Fay Weldon’s near-death experience
Fay Weldon’s Christian faith was of little comfort when she nearly died and found herself at the pearly gates.
Fay Weldon’s Christian faith was of little comfort when she nearly died and found herself at the pearly gates. The 77-year-old novelist had a near-death experience in 2006, when a severe allergic reaction briefly stopped her heart.
It wasn’t the usual, blissful trip through a glowing tunnel. “I had this vision,” she tells Elizabeth Grice in the London Daily Telegraph. “There were the pearly gates, but they were double-glazed pearly gates. Not a nice, genteel English taupe color but phosphorescent oranges and pinks, like an Indian temple. When they slipped open, there was this terrible creature on the other side like a German expressionist drawing.” Weldon assumed it was Cerberus, the mythical three-headed dog that guards Hades. “It was trying to pull me through and these other people—presumably the doctors—were trying to pull me back in a tug of war.”
When she recovered, she told the medical staff, “If that was dying, I don’t want to do it again.” Not only does the hereafter have vulgar décor, Weldon says, it’s “just more of the same. More struggle.”
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