Gasp

The book changed my life forever.  I was forty-five when I read it for the first time, back in 1972, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read it since.  A Jesuit by training, embarked upon a lucrative writing career exploring the bio-ethics of organized religion, I was compelled to toss over everything I had ever believed or espoused about the meaning of life, death, and the hereafter.

Written by Romain Gary, a Lithuanian-born French writer, The Gasp presented an all-too-believable tale of a scientist who discovered and captured the most powerful force ever unleashed in the universe—that peculiar energy that leaps forth from an individual at the moment of death—which Gary’s protagonist christened the gasp.

That final exhalation is portrayed as a pulsing orb of energy more powerful than the atom, and regarded by many in the book as the human soul, the giver of all life.  The book was fiction, of course, and no one to my knowledge has ever seen the gasp.  But that mattered not a whit to me.

In fact, Gary’s concept fed off the unrest that had been stirring in my own conscience for quite some time, a disquieting and growing belief that the entire mystical-Christian story of creation could not possibly be true—not if the laws of physics were to be believed.

I began for the first time to think of the soul, not as the God-gifted, morally-driven seed at the centre of human life, but as an energy source—a beacon of light, a fountain of flame, a cauldron of vivacity—an indivisible part, although smaller by exponential multiples, of the energy that powers the universe.

In short, I came to believe the source of every individual life derives not from a mythical creator, but from pure energy unleashed.  It is, as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, …the force that through the green fuse drives the flower…[and] ticked a heaven round the stars.

I’ve never been able to explain the original source of that energy, but because science tells us the universe is expanding, not contracting, I’ve concluded that every time a gasp escapes a dying life, it does not dissipate and fade to nothing.  Rather, it is rejoining the cosmos from which it came.  That mote of energy that has powered me for these ninety-three years is, therefore, eternal—which, I concede somewhat sheepishly, does reinforce the Christian notion of everlasting life.

I must also confess, lest you think me batty, that I have never had the opportunity to put my theory to the test.  But now, alas, the time is nigh, and you have found me intubated, wired, IV’d, sedated—a shell of my former self, and one whose earthly journey will shortly come to its conclusion.

I find myself wondering if I shall be conscious of my last gasp, discerning of the energy as it leaves my body.  I am curious as to whether any part of my conscious mind will go with it, or whether my awareness will die along with my failing corporeal shell.  In other words, will I know at the moment of death that I have died?

But as I have written elsewhere—

I would have to live

forever to realize

I’ve already died

Nevertheless, I implore you to stay with me.  Watch and listen for my final moment.  And if you detect my soul escaping, you will know I am embarked on the next phase of my journey—

the uncertainty

of the start pales next to the

glory of the end

So watch and listen, I implore you.  Watch and listen.  Watch and…

<gasp>

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2021}