I’ve now seen death from two very different points of view.
In 1988, I was hit by an illness without a name, an illness that would imprison me in my bedroom for the next fifteen years. Today it’s called myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome.
I lost nearly everything that had made me me, the PR firm I’d founded to sneak into mass behavior, a firm where I’d worked with people like Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley and Billy Joel. I lost my contacts, my friends, and my purpose in life. All I had left was my science, my writing, and my wife.
Ten years later, that wife of 34 years served me with divorce papers. I had told her that all the threads that had tied me to life had been cut. The one thing I had left was my marriage to her. But she divorced me anyway.
I could have become furious. I didn’t. What I didn’t realize was that there was fury nonetheless, and when I didn’t express it outwardly, it turned inward and blow-torched me. It tortured me with minute-by-minute, excruciating, unendurable emotional pain. Pain that made every second feel like an eternity of punishment. Pain so bad that I wanted simply to go to bed one night and not wake up in the morning.
So, I looked up fatal doses of the drugs I had in my house in the Physicians’ Desk Reference to make sure that whatever I put into myself would kill me. And before going to sleep one night, I took 127 valium, 15 thorazine, and injected myself with 5 ccs of lidocaine.
It almost worked.
I spent the next three days totally unconscious, lying in my bed like a corpse. And I learned what that phrase “lying like a corpse” means. In normal sleep, you toss and turn. That restlessness helps keep your blood circulating. But when you lie there like a corpse, you stop moving. Completely.
So my blood pooled and tore its way through my flesh, opening two wounds where it trickled out, one hole in my side and one hole in my neck.
Then, on the third day, I started to wake up. But I was delirious. And in that delirium, I realized two things: that I had a foggy sense of items I was hoping some savior would come along and do to save me. But in my delirium, I saw my mind organize those hazy hopes as a solid check list. And I realized that the only one who would perform the items on that list was me. I would have to be my own savior.
And I realized something else. That there was a bonfire in my gut with far more power than my everyday self had ever realized. And that flame flung a finger in the face of death and said absolutely not. I refuse to die.
That’s when I was 55 years old. Now it’s 26 years later. And in the last four months I’ve gone through three brutal illnesses that have shown me the face of death in a whole new light. A light that comes from being 81.
First, in November, I got sick. But I kept trying to work. Seven days into the illness, my assistant found me fully clothed on the floor of my bedroom babbling incoherently. She called an ambulance.
I had Covid and dehydration. It took the hospital staff three days to save my life. And seven more days to give me a flicker of feeble strength.
And what did I see in this new state of almost death? I no longer stared at the blazing fire of my soul’s absolute determination to live. I had a vision of entering an open grave face down. And it was dark.
I confronted the fact that my life force was running out. The hopes and ambitions that had kept me alive were letting go of me, they were letting me drop.
Then two other illnesses followed, norovirus, and a fall that broke my elbow and required surgery. They, too, showed me the darkness of the grave.
But you, today, have brought me back to life. As you’ve done hundreds of times before. And once again the fire of my will to live, the fire in my gut, is back.
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s next book, coming out in spring, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute