Had to call K last night because I was staring at a dark ceiling too long and I started to think. I originally said that the anesthesia wasn't too bad as far as my existential/thanatological thoughts were going, but it was far too tempting to just lay there and imagine my final moments.

K asked if I ever talked to my mother about it, and I hadn't. So tonight I did, and I received a lot of the bullshit "You've got plenty of time..." But I also received something I didn't expect, which was that my grandmother died on the operating table, and was brought back with a defibrillator.

She recounted later that she saw them shocking her on the table, went towards the light, saw her dead parents. The second time she went for heart surgery, she was fine with it, more prepared for dying on the table.

My mother told me this story not solely because she was trying to inspire hope, but because I had voiced my concern that "only hippies and God-fearers have visions during near-death experiences." My grandmother, Mom said, was not a hippie, and she didn't go to church every Sunday.

So, hope was inspired. Now I just have to water the seeds and not let lying awake and breathing fast kill them.