Sixty Days
A Strange Prophecy’s Puzzling Fulfillment
Sometime after midnight on February 18, 2007, I dreamed someone touched me
twice on my arm and said, “In sixty days you will be with me in heaven.”
Waking, I had two thoughts simultaneously: first, that I’d had a muscle spasm in
my arm from overdoing pushups the night before. My dreaming self had turned it into a
touch. Second, and far more fervent: I didn’t want to die.
Lying there in the darkness, I looked back on my life. I’d made lots of mistakes,
“things done and left undone”, but there was no one I wanted to seek out for an apology.
I thought of an evil ex-boss and replayed the fantasy of knocking on her door and decking
her husband when he answered it. But I wouldn’t waste a minute of my last two months
on her.
There were places I wanted to see—England and Israel especially—but I’d have
to disrupt my life so much to leave that it would hardly be worth it. And suppose this
was just some weird false alarm and nothing happened?
No, even if my time was limited I’d go on living like before.
My career—now there was an ongoing puzzle. But what should I do about it?
When I hit fifty I’d switched from being a freelance writer juggling two and even three
part-time jobs to a full-time teacher in juvenile corrections. The job was satisfying and
all-absorbing, but I missed my writing. I’d mostly come to terms with it, though I still
wondered, during the rare moments my job gave me for introspection, if I was on the
right path.
But I couldn’t write the Great American Novel in sixty days. Maybe the Great
American Op-Ed Piece…
I obsessively returned to the event during the next few weeks. In my sleep I’d felt
the presence of a being in the room. I don’t remember anything special about the voice,
except that it was definitely a voice, not a thought. The being itself felt masculine but not
human. It moved from the foot of the bed to the side where it could touch my arm. I
could still feel the touch when I woke up. Why twice?
I thought a lot about car crashes. My family and I are always on I-95, the state’s
most dangerous road. Life insurance? Paid up.
Vague floating anxieties until my wife reminded me about my prostate.
During a routine exam back in the fall my doctor told me it felt “different” and
that I needed to see a specialist. Just a precaution—all your other indications are OK—
but you don’t want to take any chances. I’d been in denial ever since. Now it was
February and I’d run out of excuses. I grimly made the appointment and focused my
worry on what they would find.
The building had “CANCER” prominent in its billboard-size logo. “Getting old
ain’t for sissies,” I remembered Dad saying. I squared my shoulders and walked across
the parking lot.
Friendly receptionist, subdued color scheme, soothing abstracts—I wasn’t
reassured.
My apprehensions were momentarily set aside by the doctor. He had a great
bedside manner, though I wasn’t lying down.
Glove on, glove off. Definitely odd. Your PSA’s are OK, so it’s probably
nothing. Still, we have to check it out.
He gave me some Viagra with the air of a homeowner dispensing candy on
Halloween. I went out to the receptionist and scheduled the biopsy plus a second session
when I’d get the results.
The appointment was for March. They gave me a yellow bag with an enema,
pills, and a brochure of instructions. I read the first paragraph, assumed I knew the rest,
and put the bag in the medicine cabinet. Out of sight, out of mind.
I was equally in denial about the specifics of the dream. I never sat down with the
calendar and actually counted up my numbered days.
Life rolled on. It was Lent, so church was thoughtful and somber. Anxiety was
there whenever I closed my eyes to pray: “And please, God, let my test come out all
right. ”
I’d given up alcohol until Easter. Another lost distraction—more time for
thought.
Work was tough and I was getting discouraged. I’d been teaching ninth grade
since I started three years before. It was the new-guy-on-the-job job—lots of numbers
and discipline--and when the lady who taught eleventh and twelfth grade quit in
September I put in for her position and got it. My principal asked me to keep teaching
the ninth graders until they got somebody else. I accepted eagerly, my eyes on the prize
of smaller numbers and the maturity of the Juniors and Seniors. I daydreamed about a
manageable workload, introducing students to Beowulf and Whitman instead of teaching
them to capitalize their “i”s and indent their paragraphs, and maybe even having time on
the side to write.
I was still teaching all three grades in January when I got two more big classes of
ninth graders. They were “restarts”, mostly socially promoted middle schoolers, with all
the unstructured work habits and hostile, chaotic behaviors I’d been working on—and
seen gradually improve—with my other ninth graders since September.
It was like returning to Go in Monopoly without collecting two hundred dollars.
My personal mantra changed from “This is really hard but I can handle it” to “If I
die I won’t have to teach.” The one good thing about it was that, at work, I was too busy
to think about myself.
