‘I called to the Lord out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
You cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
Then I said, “I am driven away
from your sight;
how shall I look again
upon your holy temple?”
The waters closed in over me;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped around my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me for ever;
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
As my life was ebbing away,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
Those who worship vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’
Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.
Three years ago I collapsed around 10 minutes into a game of football with friends at Aston Power League. I stopped breathing, and my heart stopped beating.
My friends performed CPR, fetched a defibrillator from a member of staff and prayed for me as they waited for the paramedics to arrive.
Father Simon, the priest at St. Margaret Mary’s in Erdington fetched holy oil from his car and anointed my feet and legs as the paramedics got to work.
Simon remembered conversations we’d had about St. Bede and figured I wouldn’t mind being read the Last Rites even though I’m not a Roman Catholic. These are the last prayers given to someone before or whilst they die. They can’t be administered to someone who has already died.
I was sedated and taken to City Hospital in Birmingham, where Emily was brought to see my body before I was taken into the intensive care unit. I would not wake for several days.
The prayer of Jonah in the belly of the fish has, perhaps for obvious reasons, become a special one for me in reflecting on this experience. The imagery of lying on the floor of the earth, deep waters closing in, has become more immediate.
I understand now what Jonah is talking about in a way I did not before. The same is true of the images of Sheol in Psalm 30 or Psalm 88. I feel like I know what that place is now.
The experience of emerging from a coma is difficult to remember and piece together. The medical professionals lowered my sedation several times in an attempt to rouse me, but seizures and fits of intense vomiting meant that I was repeatedly re-intubated and lowered back into sleep. I don’t remember the seizures, but I do remember being sick and feeling intense paranoia and agitation.
Everything initially had the appearance of janky PlayStation 2 graphics; the presence of a large tube extending down my throat and smaller ones in my neck and arms may have roused subconscious memories of Neo’s entry into the ‘real world’ in The Matrix, the beige ceiling tiles in the ward of the existential video game The Stanley Parable.
These initial reactions are apparently very normal for anyone waking up in intensive care. Unaware of where I was and unable to remember how I got there, I reached for various assumptions – that I had been kidnapped, that I was still inside a dream I was unable to wake from and most significantly that my consciousness had been separated from my body against my will and placed inside a virtual reality.
Memory is a strange thing. I was initially able to remember very little. I couldn’t remember who the Prime Minister was. I couldn’t remember the Queen’s name. I couldn’t remember what year it was. I could remember Emily and Edmund. I also remembered that my Dad was dead, something my Mum was sat at home worrying about having to remind me of.
A nurse called Finley asked me if I’d like to listen to music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any music that I liked. He set up a tablet computer next to my bed and it played the entirety of Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. I remembered that I knew this record. Nick Drake had been a popular selection at my workplace at the time.
So began a strange period of remembering. As the days passed I remembered more. Strangely, these days have with time become incredibly difficult to recall. The way I understood space morphed and changed.
Although I was in the same bed for the entirety of my stay on the cardiac ward, my experience and memory of that space varies wildly. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was if the windows, walls and doors moved themselves around from day to day.
I hallucinated quite badly whilst coming off the sedatives. A friend pointed out recently that this must have been particularly frightening for someone who had never tripped before. It was.
I imagined the two men in the beds opposite me were neo-Nazis who were burning down parts of the ward. One night I had a waking dream in which the ward had become a kind of haunted house lit with melting candles. A nurse found me trying to escape, having pulled out all the wires monitoring my heartbeat.
I’m not sure when, like Jonah, I remembered God. I still have my sketchbook that was sent to me in hospital. Alongside a load of nonsensical scribbling there is, scrawled across a page, “the sun will not hurt you by day, nor the moon by night”, a line from Psalm 121.
Ash Wednesday fell on the 2nd of March that year; 9 days after I had collapsed. The hospital chaplain came to the ward to impose the ashes. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent in the liturgical calendar, and Christians are traditionally marked with a cross on their forehead, made from the ashes of the previous year’s palm crosses.
Interestingly, Ash Wednesday is largely about memory. As he marked my forehead, the priest said “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”.
It is a strange thing to dwell on, especially after narrowly escaping death. The words of the liturgy invoke an earlier memory. These are the words God speaks to Adam when he casts humanity out of the garden of Eden.
Because they follow on from God’s declaration that Adam will forever eat his bread by the sweat of his brow until he returns to the ground, the words are often taken to be a curse.
Erik Varden, in his book on Christian Remembrance, The Shattering of Loneliness, argues that this is a misnomer. Adam had forgotten where he had come from. He was formed from the earth on the Sixth Day, the Creator breathing a soul into him by grace; ‘a gift no effort or deserving can obtain’. The Hebrew word for ground is adamah. Adam’s ‘deepest truth is contained in his name’.
The reminder that he is dust is not a condemnation but a statement of fact – it points to Adam’s origin and true nature.
I can’t remember if it was this date or the following Sunday that the priest returned to administer Communion. Communion is about so many things, but memory is again central. In most denominations and traditions, Christians are reminded of Christ’s words in the gospels; that each time we drink the wine and eat the bread, we do so in memory of Him.
In many traditions, including the one in which I was raised, memory is all Communion is about. It undergoes no metaphysical transformation, it is a simple symbol.
Recently I’ve felt the need for the Eucharist to be more magical than that, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that my memory and sense of self got significantly better after taking the bread and wine in hospital.
In Chrétien de Troyes’ story of Perceval and the Grail, the realisation of the Quest, which ends with Perceval being able to receive Communion is intimately tied to a reconciliation and remembrance of the hero’s self – of Perceval as he truly is.
As time has passed, I’ve undergone a kind of forgetting in reverse. The paranoia, visions and confusion that seemed so real and all-consuming at the time are now difficult to remember.
My mind has recovered miraculously. Although I can’t remember much of the weekend I collapsed, there are very few gaps in my memory. I can remember what music I like. I remember who I am.
Coming to this point of the year every year is a reminder to call to mind the other things that can so easily escape my attention. The Lenten call to remember that I’m actually dust. To remember as often as I can the presence of my Creator in ordinary bread and wine. And to remember the significance of this small story in my life; of God’s goodness as my life was ebbing away.