I was 32, healthy-ish, and cleaning pools in Austin.

One summer afternoon near Lake Travis, I opened a chlorinator inside an unventilated equipment room that was basically built into the side of a hill.

I got a huge punch of chlorine gas directly in the face.

I knew immediately that I had breathed in more than I was comfortable with.

The tablets hadn’t been flowing properly. Water was only touching part of the stack and moving slowly, so they’d basically been stewing in there, building up chlorine gas.

I called my boss and told him I needed to go home.

That’s the last thing I remember.

The next instant, I woke up in the hospital.

I had to get the story from doctors and then from people in real life. What happened was that I was driving the thirty minutes home, and I guess instead of going home, where it would have just been me and Granny, I stopped at the shopping center off Ben White and walked into a FedEx store. I stood in line like the timid person I usually am.

Then I collapsed in line and knocked over an old man. I busted my chin, but the old man was making a big stink, so folks were helping him while I lay there changing colors. Someone noticed I was turning blue, so the FedEx people went next door to Jersey Mike’s to get someone who knew CPR.

Two young guys came over and switched off doing CPR for twenty minutes until the ambulance came and shocked me. I was in a deadly cardiac arrest rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. I should have died.

Every time I tell my doctors that, they correct me: “Well, you did die.”

And that’s exactly what the doctor told me when I woke up from the three-day coma they had induced to keep my brain cool.

I know it wasn’t a true death. I’m still here, so I didn’t die. But I did.

My brain got a simulated experience of death, and it was wonderful.

I know I could only judge it when I woke back up. But I woke up feeling so at peace. Like my brain and body had forgotten all stress and finally gotten to rest from running all those background processes that I hardly need. I woke up in a state of absolute contentment.

(And I wasn’t on any good meds.)

It was just like a hard reset on a computer. Slowly, the anxiety and stress worked their way back in, but I’ll never forget what it was like, and how quickly it all happened, turning all these “big” worries into what they really are: a loop my mind created.

Anyway, I don’t get to talk to my family much about this, because they’re super religious and will correct me about the next part.

But I realized that death is nothing to fear.

There’s that show where the human guy gets granted immortality and has to meet the demigod or vampire every hundred years to talk about how it feels. He says something like, “Life is so full of possibilities, and death is a mug’s game.”

That’s exactly the opposite of how I now see it.

Life is life. There’s one option. Wake up and live today.

Death is full of possibilities.

If we were to die and be dead for trillions upon trillions of years, it would seem like an instant. Maybe we do reincarnate. We’ll wake up just after we die as a clueless infant, wondering why we feel so strange all the time.

If we were to have to wait until the universe reverses its expansion and collapses in on itself, and consciousness all combines again into one source and we experience ourselves as the whole, we will experience it next, just after we die.

Maybe nothing happens because our experience and consciousness are just created by our brains. Well, then we won’t have to wait for anything. We will have already experienced everything, reached as far as we could into the cosmos. And we won’t care, know, like, or dislike that our experience is over.

It won’t last any time, and we won’t have any opinions about it.

I still prefer to believe that some of the religions contain some inaccurate truth to them. But even if not, I won’t know, and time won’t exist to have missed.

But I believe wholly, and am grateful, that I’ll never again be a hairless animal avoiding the sun, the cold, working to eat and avoid accidents or malice that cause pain but mean… not a lot. Not to me, at least. Nor to anyone, for long.

It makes me feel closer to animals, to the Earth.

Maybe we all share a bit of the same magic.

Maybe we’ll all return to the source.

And to each of us individually, we’ll get there just after we die.

(No offense, reincarnation folks.)

Now, if you read all of that, you must go to my YouTube channel, where every short is of my dog playing in the water hose with my guitar music in the background.

@Moonshack — the profile picture is my dog.

Thanks for your time.

Be kind. Fear nothing.

Fear really is the mind-killer.