I was clinically dead for two minutes. This is what I saw

Dad later said that when I had the second heart attack it took everything he had not to mount the median strip and follow the screaming ambulance down the wrong side of the road. By the time he caught up to us an hour or so later I was rigged up to Monty Python’s machine that goes PING! in ICU, where I stayed for several days.

I had been to an untroubled place most people access via a one-way street. My father was relieved. I was too young to stay.

When I woke I was glad to see him, as I was to see my mother and the rest of my family who’d raced to my bedside. These were the people I would have left behind, and although I loved them with all my pulverised heart, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have missed them had I remained in that peaceful place.

That’s not heartless, it’s death, or my experience of death. They would have suffered it. Not me. I wouldn’t have been able to miss them. It was the end of my thoughts and everything I’d known hitherto. It was the end of Dad taking me to sport. The end of Mum letting me sit on her lap and drive the last few metres down the drive into the garage. The end of smiles and squabbles with my brother and sister. That bouncer I missed was the end of everything.

And yet, it was merely the end of my cricketing days.

There are so many clichés around death. There was nothing unique about mine, apart from the fact I came back from it. And while I’m glad I did, I would have been quite happy to stay. In that Zen I wasn’t capable of regret, sorrow, or frustration that I hadn’t ticked things off a bucket list. I wasn’t capable of conscious thought. All I felt was warm and safe.

But according to the doctor who resuscitated me (the father of an opposition player, a miracle he was there) I only got two minutes into death. Perhaps in the third minute the horned man with a pitchfork appears and starts berating you for all the things you did wrong, which as a 12-year-old wasn’t much, apart from stealing James Nicholson’s footy cards and having improper thoughts about my science teacher and her plunging neckline.

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All I can say for sure is that the famed light was bright, but I can’t work out if it was bright on the way back or on the way there, and because the only people who report it being bright are those who have returned, I’m afraid my testimony is as unreliable as theirs, and you will have to wait your turn to find out.

Despite death inflicting no physical scar, I now believe mentally it hit me for six, or at least a quick single. Over the course of my second life, even living it to the full and being more adventurous than some, there have been recurring moments of anxiety and panic inordinate to the risk being faced.

I’ve flown planes upside down, been in race cars right way up, travelled the world and moved to a foreign country with one suitcase, but at times a more mundane pursuit can leave me on edge. It took some help to realise that when you turn up to have a hit of cricket as a 12-year-old and it kills you, into adulthood your fight or flight mechanism can work overtime, even when it really doesn’t need to protect you and should clock off.

Years ago I would have told this story without the above two paragraphs but today’s mental health conversation allows me to embrace the scars you can see and the scars you can’t. In fact, I don’t think I would have even asked for help without the shared stories of other brave souls. And I’m so glad I did. It explained everything, especially why I froze while checking the app that Friday night to see where my son was playing the following morning.

Driving to the oval, I realised the person I felt most sorry for was my Dad – I had never really considered what it must have been like from his point of view, taking his son to sport one random Saturday only to see him die in front of his eyes.

He was sitting beside me, as was my daughter, who couldn’t get her head around the whole thing but who whispered when I put her to bed the night before that she was “happy you didn’t die, Dad, coz you’re the best Dad there is”.

“It would have been exactly here,” said my Dad, pointing out the oblivious patch of grass on which I’d collapsed about halfway between pitch and pavilion.

I hugged my father, my kids, and felt incredibly grateful there’d been a doctor there the day I entered the lobby of death’s hotel and saw enough to know that it’s five-star. Pure peace. Nothing to be feared apart from the road you take to get there and the wellbeing of the people you loved and left behind.

When your cricket ball comes, they will be the ones who remember everything you forget. So love them with all your heart while it’s still beating strong.

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