Last words

on a near-death experience

Tanya Shadrick, age 33, days after her return from sudden near death

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“The light. Did I see it? What people want to know when they learn about my sudden near-death at thirty-three. Yes, I saw a light, I say. It changed me. But not in ways that were quick or comfortable. I practised no faith before it, and none since. And I can’t know if what I glimpsed was the realm of god or physics, or just an effect of my body draining fast of blood and oxygen - only that it left me unable, on return, to sleepwalk through days as I’d been doing.” The Cure for Sleep (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 2022)

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Eighteen years ago today my life almost ended in minutes. Every slow, effortful experiment in living I’ve undertaken since - hospice scribe, creator of a mile of writing in public, mentor, publisher of other people’s soul stories here and elsewhere - comes from what I glimpsed then/there…

My body was going to hospital. My self, however, set out in another direction. Where was I? (In no pain, I had mind enough to talk to myself like this.) Upwards and tidal slow, I was floating on a blackness that had distance, volume. Words and phrases began happening. Spacetime! And here I was, going through the dark towards a distant, tiny whiteness that contained an immensity. It was – oh why was I so far away still? – it was an inhabited light in which every being that ever lived had slipped its skin, and divisions, and prejudice; a portal to good intent, where anything in this earthbound life not simply kind and courageous was burnt away on entry. I travelled faster, glad to go, unburdening myself of old hurts and longings as I went.

No matter to me if my NDE was a glimpse of an afterlife or only a chemical effect. What lasted was that brief but joyous sense of a collective generosity & my wish ever since to be part of that: here, now.

Thank you to everyone here who has joined me in any of the works I’ve made in response to that call - the mile of writing at Pells Pool and the Watermarks anthology I published alongside it, the book I published next of the late Lynne Roper’s Wild Woman Swimming diaries, my collective Concentrates of Place and Birds of Firle projects, and the hundreds of short true soul stories I’ve collected from so many of you here on Substack for this project.

And thank you too - so very much - to every reader of my book who responded to my story with ones of your own: not only on here for this project, but as private messages sent when I was more often and openly online. What truths we have shared.

This day last year I was travelling from Sussex to the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire to co-deliver a week’s intensive teaching. It was an honour to be asked, and the women I worked with were wonderful. But I knew, even before I arrived, that it would likely be my last substantive piece of public work. Certainly as this kind of radically open writer-in-the-world.

All year since then I’ve been living a very private town-based life once more, with a growing certainty that I’ve told the stories I needed to for now. Instead of writing I spend hours every day repairing windows, painting woodwork. I don’t know how I will earn my living in the long term but this year it feels good to be working in a wordless solitary way after almost two decades being so determinedly wide open to the world.

The last time I plan to talk about my book is this Thursday 28th November for All My Wild Mothers author Victoria Bennett as part of her extraordinary

Wild Women Writers' Salons

series. I will be sharing a conversation on motherhood and writing with Vik and fellow memoirists

Caro Giles

&

Alice Kinsella

. I’d love it if you’d join us.

I will continue to keep the three-season archive of writing prompts online here at Substack and free to all who want to take part by adding short true soul stories of your own. And you can continue to expect feedback from me, although I will only be online once a month to read and respond. It is always the best kind of writerly gift to be entrusted with stories being dared and shared.

I’d also invite you to take time to read and reply to posts made by fellow project members under each of the writing prompts: even though I’m not here often anymore, I’d love it if this space continues to be a place where you can meet like-minds and support each other in your life-writing journey.

With gratitude and admiration for all you’ve shared with me here,

Tanya x