Dr Showkat Hussain Shah
In the city of Delhi, where the air is thick with ambition and the pulse of life beats at a relentless pace, the boundaries between science and the sacred often blur. It was during my cardiac residency, while pursuing super-specialization, that I found myself at the intersection of these worlds-a witness to the mysteries that lie between life and death.
It began on a humid afternoon, the kind when the city seems to shimmer with possibility and exhaustion. I was summoned to the outskirts, to a gated estate where an affluent man lay unresponsive. I remember the drive: the city receding behind us, the landscape shifting from the chaos of traffic to the quieter, dustier roads that ring Delhi’s edge. Our ambulance was a capsule of urgency, filled with the antiseptic smell of hope and fear.
The patient was Prem Singh, a man whose reputation preceded him. Even in his unconscious state, there was a certain dignity about him-a stillness that seemed to defy the chaos around him. Our team worked in practiced silence. Twenty times, we delivered escalating DC shocks, each one a desperate invocation to the heart. Twenty times, his body arched and fell back, as if caught in a dance with forces unseen. We intubated him, stabilized him, and began the journey back to Delhi, the city’s lights flickering in the distance like distant stars.
For the next month, Prem Singh became both my patient and my enigma. In the ICU, he hovered between worlds, his heart prone to sudden storms of ventricular tachycardia. Each episode was met with amiodarone and the ritual of the shock-medicine and electricity, science and faith. I watched him closely, searching for fear in his eyes. But each time he returned to consciousness, there was only a calm acceptance, as if he had glimpsed something beyond my understanding.
A few days before his discharge, curiosity overcame my professional reserve. I sat by his bed as the evening sun cast long shadows across the ward. “Prem Singh,” I asked, “why is it that I never see fear in your eyes-not even when you were closest to death?”
He smiled, a gentle curve of the lips that seemed to hold secrets. “It is painful to die,” he said, “and I would miss this beautiful world. He spoke softly, his voice carrying the weight of experience. Despite the melodrama of cinema-blood, tears, last words-his own encounter with death was nothing like that. “Death, for me, was like sleep,” he said. “No pain, no fear. Just drifting away, as if I was being carried on a current I could not see.”
I was struck by the simplicity of his words, and by the sense of peace that radiated from him. In that moment, the ICU seemed to fade away, replaced by something quieter, more profound. I thought of the ancient mystics-Kabir, Rumi-who spoke of death as a return, a homecoming, a dissolution into something greater.
Over the next few days, I found myself returning to Prem Singh’s bedside, drawn by a curiosity that was both medical and existential. I asked him about the moments when his heart had stopped, about what he remembered. He described a sensation of floating, of being untethered from his body. “It was like standing at the edge of a vast ocean,” he said. “I could feel the waves pulling me, but I was not afraid. There was a lightness, a sense of being held.”
I began to ask other patients who had survived sudden cardiac death. Their stories, too, were filled with images of drifting, of gentle darkness, of peace. None spoke of pain. The pain, they all agreed, came with survival-broken ribs from chest compressions, burns from defibrillation, the indignity of tubes and needles. But the moment of crossing over was painless, almost beautiful.
As a doctor, I am trained to trust in science, to believe in the power of medicine to save and restore. But in those quiet hours in the ICU, I found myself wondering about the mysteries that lie beyond the reach of our instruments. What is it, I wondered, that allows some people to face death without fear? Is it faith, or acceptance, or simply the grace of having glimpsed the other side?
Prem Singh’s words stayed with me. He spoke of the world as a place of beauty and sorrow, of love and loss. “We are all just passing through,” he said. “Life is a journey, and death is not the end. It is a return to the source, a merging with the infinite.”
I thought of the ancient texts and religious scriptures -which speak of the soul as eternal, unbound by the body. I thought of the Sufi poets, who wrote of longing for the Beloved, of the heart’s desire to dissolve into the divine. In Prem Singh’s calm, I sensed the resonance of these teachings-a mysticism that transcended doctrine, rooted instead in lived experience.
On the day of his discharge, Prem Singh dressed himself in crisp white, his movements steady and assured. He shook my hand, his grip warm and strong. “Do not fear death,” he said quietly. “It is only sleep. The world will go on, and so will you.”
I watched as he walked out of the hospital, sunlight catching on his shoulders, his back straight, his spirit unbowed. In that moment, I felt a sense of awe-not at the power of medicine, but at the resilience of the human spirit, at the mysteries that lie at the heart of life and death.
As doctors, we fight for life not because death is terrible, but because life is precious. Every heartbeat, every breath, is a gift. And yet, when the time comes, perhaps the greatest gift is to greet death not with terror, but with the quiet courage of one who knows that the journey continues.
Death, I learned, is like sleep. Life is the real adventure. And perhaps, in the end, that is enough.
Let us live to die-and die to live for that eternal life.
(The author is consultant intervemtional cardiologist GMC Anantnag)
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