My Second Death
I was too young to remember my first death.
At about one year old, as my mother told it, I developed a severe strep throat. At that time and place — a tiny town in south Georgia in 1943 — there was one doctor, treatments were few, the wait was long.
As Dr. Hayes swabbed my infected tonsils with something Mother recalled as silver nitrate, the wooden stick of the swab broke, I swallowed the antiseptic, and at once I became violently ill. This was an emergency the clinic could not handle, the nearest hospital was 22 miles away, and during the high-speed drive there — As she told it: “You may as well slow down, Bill. There’s no use killing all of us. The baby’s dead.” — I went into a coma.
I sometimes wonder if that coma was the breathless, light-breathing place I sometimes go to in deep meditation or on long solitary hikes or in momentary eternities opened by love — or if it was only that place of boneless obliteration depression used to drown me in.
I lived. I lived to carry forever the pre-verbal memory of that moment when, with no other way to save myself, I temporarily died so I could keep on living.
And I was able to live because my shyly proper mother, during the long wait, had set aside her embarassment, and, in that public space, nursed this fretful child. The doctor said later that her milk in my stomach…
