank but little sips of water. I drifted in and out of sleep. Basically, I was too sick to realize how sick I was.

One feverish day I dreamed that I was sitting in a hospital bed on white sheets in a white room filled with brilliant, ultra-white light that streamed in through gauzy white curtains. Seemingly from nowhere, my former colleague John appeared and sat in a white wooden chair at the foot of my bed. That would be the same John who had died a half-year earlier of malignant melanoma.

He gazed benignly at me.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I heard you needed company."

Hmmm.

When I awoke, I asked Michael to drive me to the doctor across town. Dr. MacDonald said I had a bad case of pneumonia. He put me on antibiotics, and within a few days I was restored.

The dream stayed with me and does to this day. It was vivid, real, eerily tranquil. It was not a nightmare … more like a vision in which I was free from fear and any other strong emotion.

Perhaps the veil – the wispy cosmic membrane between temporal life and vast eternity – had torn a bit as my condition declined. While he'd been a great guy in life, apparently I was not ready then to join my friend on the other side.