HAINES -- The late summer day when my friend Gladys almost died was perfect. The orchard was loaded with cherries. Salmon swam up the Chilkat River across the bluff from the old farmhouse. Behind the garden, eagles circled lazily high above Mount Ripinsky. Gladys' husband was mowing the same big field he played on as a child.
One minute Gladys had been hanging a rug on the clothesline, the next she was on the ground, unable to move her arms or legs. She spent more than two months in an Anchorage hospital and is just now getting around on her own, much to the amazement of doctors who feared she'd never walk again.
There are more than a few folks who, on a day like that one, would look around and think or even say right out loud that if they had to make a choice right then between here and heaven, they'd stay put. Which is pretty much what Gladys did, even after getting what she is sure was a glimpse of the Elysian fields.
I have been thinking about Gladys' story and similar ones I've heard recently, no doubt prompted by all the end-of-life news, from Terri Schiavo to the pope.
I was visiting my neighbor Don, a retired fisherman, when he got talking about an old school friend who nearly drowned after falling through the ice while clamming. When the lifesaving crew reached him, his buddy punched the first rescuer in the head. Later, he told Don that he had heard glorious music, seen bright lights and felt warm and content. He was more than a little ticked at being pulled back onto the dark, freezing shore. "After that he wasn't afraid of anything," Don told me.
Hertz, our electrician, used to be a logger. He once was hit by a falling tree and had what he knows was a vision of the next world. He says he felt completely free as he hovered above the people who eventually brought him back to life. Hertz is Catholic and seems to accept death better than most of us do.
Gladys isn't religious in a formal way. But she is Aleut, originally from Dillingham, and has a strong spirit attuned to what is good and true. She is also a retired science teacher and thinks that sensation of floating above your body many near-death experiences share may be the function of a visual brain pattern.
But that doesn't mean she doubts Hertz or Don's friend. She had a similar experience while she was lying on the ground below her clothesline. The line was made for her mother-in-law, Mary. It was a long cable strung between a pole and a small deck about four feet above the ground to keep laundry out of the snow in the winter.
When Gladys reached over and added one more pin to hold the rug, the line apparently snapped. Gladys held on reflexively and "became the end of a lashing cable," she thinks -- "although it took me three weeks to figure out." At first, everyone thought she had simply fallen off the deck, but the snapping-cable theory explains how she got hurt so badly.
When Gladys first realized something big had happened she was down in the grass and felt wonderful, cradled in peace.
"I had no thought of anything or anybody," she said, and "there was this strange orange-golden light." Gladys is a practical woman, not prone to fancy. But then, she said, she heard a voice, commanding her to breathe. She sucked in air and pushed it out again and suddenly everything hurt and she was scared. Her husband called 911, and Gladys said her "darkest hour" began.
Looking back, she guesses the voice was her deceased mother-in-law talking to her from the other side. "There is no way Mary would have tolerated me dying under her clothesline," she says. Luckily, Gladys can laugh about it now.
We are in her kitchen, and she is taking a break from sorting mementos. She and her husband are leaving the old family farmhouse for good this time, not just a season. "I like Haines," she says. "I just like Anchorage more." Her close call has made it clear that she wants to be near most of her loved ones most of the time.
The TV set is on in the other room. The news is all about Terri Schiavo's death and the debate her health fueled about life. We both agree on the value of living wills, but that's as far as we get. Gladys is too busy packing and planning a hike on Flattop with her grandchildren and great grandchildren for her 68 th birthday. But she knows I want some wise words from her, and she looks at me and sighs: "I never came up with any great conclusions except there is more out there than you think."
No wonder I already miss her.
Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines. She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.
