I died on a lovely autumn evening a year after that first heart attack.

I recognized it immediately when it returned, just as I’m sure my father had so many years earlier—that abrupt, hard-sticking pressure dead center in the chest, a sudden, sickly and intense yellow-brown pain, like a chunk of banana bread stuck in your esophagus, its presence already grown to maximum proportion with the old and familiar accompanying sensation of intensely focused indigestion—the kind of pain that once you’ve experienced it, you never forget it and hope it never comes again.

That first heart attack a year ago had left me pondering, for it had come at the oddest of times. You see, we had just lost Davey to a heart attack a month before, high on the side of a mountain in the southern Rockies as he was guiding an elk hunter.

Two years earlier, our friend Tommy Jones had shot an elk of his own at dusk, and it had gotten into the thick oak brush. Tommy had hit him perfectly, but in the low evening light he couldn’t tell for sure. So rather than taking the chance of pushing a wounded animal into the next canyon, we chose to back out and go in after him come dawn. Davey had been the one who’d found Tommy’s elk dead the following morning at first light, and when I called Tommy to tell him that Davey had died, he told me that he’d had a heart attack himself just a week earlier, and that getting to the hospital quickly had been the difference between living and dying.

He was going to be okay, he said. But knowing how these things sometimes seem to come in threes, I couldn’t help but wonder who might be next, little suspecting what the answer soon would be.

Throughout the entire experience, from the sudden hard pain to the long climb alone back down from the top of the ridge to find Jane and Carly, to the frantic ride by car to the first hospital and then by ambulance to the second, throughout the complex procedures to open the blockages in my heart and then the weeks and months waiting to see what might remain, little that had once been important to me – the stock market reports, prices of gold, the pennant races, all the beautiful places I had been, all the beautiful fish and animals I had seen, all the beautiful people I had known -nothing, except for my wife and daughter and brother who had saved my life and then born the brunt of the recovery, had any importance whatsoever.

That first attack had been sudden and brutal, and by all rights it should have taken me right then and there.

I had been in a dark place – not necessarily frightening, but simply dark. The center had been empty and real, two-dimensionally square and canted slightly to the right. And though I could detect some pale and amorphous activity out along its periphery, I couldn’t tell what any of it meant, and frankly I didn’t find it all that important.

For the darkness had no power, and amazingly there had been no fear, no apprehension, no “why me?” By all rights, it really should have been one of those quintessential Run-to-Jesus moments. But for some reason it wasn’t. And that puzzled me.

Now please, don’t get me wrong—He was there. And I knew He was there. I just couldn’t locate Him. Over the years, conversation with Him had become increasingly less formal, more casual and continuing and real, not in any proud sort of way on my part, but in all humility, honored but not nearly appreciative enough to have such a venerable Companion on my journey through the temporal world.

Prayer had instead become more an awareness, a mutual presence, an ongoing and often non-verbal exchange, and rarely, did I ever get around to saying “Amen.” But during that first long night in ICU, and then the days and nights that followed, I couldn’t figure out where He was, though I absolutely knew He was there.

I just couldn’t find Him. And, as I said, that greatly surprised me.

And so finally I had to ask.

His answer was typical and immediate and oh so welcome: “Yeah, I know . . . you couldn’t see me. I was holding you too close.”

But I eventually realized that no matter the degree of my recovery or the length of physical life that might remain, the inevitable result would be that sooner or later I would return to that same dark place. Yet next time I knew I would not feel so alone. For He would be there with me, just as He’d been earlier, to provide comfort in the darkness.

He had, after all, been the first to tread this path, had experienced that abject darkness long before any of us, having faced a far more terrible death than I could ever imagine. He had feared, just as I had feared. But He had defeated fear, and then He’d defeated Death itself and had blazed this trail that now lay before me.

He had come to me early in life and had been far more faithful to me than I had been to Him. Yet He’d never forsaken me, though often I had strayed off in many indulgent and destructive directions.

But now He was here, and I knew he was here, and I felt much better in the assurance that once you know Him, you don’t have to go searching for Him in times of need.

The recovery had been a true reality check. For having already tasted the Eternal, it sometimes became something of a letdown waking up and finding myself still here in the world. At first I had waited to feel human again. But as time wore on, I began to sense that there was so much more to be. Now no longer would the matter-of-fact daily norms of being merely human carry such significance. Image, possessions, accomplishments and the like, as good as they had been, were now only vague and vaporous symbols that I knew I would sooner or later leave behind. Then one night in those single-digit hours I had grown to love, the most fruitful hours there are, the writing began to come.

There had been a couple of pale and impressionistic lines and concepts during those first few nights in Intensive Care.

But this—this—was different.

So I struggled to sit up on the edge of the bed, then fumbled for my light and ever-present pen and pocket journal, and the words and sentences began to come in waves and I was off on an ink-induced odyssey as page after page filled with images and ideas that I knew were not from within myself.

They came from all directions, and this book that I had thought to be nearly finished before everything hit me was now off on a new and uplifting trajectory I had never imagined.

All in all, that last year was a real gift, a true blessing, and the work that came from it was certainly worth sticking around to be a part of. And when it was all done, and once more I suddenly experienced that old familiar pain again centered high in the chest and the return to that same dark place I had been before, I saw it for what it really was – a Passageway into the Light. But this time I knew I was not alone. And when I felt His hands warm and reassuring around me as together we eased forward with the wind and the world at our backs, I remember the supreme comfort of having Him there with me and how utterly happy I was that I had lived this life and loved these people and had been loved by them in return, and how everyone should have the opportunity to experience this.

At least once.