Isabella isn't dead yet!

CW: This piece explores themes of suicide and grief

Isabella isn't dead yet!

Ed Tasca

I don't care if you believe my story. It happened. And I feel it should be shared with everyone. It's the story of the ultimate human discovery. I have breached walls of the living and the dead. And I have answered the mystery of why people who have died momentarily, reached near complete death, found it of infinite rapture, come back to life when they don't want to.

Suffering. It was suffering. I didn't know it could cause such pain. It left me in disbelief that life could be shaken like this. Memories and expectations once so full of joy sting now, and seem like the greatest and most naive foolishness.

It was a balmy evening. Sky wasn't bright and clear with stars peeking out of the twilight. Instead, it loomed darkly, solemnly as though ready for a funeral. It made me feel even more alone, more abandoned, more worthless. He tried to tell me he was doing this for the both of us. A laughable lie intended to make me feel grateful for his good intentions. And yet, I still felt a love that could never be replaced with another. An unexpected suffering.

Tonight, I want to feel love, the kind that feels everlasting, I thought.

I stepped into the surf along the sandy patch of Atlantic shoreline, where I often found quiet and calm as a child. I was there with the saintly regard of my father. Along the marshes and lagoons of the Brigantine Island. These were the happy places where my father took me to fish and catch crabs when I was a child. And sometimes we would just play in the sleepy waters off the beach with my inflated dolphin and beach ball. Brigantine was that magical land of fairy tales and song.

Thislate-evening swim. It wasn't an ordinary swim. It was a return to a time when love was everlasting. I told my brother I'd be here so he could join me afterward for dinner at a diner that has been a Brigantine landmark for as long as I can remember. We always called it The Avenue Diner. It's real name: Donatello's. I learned as I got older that it was named after one of the fathers of the Italian Renaissance beloved of the owner. Yes, the great rediscovery era had found its way into tiny, hidden Brigantine Island.

The waters welcomed me. Warm timid waves lapped about me like the ocean was petting me with little shoves and nudges. I dived into a swim, My arms swung into flight and I took to the relaxing rhythm that is the wonder of swimming. It was nice. Dismissing the disturbing moment, dismissing the sorrow.

But after swimming only a few lengths, the moonless night and the quiet ocean seemed different somehow, not right, not as I remember. The twilight too took on a darkness. Something made me feel out of place. I kept swimming away from it, but there was no away from it. I was swimming away from myself, an impossibility all humans try at some point during their patches of sorrow.

That's when I felt a suction from beneath. It was manageable at first, but then it grew stronger and stronger, drawing me under the water irresistibly. A rip tide, I knew it from another event years ago. They come at this time of the year. And it can grab you like an underwater wind storm. The swim became a dive.

The dive deepened. The water went cold and then colder. I coughed up the sea. I flapped about to regain control. And then the sea coughed me up into a warmer place, a soothing bath. My body sunk into a weightlessness, pleasant and safe again.

For a moment, my mind struggled to understand the transformation where my fear was wiped clean, and consciousness had become a sensation not a physical place. It was the flares, brilliant skeins and waves of light that were tugging at me now like the rip tide. They pushed me and soon the flares stopped their pushing and became an elegant, colorful escort. I was still alive I thought, but somehow detached from Earthly things.

I was going to heaven. It could be nothing else. The joy I felt, the love I felt - a wonderment like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I was going to heaven.

This was all for sure when I heard my father's voice. I couldn't see him. I did feel his presence, it was a surprise that could only come from the divine. I let go of myself now, captivated by the strange radiance and sounds that led me ahead.

Signs of my childhood with my father flashed around me, scenes like sacred mosaics, rich with color and action, each telling me its meaning and the importance of my father in it. But I understood, no words needed. I saw people from my past and people from my future I would never know or meet. Time was gone, reappeared in its fullness now, infinite and undivided with the past and future visible at once as a coherent sequence.

Real past and future scenes flashed within the sequence and then disappeared as quickly. The flares around me became brighter and brighter, still guiding me. At least that's what I thought. All events seemed to tell me I was entering into a rapturous afterlife.

“Isabella.” That was my father. I could see the white splashes of foam that made up his spirit. He was the only loved one who called me Isabella. Billie was my nickname among affectionate friends. “Father, it's you!”

I was so excited now that I wanted nothing more than to remain here, wherever I was, forever.

“I have a message for you,” he said with that fatherly tenderness I remember so well. I knew from his voice that my father came to be my guide.

“No. No. Isabella. You've gone as far as you can go, and if go any further, I won’t be able to help you back.”

“But I don’t want to turn back. This is my chance. A freedom of pain, of anxiety, of all the dark purposelessness that seems a bad dream to me now. This next moment was silence laden with a sense of imposition.

“Is this just a dream, father? Tell me, because I don't want to wake from it.”

My father had gone. I wanted to find him.

I felt like love had wrapped and saved me like the warm motherly bath of the womb. I marveled that I remembered that time before I was born, of a time of unconditional love, and complete security that one never has again in life. But I felt it again now. An eternity of beauty an satisfaction and immeasurable love.

Beings of light appeared now, seeming to communicate without words. Not just greetings and chat but with all the secrets of the universe.

