Unknown to her at the time, Sarah survived the BASE jumping accident. It paralyzed her and fractured her skull, she lost consciousness, and she went into respiratory arrest in the ambulance. Just as she reached the hospital, she went into cardiac arrest.

A bright white light shone in all directions, and Sarah turned in a circle, looking up and down, confused. She was not in complete control of her own body. She remembered waking up in the morning, and then with difficulty, she remembered BASE jumping.

I’m dead? Sarah thought. But I checked the gear! I jumped from a safe, beginner height!

Contrary to her first reaction to her present predicament, Sarah realized that she was alive. She held still, unable to go into it or away from the light. She needed to escape, but emotionally, she had no reason to hurry or worry.

Sarah sensed something interacting with her body; the light muffled it. Slowly, the light hurt her eyes, as if they did not constrict, and while her lungs filled and emptied, something other than her body forced them to. Her heart beat after every dull crunch. The interaction stopped. Her heart stopped obstinately and Sarah thought, Come on. Beat. Why aren’t you? I’m still here!

The CPR resumed, paused, and repeated several times. She expected it to resume, but the break lasted longer. Sarah’s muffled sensations faded away.

I’m still here! Keep doing CPR! Sarah told her heart to beat and herself to breathe.

The light faded into a complete absence of colors, including black. Sarah could not feel her body and there was nothing to feel, even her own body’s orientation. It also did not smell or have a sound. Everything that she could sense when alive was absent. But now she remembered her BASE jumping accident and many other forgotten memories.

Sarah knew her body died, with both cardiac death and brain death, as much as she knew in the brightness, her body had been alive.

When she died, Sarah expected a void, but not to be aware of it. She refused to spend an afterlife in her condition, and where were the other people? Vaguely, she noticed something sinister about the void. If people existed after death, reincarnation made the most sense to Sarah. She believed in it for a while and changed her mind. Therefore, she was either alive or queued for reincarnation.

But Sarah sensed her body nearby, and the sinister thing shifted in the distance. Simultaneously, the void did not have a direction or anything to sense. Though recovering from her injuries daunted her and the imagined pain and hospital bills were possibly worse than being dead, Sarah wanted to live and see her family and friends again.

Suddenly, like forgetting a word she used every day and finally remembering it, or forgetting why she walked into a room, Sarah knew the void was not a place in which to exist for very long. Maybe it took a while for her to notice her body was non-functional.

Also, she wanted to escape the sinister thing. It began to scare her.

The sense of Sarah’s body faded away. She thought, I’m not dead. I’m too okay to be dead, but I’m too close to death to be alive. The obvious solution, which automatically popped into her mind and made perfect sense, was to be alive.

Now she needed to convince her body she was alive. Edging towards her body, she repeated, I’m alive!

The sinister presence followed Sarah but stayed far away from her. She developed a sense of impending doom. Although she did not believe in supernatural beings, she knew the sinister presence existed and wanted to kill her. Death seemed like the best name.

Sarah knew she had been in the void for a length of time. However, her thoughts and the events seemed to come at the same time, except for a brief moment when she realized she was not quite dead. As she repeated, I’m alive, time sped up—along with the sense of impending doom.

Eventually, the void faded into the brightness, a considerable improvement. Partly to her relief and to her distress, she physically felt more subdued than on her first trip to the brightness, and mentally, more alert. Sarah wanted to feel normal. She imagined how painful her injuries would be, but she preferred pain and stress to the void and the brightness. She preferred it to the void, but she wondered if Death could follow her there. It lurked beyond the brightness.

Sarah wanted to be donated to the body farm. If the body farm refused her donation, she wanted an eco-friendly burial, which meant the mortician would expect her to decompose in a wooden coffin. At least the forensic anthropologists intended to dig her up again.

Sarah’s body felt very uncomfortable and disconcerted, like her body was a football game which she watched a football game on TV rather than playing the game live. There was something wrong, but she struggled to identify it. She remembered falling 3,000 feet—and she loved it until the wind shifted and failed to inflate her parachute. That’s why I feel bad, she thought.

