Today marks one year since I received a heart transplant.
Like many who find themselves near the veil, I experienced a few things leading up to hospitalization — and while I was within it. Some might call them religious experiences; I call them things I simply cannot explain.
A couple of weeks before everything collapsed, I was visited by a dark figure in my home as I slept. I woke to see it standing in the corner of the room. I was fully awake — this was no dream. There was communication of a kind; not words, but understanding. I knew it was an omen of the end — perhaps Death itself come to visit.
I told it I felt there was something still unfinished — not that I wasn’t ready to go (I was), but that something remained undone. The figure made it clear that if I chose to stay, the road ahead would be hard. I would suffer. I accepted, and it left through the window.
I lay there afterward, thinking about what had just taken place. I knew, in the classic sense, that I had just been visited by the Angel of Death — and by refusing his outstretched hand, I had chosen the harder path forward.
In the old stories, such moments are rarely unique. Sometimes, it’s the hero who defies death — not always his or her own — staging a quest or bargaining for another’s return. Gilgamesh rebelled against mortality itself; Orpheus descended into darkness for love; Jonah chose struggle over surrender in the belly of the whale. Others clung to life — Hezekiah weeping and pleading with G-d, Faust bartering his very soul. And some, like Heracles and Odin, stood face to face with Death and refused to yield.
But perhaps my favorite, and the one I hold as namesake, is Elijah. He did not die at all but was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind of fire — not a peaceful ascent, mind you, but the tempestuous crossing of a man who would not yield, carrying his mission beyond the mortal plane.
Across ages and faiths, the story repeats: the soul that says Not yet. Not from fear, but from a deep knowing that the work is not done — that something still calls.
When Death came to my bedside, I spoke not in protest, but in purpose. I wasn’t clinging to life so much as reaching toward what was still unfinished. I didn’t know what it was — I still don’t — only that something remained.
And from that moment on, the path grew steep, just as I had been warned.
My time in the hospital was brutal — a good friend described it as medieval. I endured nearly every kind of suffering I had ever feared: endless pokes and prods, shocks, procedures often with little or no sedation. I lost my voice when one vocal cord was paralyzed, leaving me unable to speak — much less sing. And those who know me understand how deeply music runs through me.
I had made my peace with death. I did not pray to G-d so much as reach out to the essence of creation itself — that presence many call G-d, but which I sense more as a kind of consciousness or energy that pervades all things. Not the bearded patriarch of human imagination, but the luminous pulse beneath everything that is.
One night, I had a vision. At the end of a long path, there stood a wall of black void — both something and nothing. I could not pass through or around it; it was simply the end. Then the wall crumbled, revealing a brilliant sunset — gold, blue, red — a wavy, endless mist of light.
Before me lay two paths: one continuing into the light, the other ending abruptly. I somehow knew what that shorter path meant — what would follow for my family if I chose to end my journey there. What I saw filled me with sorrow.
So I chose the longer path — the one with the sunset. Instantly, I felt something change. Not subtly — clearly. The next day I was transferred to another hospital, and the doctors told me, almost casually, that I was not going to die, even though it might feel like it. There were more tests, more pain, more of everything — and then I was placed on the transplant list.
Some might think this was enough: two profound encounters with something beyond. But there was one more to come.
At one of my lowest points, I was taken to the cath lab for yet another procedure. Sedated, I drifted out of my body and watched from above. The scene was surreal — black and white, hazy, like static snow on an old television. The doctors worked methodically, calling out numbers, focusing on their craft.
Then, to one side of the room, I saw a block of golden, glittering light. I was drawn to it — a doorway of calm and peace. It beckoned, offering an end to the pain if I chose it. And for a moment, I wanted that. But deep down I knew: things weren’t done here. I stayed.
I sensed a kind of smile from beyond that golden curtain — hard to explain, but undeniable. Then — abruptly — I was pulled back into my body and out of sedation.
I don’t call these religious experiences. But I no longer feel the need to wonder whether there is something more beyond us. I don’t depend on faith alone; I’ve been given the evidence of that something more.
Across all of these encounters, there were no spoken words, no faces forming from the light. The communication was deeper, more immediate — not sound, but knowing. It’s difficult to describe without diminishing it. The exchange felt like an overlay of awareness, a blending rather than a dialogue. Meaning arrived whole, without the need for language — refined yet unrefined, as if thought itself had bridged the divide, complete upon arrival.
I’ve come to think of it less as a conversation and more as communion — the quiet transmission that occurs when two awarenesses meet without speech and still understand completely.
In Kabbalah, we speak of the Ein Sof — the unknowable source. It’s unknowable for a reason: it defies containment. Organized religion tries to define it, to put shape to something that cannot be shaped.
Some things are meant to be studied and explained — that’s why we have science. Others simply are. And I’ve come to accept that these moments belong to the latter.
Still, I ask questions. The answers do come, if I listen. Sometimes they arrive in the voice of a friend, or the simultaneous whisper of a dozen coincidences — when everyone around me begins speaking of the same spiritual idea, or a book appears in my path again and again. Sometimes it’s subtler still — a sudden change in the weather, a flicker in the wind. Poetic, yes, but all the same these are, in fact, replies.
These messages from the universe are there if we learn to listen — not to chase meaning, but to notice. To observe. To flow rather than direct.
Much of my life has been lived in the sign of fire. But now, I find myself more aligned with the rhythm of water.
I still haven’t discovered what it is I am meant to do — that unfinished work I spoke of to the dark figure that night. When I asked, I was shown a vision of a river and a canoe without oars. A clear message: go with the flow.
So I do. For now, I sit in the canoe, drifting, watching life along the riverbanks and within the river itself — listening, observing — and waiting for the current to take me, wherever I am to go next.
“Not all who return from the edge do so to escape death. Some come back to finish a sentence still being written.”
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