In these troubled times,
My thoughts turn toward Heaven.
But St. Peter puts up a sternly firm hand,
And stops me in my forthright tracks.

"It's not yet your time, my child",
Came his compassionate refrain, laced with sweet sorrow,
"I'll see you back here when four or five decades have marched upon your Earthly home".

I awoke from the muffling, euphoric anaesthetic,
Groggy, searching frantically for that great white, all-encompassing light,
With the enveloping love in which I had so recently been swathed,
But all that met my bleary eyes were green-garbed figures, masked as if hiding a terrible crime,
Or like characters in a Karlof movie; perhaps this was merely a nightmare I had not yet shaken off of me.

"You died on us there for a minute or two".
That seemed uttely incredulous, for never had I felt more alive.
But what else could explain my temporarily free and giddy spirit,
To rise triumphantly from a broken-down, long-condemned body, a ripe target for the wrecking ball
And be embraced, lovingly stroked in an alien way, for on Earth I am untouchable?

"I want to go back there. This life holds no treasures for me. Please let me return and nobody has to be the wiser".
But even as I saw my pitiable words tumble onto the shining floor and roll under a hospital gurney,
I knew the "Kevorkian Philosphy" did not include terminal cancer of the spirit and the soul.

Jane Wanklin
1997

A woman's attempted suicide denies her access into Heaven.