She thought about each part of her body from head to toe and determined she had a non-functional, stiff body, in the early stages of decomposition. Sarah assumed she lay on her back, but struggled to feel the environment. Although she sensed her body’s presence, she knew she was out of it. The realization made her feel mentally anxious, but physically, she had no symptoms, which simply alarmed her more. Breathing exercises helped if she ignored her inability to breathe.

Sarah decided to use grounding or mindfulness exercises to regain her senses. She tried, unsuccessfully.

I need a body, Sarah thought. As a mantra, she repeated, I have a body.

It worked—the brightness faded into a sensible environment that was Sarah’s body. Sometimes she returned to the brightness or left her body. One trip, the brightness alarmed her so much that she returned to the void and straight into Death. She escaped to the brightness with meditation. However, Death crept into it. If she tried too hard to escape it, she panicked and returned to the void. Death chased her but seemed incapable of following her into her body or dragging her out of it.

Eventually, with mantras, Sarah settled into her body.

Then, also with mantras, she activated her senses. Sarah tried to stabilize one before experimenting with another. At first, she felt like she was lying down and cold, then she heard a very faint, constant, white noise. She saw darkness. She had slight whiffs of her body with a metallic hospital taint.

I can’t be in a coffin, Sarah thought. They closed my eyes, or I’m in the morgue refrigerator, or inside a body bag.

As Sarah regained control over her senses, they faded away and came back spontaneously. Whenever her senses dimmed, she worried she was fading away and dying. She returned to the brightness or the void occasionally, each time with more of her senses intact. Upon returning, her senses required less concentration.

Sarah sensed her environment indistinctly, but she increased her senses and decreased them until they seemed normal or, in the case of pain, tolerable. She strained her sense of taste until her mouth tasted foul. The longer she tasted, the more she hated it. With the sense of pain, she discovered that she had bitten through her tongue. Through the refrigerator, she heard the morgue attendants work. Scents floated into her nose; inhaling required air and the ability to breathe, and she still could not breathe. She tried a normal sense of smell, but her body stank, even inside her own nose. The smell distracted her until she lowered it. To her frustration, she could not move her eyes or eyelids, and she needed to look around. Sight and hearing seemed like the most practical senses. The others distracted her and for the first time in her life, she did not need to tolerate it. Half-reluctantly, a little guiltily, and wondering if she wasted the effort on tasting, she lowered her sense of taste.

She wanted to live, but sometimes death seemed out of her control and sometimes fightable. Sarah decided to fight it. Since grounding, mindfulness, and other meditation methods helped, she learned to use multiple senses at once.

What she sensed distressed her, but her body seemed incapable of showing it. Sarah felt, smelled, and tasted her body decomposing. Also, her emotions remained intact since the first time she entered the brightness. When she dwelt on them, they upset her into the void; she went into the brightness to work them out and she barely avoided Death.

The majority of Sarah’s body was still non-functional. Restarting her senses gave her enough confidence to restart the rest of her body. She considered her heartbeat and respiration most important—without them, she was clinically dead. Sarah knew restarting the heart and respiration was possible. She spent every day of her life breathing and pumping blood, and doing so again must not be outlandishly difficult. She needed to adapt her body to her mind, and, apparently, she had complete mental control over her body’s processes, despite a layman’s anatomical knowledge.

Then Sarah remembered brain cells died quickly and that she should be too brain-damaged to sense anything, let alone have a heartbeat and a pulse. She nearly lost control and went into the void, but she regained it and meditated until her mind was comfortable inside her body.

Just as Sarah made up a breathing mantra, the morgue attendant opened the refrigerator. The fresh air relieved her, and she saw too bright fluorescent light through half-closed eyes. Sorry about the smell, she thought, but the morgue attendants behaved as if she was normal.

Sarah desperately tried to move or speak, but overwrought herself. Her senses flashed off and on. She bounced between her body, the brightness, and the void. A return to the void became more likely than the brightness, but regaining control over her body required less time and effort.