Without my asking, secrets came from nowhere and everywhere -- mysteries that man has argued over for millennia. Through titters of laughter they told me or I sensed that: Human values are pesty pranksters, born of conflict from the opposing natural forces we are made of – energy sources that rule everything. But values above all human beliefs cause the most conflicts, and so are valueless. Human actions are driven by conflict, even the most benign actions can have hidden dark forces. Next, the words that all people speak hide the complexities of their secret realities, making all human behavior a psychological muddle. Next, the events that make the most joyous memories are fleeting. Only events of pain and suffering shape us for a lifetime – until death. None of this is common awareness.

All human endeavors and inclinations are marbleized with uncontrollable dark threads. And at death we learn the truth of our dark threads and how we were fooled throughout life. This storm of revelations then stopped with: Life isn't meant to be a friendly place. It is meant to show itself to you and ask you, “What would you do when confronting these illusions, imperceptions and contradictions? What life will you create from the disonance they bring?” This is human existence.

All maddening revelations of why humans will prove good and bad, and of course, by individual degrees. But something kept telling me, Isabella, there's still more to learn. Much more.

The beings of radiance continued to escort me toward a radiant portal, a majestic ride like royalty in its golden and bejeweled parade. I never hesitated. Radiance grew as I moved ahead. I wanted to know what other tricks were testing human existence.

But startled with a new sensation, something began to drag my progress: As I pondered the force that seemed to be holding me back, a paralysis confused me.

A bittersweet longing haunted me now. The new tranquility and joy of this glowing sanctuary, which was still fluttering in brilliant light, remained just ahead, what seemed like one more step away. But something was forbidding me to enter. “Let me be,” I found myself calling to the inexplicable attachment to the world I left behind. “I know what I want.”

Father, I called out, I should be able to make this decision myself. I want to join you. You seemed so happy and beatific. “Take my hand,” I pled, “please, papa. I have made my decision. It is my choice. I want to join you.” There was another silence.

The disembodied beings of radiance swirled like formless heated air and seemed to agree with the difficulty of my choices. But it was my father again who intervened. He became visible for the first time. “I love you,” I screamed at his return. His beautiful face smiled with self-assurance and I felt that tearful human emotion to sob.

“Isabella, my love,” he said. “you do not make that decision. It comes from the nature of death, the forces that propel it. Death has its own mysterious engine. Even the strong and the healthy must fear it.”

“Father, I miss you. And mom. And everyone who has passed. I want you all back.”

“Isabella, you are still alive. You are still of the material world.”

“Damn it, Father. I'm dead.”

“My love, I could tell from your language, that you are still alive.”

The beings of radiance danced seductively. I heard an inner voice tell me that “one more step meant eternal peace. And I wanted it. I could not control what great unknown force had snared me and shot me along the boulevard of lights that lay ahead. I had won. I had made it to the end of my journey.

“Isabella, you are young with years of life left. You still have a woman's life to live out,” my father said as though he were right at my ear now.

“Father, I'm no longer a woman. I'm not a man either. I'm just me, now.”

“Go. You must go back. When we reach this point, the dying body has no free will. It must go back. It is a law of this world beyond.”

“I don't believe that. If I am not dead, maybe this is another Earthly trick to negotiate. I now know that we all come to this point at death. And that we decide not to go back. I would say almost all of us who get here don't want to go back.”

“Isabella, I can't stay any longer.”

“Dad, I love you. It's a trick. As though I have no passport.”

“Isabella, please. It's no trick. Life still possesses you.”

“For what to raise a cat I do not like.”

Voices now were becoming faint. Including my own. And it all frightened me for the first time. My guiding lights were fading too.

“Go.Go.Go.” My father's voice faded into the wonders of paradise I could not see.

“This is a world we all dream of. I'm afraid to leave it. It may not be available to me at another time.”

“Isabella, I love you. But you don't understand.”

“Father, I love you too. You were the one to greet me here. To assure me everything would be okay. I'm confused and disappointed.”

My father's voice was now the whisper of the ocean surf: “Go back and tell everyone what has happened, what you have seen and what they have coming to them one day.” These were his last thoughts for me. And he vanished.

The lights around me were gone. I didn't feel sad. I didn't feel lost. I didn't feel denied. I felt wonderstruck as though I was now a representative of an eternal life and unqualified love.

The wonderful luminous world was now replaced by the familiar darkness of the ocean depths. At the same time, I realized that I was in the arms of a powerful young man who had breached the ocean surface and raced me to the beach.

I awoke on the shore, gasping for breath. I had been under the water my watch said for only two minutes. Two minutes where I had engaged an eternity. It was now night falling, but the moon had escaped the clouds and a glow as though painted across the water seemed to confirm my inevitable return from ocean to Earth. The air was crisp. Traces of twilight remained with new hues of pink and gold at the horizon.

As I lay now on the cold sand, myyoung rescuer was still pumping on my chest until I gave up the waters that abducted me. He finally spoke as I coughed and burst into full consciousness: “My dear, I didn't think you'd come to. But you made it. You survived.”

I felt the weight of both worlds pressing on me to acknowledge that such an experience left me with a solemn responsibility to take my story to the rest of the world.

“Isabella, I have found your identification in your clothes and called your brother who is on his way. He was crying he was so happy.”

The echoes of near-death played with a light-headed uncertainty, but I had no reply for the young man who saved me. I could only stare up into dying twilight unable to tell the young man how I really felt. Or what had happened. Because for those first dizzying moments back on the beach again, I couldn't be sure where I was really alive anymore. Back to Earth was a fate further filled with more challenges, more of life's puzzles to solve. But the near drowning brought me to my senses and the courage to be again, but to be with the purpose my father instructed.

“Friends call me Billie,” I told my rescuer.