In March, they finally hired a new English teacher. She was a quick learner with
a good sense of humor and seemed to like the kids. I wasn’t just passing the baton—I
was handing my young men on to someone who knew their stuff and could take the
students where they needed to go. Light at the end of the tunnel—I was ecstatic. Of
course, I would stay on in the classroom with the ninth graders until she learned the
ropes.
The week before the biopsy I got an unbelievable cold. I tried a cocktail of
remedies, finally settling on a popular cold medicine which I only take as a last resort
because of deep suspicions about its lingering side effects. It worked, sort of. At least I
didn’t have to blow my nose every two minutes.
“What are you taking?” my wife asked during my second day of self-medication.
When I told her she informed me that the medicine contained aspirin and that I
wasn’t supposed to take aspirin in the week before the biopsy. She’s a comprehensive
reader of everything, from monumental biographies to medicinal disclaimers in 8-point
type. I consulted the yellow bag’s brochure. Of course she was right. I called the
doctor’s office and they rescheduled the procedure and follow up.
The day finally came. My wife accompanied me to the cancer center. With any
kind of anesthetic, you have to have someone drive you home but I was also just really
glad she was there.
My name was called. I changed into a gown and went into a back room where a
doctor I didn’t know was waiting for me along with two nurses. He checked me out yet
again. Definitely not normal. His partner had made the right decision.
On my side. Anesthetic. There would be twelve hits: “You’ll just feel a
pressure.”
Bullshit. It was like getting shot by a pellet gun without the pellets--but much,
much worse. Someone mentioned little hollow needles. I lost count at six. Twelve
seemed like eternity. It hurt like hell in a way I’d never been hurt before.
Laying on the couch that night, anesthetic gone, agitated, impossible to settle:
“My God, this is horrible!” Taking my full compliment of Tylenol—not aspirin.
Thinking of all the people I’d known who’d had procedures and operations: now I knew
what they’d been through—though this, by all reports, wasn’t really all that bad.
I was finally able to fall asleep and only woke up a couple of times in the night. I
wasn’t much better the following morning. They had said something about “maybe”
staying home from work. I find it hard to imagine the kind of iron constitution that could
jump right back into things the day after a biopsy. But the second day I got up and did
chores. The pain slowly segued into worrying about the results.
“I’ve got great news for you.” The doctor smiled as he shook my hand. “You
don’t have cancer.”
A slow inrush of quiet joy. I followed him back to a little room designed for just
this sort of one-on-one. We sat at a small table. My prostate was asymmetrical, he said.
That’s just how it was, the way some women have unmatching breasts. He held up his
hands as though weighing a mismatched pair. I love this guy.
“Of course we have to check everything.”
“Of course.”
I floated back to the waiting room, set up the next appointment—a year away--
then called my wife and shared the good news.
In the parking lot it was like everything was new and mine again: bushes, trees,
the sky, the sound of my shoes on the pavement. All that wonderful, simple life. I got
into my car and drove home happy.
That night it suddenly hit me. I got the calendar off the fridge and counted
forward from February 18. It was exactly sixty days from the night of my dream.
On February 18, I hadn’t set up the first dates for the procedure and follow up,
much less the rescheduling; and there as no way I could have known about the cold. Yet
something—my unconscious, an ancestral spirit, an angelic entity—had known that I
would get good news April 19.
I can almost hear the Twilight Zone overdub: “Do coming events cast their
shadows before?”
And how do you interpret the shadows? In my case particularly: what on earth
was meant by “heaven”?
For two months I could only think that the visitation prophesied death. After
April 19, I started to see things differently.
My mother, a staunch Unitarian, used to counter the fire-and-brimstone people
that surrounded us by saying, “You have your heaven and hell right here on earth.”
Perhaps “heaven” meant my daily life, and called me to use the certainty of my own
death to draw my attention to what’s happening right now.
A reaffirmation, not a revelation. I’ve been trying to do that since I was a
teenager.
On the other hand, a one-to-one correlation between “heaven” and my daily life,
on the surface at least, seems laughable. Most people would probably think it was hell.
The new teacher quit in April, so I reinherited the ninth grade, and there were
even more of them because others had transferred in. A critical mass of juvenile
delinquents. I scrambled and got a handle on them. Then I was transferred.
I had been working in minimum security and moved to maximum, to the school
where the whole system sends its worst problems. The students were more damaged,
more needy, and far more violent. There were fewer of them though, and once I found
my way, I discovered I was very effective, the job more satisfying than the one I left.
I started writing again. One of the first things I drafted was this essay, trying to
make sense of what happened, and what it meant.
Is time an illusion? Does the future already exist, simultaneous somehow with the
past and the present? Is “heaven” the way we see the world, rather than some idealized
afterlife with angels and harps?
Ancient questions. I’m still waiting on the answers.