Everything Versus Nothing - Lazurus II

Everything I thought about life disappeared with my first death.
On a hospital operating table
I was Michael Jackson on profopol.
Feeling
Nothing but nothing
And the promise of more nothing throughout eternity.

The hereafter was exactly as I had expected.
A wasteland.
White.
Formless.
Nothing.
No God.
No gods.
No Satan.
No heaven or hell.
No purgatory.
No fear.
No pleasure.
No pain.

Then
I sensed something else.
More nothing.
My math education taught
That nothing times something equal nothing.
Nothing was more powerful than everything
And I was okay with eternity with nothing.

Year ago in Thailand
My father had once appeared in a dream.
In his fifties. Strong. Not old. Not young.
I complained about my problems.
He stopped me.
He knew something I didn’t know and said clearly, “Don’t worry. When you’re dead none of those problems will mean nothing.”
I believed him without question.
He had never lied to me.
I wish I could have claimed the same.

I had lied to me all the time.
In this white nothingness that didn’t matter.
The nothingness absolved me of everything.
I searched for something in the nothingness and found nothing.
My humanness argued there had to be something.
Not true.
I had no eyes, nose nose, no ears, no skin, no tongue,
Yet I could feel the nothingness,
Even though it was nothing.
I couldn’t shut off the nothingness.
It felt like forever, then I segued to a dream.
I was on a cutting block. In London
The Smithfield Market.
Butcher's chopping my body.
My guts scattered across the wood table.
No pain.
No terror.
Simply a vacation from the nothingness,
Except it was something worse.

I emerged from death.

Snap.

My eyes opened.
My body on an operating table.
Profopol fading.
My abdomen opened to transplant a liver.
There were no guts to be seen.
No butchers either.
Nurses surrounded the OR table..
“Are you okay?”
The voice from behind me.
I croaked out yes.

Life.
Not death.
Not nothing.
Breathe.
Feel drugs.
Morphine.
Maybe Dilaudid.
I recall saying no Oxys.

This was not a new life.
I had not died.
I had lied to myself.
The nothing was not real.

A doctor
“Everything went well.”
Everything?
But what about the nothing?
Both were simple answers on morphine