LINDQUIST HAD BEEN COMATOSE FOR FIVE DAYS when a conclave of doctors, those on duty and those from the long night in the emergency room gathered around his hospital bed to remove the breathing machine and see if he regained his sensibilities. Ventilator unplugged, IVs disconnected, a doctor shook him vigorously. He did not stir. The doctor shook him again, and Lindquist took a shallow breath and opened his eyes—baffled that his wrists were tied to a bed, above him an array of monitors with phosphorescent green traces that swept across video screens, and that except for his sister Klara and his secretary Alice, the room was full of strangers who stared at him like an alien.
The seminal medical event, the one that had choked off blood flow, had every potential to erase the trillions of impulses that had flowed into his sensory pathways and impressed themselves into the billions of nerve endings in the course of what Lindquist called his life. Although the results of an EEG were guarded to slightly positive, for at least the next few days he appeared childlike. It was possible that the brain reverted to an earlier stage in life, but he would never know because, as the neurologist explained to Klara, the brain doesn’t report to itself what goes on in its mysterious cosmos. In the days that followed, a rational attitude began to emerge, one where he displayed his usual temperament, demanding more than a sick man should—especially one who eight days earlier had, by all measure, died.
Two years after Peter Lindquist had moved from Vermont to Boston following the tragic death of his wife, he married Jenny Revere Svenson, a woman who would raise Joe until college. Klara was born the year following their marriage, so Joe was Klara’s big brother, and she saw Joe’s recuperation as her responsibility.
“Joe, I don’t like seeing you in bed like this, in a hospital no less. But, I do love seeing you every day. Like we’re kids again.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t spent time enjoying each other as kids, we were self-centered brats, going from pillar to post.”
Klara smiled. “Happily, we’re close, now.” She changed the subject. “Joe, when you passed out, did you see anything? You know a light or a sign? They said you’d died.”
“No, don’t think so, no light. But you know, Klara, I did see my life pass. The life measured from the moment I took my first breath until those last ones. I saw no flash, no long tunnel, no light at the other end, but as I was passing out... felt calm. It’s like in that final moment I resolved things that might’ve troubled me. In a split second, I realized that I was only those things that I’d touched, the places I’d breathed, the people that I’d loved.”
Lindquist, admiring her gentle look, waited for his sister’s response. She had a pretty face and seldom wore make up, was a big-boned woman, though not being self-conscious of her size, and she did little to hide it. “Klara, am I making sense?”
She kissed him on the forehead. “I love you Joe, and yes, you make a lot of sense.”