I opened my eyes to see only darkness. I did not know how long I had been unconscious or how much time I had left. I had no concept of time. There was no way to know if it was day or night.
         I could feel wood against my body. I could smell the pine of my coffin and my own sweat. I could hear my slow, rhythmic heartbeat. I could faintly taste my own breath. These were my sole sources of sensory input.
         Someone once called Death "the undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns." Tonight I would discover that country and I would return. All the waiting was over and now I had resumed my life's work.
         An indeterminate amount of time passed. I rose up from my coffin, outside my body and hovered above my unmarked grave. I could see the ground and yet it was translucent. I could see my coffin and yet I could also see through it.
         I looked down at my body. I had forgotten that I looked like that. I was used to seeing myself in a mirror or a picture. But both were flat and neither was full size. But now there it was, full view, about five feet away. I had changed since last seeing myself that way.
         My face was covered with wrinkles and there were dark purple bags beneath my intense brown eyes. My hairline had receded halfway across my scalp and the hair that remained was more gray than black now. I was tall and thin, almost skeletal. Somewhere in my mind, the word skeletal almost made me laugh.
         Emotion surged up within me. To feel this again, after so much time, was pure ecstasy. It was worse than an addiction and yet so much better. To be buried so often and then to be deprived for so long, had been pure hell. But the painful waiting only made this night more heavenly.
         Fleeing Death is a mistake born of ignorance. When we attain the wisdom to realise this, we stop fleeing and allow Death to take us. Death is a beautiful woman whom we should allow to embrace us. Death is orgasmic.
         My body was very different from the body in the coffin below me. I was a blob floating in thick clear water, but at the same time I had arms and legs and a body and a head. I knew that I could change shape as needed.
         One of the difficulties with near-death experiences is the failure of language to describe them. So many things on "the other side" can be described as several different, seemingly contradictory things. It seems impossible to be both a blob and a body, yet "over here" it was perfectly natural.
         I heard the comforting voices of relatives and loved ones who were here to help me. I could not make out the words, only their welcoming tone. I felt their joy and their unconditional love. I had always longed for this part of the experience, as I had never known such belonging in life.
         There were no words here. When I heard familiar voices, they did not speak. They communicated in thoughts and feelings of such completeness and clarity that spoken language was useless.
         Something pulled me through the voices and toward a brilliant white light. I did not resist. The light engulfed me. It was a light, but it was also water. It was like being in a vast ocean. Somehow I knew that the watery light was made of human souls.
         The fact that I had seen the light many times before did nothing to pale the experience. Memory alone could never prepare me for such an overwhelming love, for such total and complete acceptance of who I was.
         The light non-verbally asked me a question that led me to evaluate myself. I relived all the major events of my life with remarkable intensity. Everything that I had ever known and then forgotten, I felt again as if it were new.
         Now I was at the beginning of the tunnel. Loved ones surrounded me. They communicated unconditional love, again and yet they also told me that I must go back to my body. I firmed my resolve and resisted them all. Even if it meant my death, I had to know what lay at the end.
         It is my time! I will not go back! I will go forward! I am ready to die.
         Again, I rushed through the tunnel, sucked through it like dust in a vacuum with a painful crashing of sound around me. The light, which could not possibly have become more brilliant, did. It grew brighter and brighter, yet it was not painful or blinding because I had no eyes.
         I was out of the tunnel! Now I found myself blinded by the light. It was in a distinct place above me and it was painful. I closed my eyes and concentrated upon my other senses. Why, I wondered, did I now have eyes?
         Hands were holding me. The voices used spoken words that I did not understand, but they were overwhelmed with joy. I heard an infant crying in what was once my own voice.
         I opened my eyes. I was the infant, being handed to my mother on a hospital bed. My father, my aunt, my grandmother, a doctor and a nurse all peered down at me.
         Their faces changed into clock faces, all displaying different times and moving at different speeds. Their speech faded away until all that I could hear was the combined ticking.
         Thirty-two years were condensed into what seemed like a minute. Clock-faced people moved around me and I around them, until finally I lay down in my coffin one last time.
         Something pulled me from my body again and it disintegrated into dust inside the coffin. Only a skeleton remained. The coffin disintegrated and my bones turned powdery. Coffin and corpse blurred into one and mingled with the dirt around them.
         I gazed at what was once my body, at what was now nothing. After a long moment, something became distinct from the dirt. The powder separated into coffin and corpse once more. Coffin and corpse reintegrated into what they had been.
         All of what I had just seen was reversing itself. I was being sent back. Once more I was denied that final step of seeing what lay on the other side. I tried to shout, but I could not. Even if I could shout, I knew, it would not matter. I was in my coffin once more, crying with all the anguish of being denied my lifelong dream once more.
         "I will go back," I muttered as William dug away the dirt. "I am not done yet. I will go back and I will finish my journey."