In the brightness, Sarah rested, swearing and complaining, and worrying about Death hovering over her. She calmed herself down and talked herself into her body again. It was the easiest return yet.

Somebody transferred Sarah to a body bag and a vehicle. To avoid alarming the driver, she concentrated on respiration. Immediately, she wanted to attract attention, but as well as not wanting to alarm anybody driving a vehicle, she thought that without a pulse and respiration, people might assume that she was dead and twitching. So, she needed to restart her heart and start breathing.

Further, cells died without oxygen and blood flow, neither of which Sarah had had for hours. I make my body work anyway, so it isn’t a problem, Sarah thought. She wondered when she would reach the squishy, gloopy stage of decomposition—probably soon. When a body part separated from her body, she knew she could not control it.

Through the van ride and a plane trip, Sarah focused on breathing, with the mantra I am breathing. Her sense experiences indicated simple mantras worked better. Guessing how a body part worked and overthinking her organs just confused her; prodding and shifting her body mentally until it seemed normal helped.

The sense of impending doom lurked nearby, despite Sarah remaining in her body. I can’t lose control again, she thought. Death will catch me. But it isn’t a real being. I don’t know what it is, but it can’t catch me.

A conversation upon landing reassured her that she was destined for the body farm. At the moment, Sarah vastly preferred forensic anthropologists to morticians. Forensic anthropologists recognized more weird movements and tiny signs of being alive or corpses’ oddities than a mortician. The forensic anthropologists would examine her closely for weeks or months, and she imagined that at some point, she would be able to move her body. If unable to move, Sarah thought the forensic anthropologists would quickly and expertly recognize she was not a normal dead body.

Somebody from the body farm picked Sarah up from the airport and drove her a short distance. Sarah assumed she was in the body farm facility. Now she needed to breathe—the forensic anthropologists wanted to begin their experiment. According to an overheard phone call, the forensic anthropologists came to the facility on their day off. The speed panicked her, and she spent much of her energy trying to stay calm. She still had little idea of how long a trip to the brightness or the void lasted; she might miss her opportunity.

Two forensic anthropologists, one a man and one a woman, seemed to be the experimenters. They undressed her and examined her, and Sarah clearly saw much of the room as they moved her about. It surprised her; Sarah wore glasses or eye contacts for years, but experimenting with her senses must have helped her eyesight. She read the woman’s name tag, “Linda,” and figured out the man’s name was Bradley.

Desperately, mentally calling to Linda and Bradley, Sarah tried to move her eyes or blink, and breathe at the same time. She lost control of her pain and in a rush to regain it, went into the void. Calm down. I have time, she thought. She meditated briefly before Death snatched her. But she threw him off and returned to her body immediately. Death seemed closer to her than ever, but Sarah calmed down and thought about the trip, only half-thinking about her senses. In her eagerness to escape Death and return to her body, she skipped the brightness. Sarah adjusted her senses and rested for a minute. She thought, I’m getting the hang of it.

Linda and Bradley had wrapped Sarah in a tarp, placed her on a gurney, and taken her outside, and now were digging a shallow hole.

At least it isn’t a trash can, Sarah thought. An airless hole hardly bothered her; apparently, her body considered oxygen inconsequential. Before making her will, she considered the possibility of forensic anthropologists stuffing her in a garbage can, and she accepted the possibility. Currently, practically, once Sarah knocked over the trash can and slumped out, Linda and Bradley would probably think the wind or raccoons knocked her over. Then she decided escaping from a trashcan was easier than a grave. It panicked her and she meditated to calm herself.

Sarah smelled the above-ground corpses scattered over the body farm. If Sarah could breathe, she would have held her breath, and if she had a gag reflex, it would have activated. She reduced her sense of smell further. Linda and Bradley seemed accustomed to the smell.

Even though Sarah did not need to breathe, the tarp worried her, probably irrationally. But breathing and a heartbeat might slow down cellular death—if any of her cells survived so long. She thought, even though she knew perfectly well that she did not need to breathe anymore, I can’t breathe! Hey! I’ll suffocate! It was an instinctive response.

