The new week begins, so I’ll need another concept somehow  related to death and cheating death, pronto!

And that concept is going to come from … Life Support Machines.

To me, they present an impossible choice. Especially when I  was a teenager, I often wondered if I’d ever have to choose  if a loved one lived or died. And, if so, could I handle it?

When I watch that situation dramatized on TV and they choose  to ‘pull the plug’, The romantic in me thinks, “But what if  they were about to wake up? What if, in the very next  second, they were going to wake up and everything was going  to be okay?”

Sure, the doctor says they’ll never wake up again. But how  often do doctors tell people that they’ll never walk again,  then are proven wrong? And do hospitals have financial  agendas with what they tell families about this, or are they  always genuine?

I passed out once when I was seven. And when I came to, I  was amazed. I told my dad and my brother and the nurse what it felt like, like my head was in a wind  tunnel, or like I was riding along waves. The nurse scoffed  and said I had quite an imagination ‘because you don’t  experience anything when you’re passed out’ (Quite a thing  to tell a seven year old!). But I knew better. It wasn’t  just an empty blank– I was sure I remembered something in  that sliver of time, like when you can recall a dream you  just had. I knew for a fact that something strange and  unusual happened.

What if the memory is just a smokescreen, and while you’re  under, you are completely aware of what’s happening around  you; you just don’t remember it when you come to?

Or what if you go to another world, and it’s beautiful and  wonderful but it suddenly gets torn away when that machine  turns off?

So I want to tell this story from the point-of-view of the  person in the coma.

There’s a girl who befriends a boy in the world in-between  (and I want to write this place like how I picture Fiddler’s  Green). While they have wonderful fun together, they are  afraid of a certain place.

The boy starts saying strange things, like he starts to talk  about how they don’t belong there, about how dark the world  is getting, and feels he must go. The girl doesn’t  understand. The world is bright and perfect, to her. And  it’s even more perfect because he is there.

But eventually he goes to the place they fear. She doesn’t  come with him. And then she knows he is gone, and she  becomes depressed.

Then she starts noticing the little imperfections of the  world she was so blind to before, and begins to understand  what he was talking about.

The world darkens and she sees a terrible storm coming, but  the other people there still think it’s sunny and beautiful.

She feels like she must go to the forbidden place before the  storm arrives. When she gets over her fear and goes there,   she finds a quaint doorway in the middle of a field.

Through that doorway is a hall with a bright light at the  end. As she runs towards it, she can hear people’s voices  echoing all around her: her parents, doctors, nurses talking  about disconnecting her, how they’ve made the right choice,  how it’s the right thing to do. She remembers her life, how much she misses her family, how much she wants to hug her mom, and  runs as fast as she can for the light, but just as she’s  about to reach out and touch it…

Time of death, 4:45 PM.