78 Minutes

By Luke Labern

Matthew was kept alive by a machine. He had had a heart attack aged just twenty-three years old, and had he not suffered his cardiac arrest where he did, he would have remained. I do not say, ‘would have died’, because in all senses of the word, he was dead. He was dead for seventy-eight minutes, according to the paramedics who worked on him.

He collapsed on returning home from one of his rambles into the countryside. Matthew’s favourite thing was nature. He loved nothing more than to spend his free time walking along the Seven Sisters, with or without company, pondering on the deep questions as he stared into the horizon and wondered what was next for him. He would spend hour upon hour there, and only illness could keep him away. In his room could be found all sorts of boots, outdoor jackets, waterproofs, magazines on the topic and his journal. No weather could hold him back from his love, and his mother would spend most of her time teasing him for bringing home yet muddier clothing.

It was on a March day, with considerably brighter weather than usual – a true spring day – that he had returned home from one such walk. He was headed for his home in the small town that was a few minutes walk from the cliffs themselves, and it was only seconds away from his house that he had felt a burning sensation, which gave way into a constricting, squeezing feeling begin to spread from the centre of his chest into his left arm. He began to clutch at his heart in the tell-tale manner, and within seconds he had collapsed onto the thick pavement underneath him, cracking his skull with the force of the fall. Seconds later, through sheer luck, a young woman spotted him lying on the floor and immediately knew that her day had taken a solemn turn. She moved him into the recovery position, listening for his breathing and began to perform the CPR she had learnt last summer, crying out ‘Someone call an ambulance!’ as she was busy acting as Matthew’s lungs.

When the ambulance arrived with its striking blue-lights, piercing through the lounge curtains, disturbing me from the book I was engrossed in, it was then that I looked out of the window and saw my brother lying on the pavement just outside our house.

* * *

The great irony in all of this is that Matthew would spend half of his time in adoration of the natural world, and the other half bemoaning humanity’s increasing reliance on technology. He was almost pedantic at times, and though he never argued against the uses of advancements in medical technology, he had a different concept of what it was to be human. He was a biologist at heart, a zoologist: his love was all that was living. Computers, electricity, components, circuits, graphics; virtual reality – none of that mattered to him. I remember many vivid conversations we had on the topic: I would play devil’s advocate and put tough questions to him, and he would always answer me very competently. No, Matthew was quite intelligent: controversial, and at times inflammatory – but always thought provoking. But of all the ideas that Matthew sowed, none had such a great effect on me as that moment that the paramedic who had saved his life had told me, candidly, just outside Matthew’s room at the hospital that he had been ‘quite dead for seventy-eight minutes’.

I thanked him for all he had done and entered into the room, sterile and silent except for the slow, weak but steady pulse of my brother’s now functioning heart. But it was not under his control: he was kept alive only by the large machine to his left which was regulating his pulse and keeping the blood pumping round his body. Mother was weeping quietly in a chair by his side, and our father was on his way from work having heard the news. Who knows how many risks he took speeding there?  Eventually she left to get some tea from the café downstairs, and I was left alone with my brother.

‘I can’t believe that I was right beside you, and yet didn’t see or hear a thing. Only bricks separated us. I was completely unaware that my own brother died beside me. I feel like such a failure.’ I paused – I don’t know for how long. I was not the sort of person to engage in platitudes, and neither was he. If he could hear me, he would know how I felt through the emotional vibrations from my voice; from the sparse, slow tears that rolled down each cheek as I remonstrated with myself and tried to simultaneously eulogise and comment on the resurrection of my brother. I had, by now, almost left my body through the shock of the events and had taken on a wholly philosophical nature – I had almost become my brother. ‘You do know that, if it wasn’t for all of those things hooked up to you, you wouldn’t be alive? I can’t imagine it. I’ll never comprehend it.’ I broke off in rumination.

I moved the chair closer to my brother and I simply stared at him. I don’t know how long this went on for, but I studied every feature, every pore. I adored my brother: I don’t know what I would have done without him. He was very much unconscious, but he was alive. I wondered if he was having any sort of thoughts, or dreams. I almost began to wonder if this whole thing was a sort of nightmare in the first place. I wanted to know what it felt like to die. I tried to ask him, but I was almost too shy. Not that he would have heard. I had been taken back years; I was a little boy again. I remembered the first time I ever really got mortality: I was listening to a particularly depressing piece of electronic music in my darkened bedroom, with only a computer screen to provide light: I was heavily in the throng of teenage angst, angry at whoever or whatever. It was at this moment that death made the transition from word, to concept; it was then that I realised that death wasn’t a thing, it was a negation. It wasn’t something new, it was the end.

I realised that the very fact I was thinking, the very fact I was able to take stock of my past, to perceive the present and to postulate about the future would, one day, no longer be possible. I would not feel my death, I would not be conscious of it: death was literally the cessation of all feeling, thinking and being in the conscious sense. These thoughts all returned to me now, as I sat with my brother who had now returned from the dead. I do not know how much of this I spoke out loud, how much of it was fragmented dialogue and how much of it inner dialogue, but I truly believe this was one of the most memorable moments of my life. I experienced would could only be described as a change in my philosophy. I began to reassess everything around me differently. I became more mature in an instant. I dropped all grudges, I appreciated everything around me: the very fact I was able to sit there – even in my agony at what had happened – able to take breaths almost became an ecstasy to me.

I had met with death – no, it had placed its hand on my shoulder – and I saw things clearly. My brother had experienced the worst, and then the greatest, of luck, but I was simply there to sit on the side lines and contemplate it all. I cannot lie and say that there was a certain morbidity in me for quite a while. I tried not to let it spill outwards, and for this very reason I spent a lot of time on my own. The only person I wanted to speak to from then on was my brother: he was the only person I could talk to about the subject. Surprisingly (though it was not surprising to me), Matthew was willing to talk about the subject.  Though he had had his seventy-eight minutes and had somehow returned, we both knew that eventually, there would come an infinitesimal rest for everyone and everything. We had promised one another never to take anything for granted, and promptly began living our lives to the fullest at all opportunities. As he regained his health, we quickly returned to our standard source of humour: each other. Even in our hardest-hitting conversations, he showed what I can only described as magnanimity.

‘How does it feel to have an electric pacemaker buried within you?’ I asked him, smiling. ‘It’s the perfect cross-section between man and machine. You must hate it.’

‘One-zero-zero-one-one-one-zero.’