Outside of Time

He is eighty-one years old and he has been to more of these ceremonies than he can count. He sat through this one in a folding chair because standing for the full length of it is no longer straightforward, and he noticed that without embarrassment, the way you notice things when you have made a certain peace with the body you are in.

The names they read this morning included two men he served with. Both have been dead for decades. He has watched the decades accumulate in a way that younger people in the crowd cannot quite understand — not as a number, but as a texture, a density of elapsed experience that changes the quality of the present moment. When you are twenty and someone you know dies, the gap between you and them is the whole future. When you are eighty-one, the gap is a narrowing thing. The arithmetic of years remaining is the kind of arithmetic that gets done more honestly as the numbers get smaller.

He is not afraid. Or rather, he is afraid in a specific and manageable way — afraid of pain, afraid of losing capacity, afraid of being a burden in the particular way that men of his generation are afraid of being burdens. He is not afraid of what is on the other side of the boundary. He is curious about it. He has been curious about it for thirty years, ever since the thing that happened in a hospital in 1994 that he has told almost no one about, the three minutes during a cardiac event when the monitors went flat and the room filled with people doing what rooms fill with people doing, and he was somewhere else entirely.

He has spent thirty years with a question the church never quite answered for him: what was that place? And was it real? And if it was real, what does it mean about what is waiting on the other side of the boundary he is now close enough to see clearly?

This chapter is for him. It is also the chapter that answers the question the widow in Part Five was too polite to ask directly: what does it feel like to be where her husband is? Not just where — but what is the experience of the intermediate state from the inside, if there is an inside to speak of?

The answer requires going somewhere most theology does not go: into the nature of time itself.