She tried louder and more expressive terms. Trying to attract attention panicked her into the void again. Before she had time to think the first half of a mantra, Sarah returned to her body. However, Death grasped her tightly. She fought it away from her mind and body; she physically sensed Death. By the time she drove it away, her senses returned independently.

Sarah calmed herself down. Living was becoming easier, though she expected it to become harder, so why was Death more powerful? Immediately, Death seemed to be hovering over her, ready to grab her again. Don’t think about it, she thought. Maybe it will go away. A thing taking me into a reincarnated body can’t feel like that. I’m not a bad person.

Sarah wondered if expecting living to be harder made it harder, so attempted positive thinking, but failed. There were few things about which to be optimistic. Linda and Bradley intended to bury her alive; that was a pretty big inconvenience and complication, but in their defense, her will sent her to the body farm. With a broken back, she could not dig herself out of the hole. Death wanted to drag her into the void and probably beyond it.

She blamed nobody for her situation. From Sarah’s perspective, her near-death experience was one of three things: unusual and unobserved, rare and observed by people nobody believed, or perfectly normal and unnoticeable by modern medical science. Sarah wondered how many other people remained mentally alive while their physical bodies decomposed. She dreaded it, so she tried to convince herself she could become clinically alive. The worry and dread brought Death closer. She wondered how long she could resist it.

With more effort than before, Sarah repeated her breathing mantra and visualized breathing. she tried very hard to ignore Linda and Bradley gently placing her face up in the hole and covering her with dirt. The dirt’s weight restricted breathing, but she reminded herself she did not need to breathe yet. A tiny movement was enough. Then she realized the tarp restricted her breathing, too, and it was too tough to tear through.

Sarah was not claustrophobic, but also her experience in small spaces was a few beginner cave tours. She hoped Linda and Bradley wanted to leave part of her sticking out of the ground, but they covered her completely with dirt. To attract attention, Sarah needed a part of her body free and mobile. The alternative was waiting for Linda and Bradley to dig her up and send her to the crematorium—potentially weeks after her body fell apart. Body farms placed cages over the bodies to keep larger carrion animals away, and forensic anthropologists tended to study microorganisms and carrion bugs which ate corpses. Sarah needed something to move, even when she reached the gloopy stage. She hoped the tarp protected her from bugs.

Sarah knew no part of her body stuck out of the dirt. She also decided she was claustrophobic, and if she was able to cry, she would have. But her eyes were completely dry and irritated.

Only a few minutes after Linda and Bradley left, Sarah’s tarp twitched. She expected the tarp to move as the dirt settled and her decomposition attracted worms and the like. Then Sarah noticed the tarp twitching during the mantra. Breathing felt weird and unrecognizable because she lacked air. But her diaphragm moved up and down like she breathed air normally.

To distract herself, and because she wanted a heartbeat the next time Linda and Bradley examined her site, Sarah repeated the mantra My heart is beating. Her chest ached. The hearts of transplant candidates were in better condition than hers. Except for being broken and dead, she was quite healthy; she wondered why her body was so intact after such a long fall. Sarah lost track of time again but tried to figure it out.

The sense of impending doom grew stronger, and whenever Sarah became scared that she was not actually breathing, Death almost grabbed her. She meditated to calm down, which helped a little. Now when she lost control, the void seemed a possibility rather than a certainty. Often, Sarah regained control quickly enough to avoid it. Also, when Death dragged her partly into the void, she scrabbled away and Death released her.

But once, before she could stop herself, Sarah gasped and hyperventilated, and Death yanked her into the void. She fought back.

She had automatic control of her senses and breathed raggedly, hardly paying attention to it, while repeating the heartbeat mantra. She broke out of the void and discovered her heart was pounding. Worried it might stop, she continued the heartbeat mantra. Her chest tightened and her heart threatened to stop, but Sarah settled into a faint, stable but irregular rhythm. Cautiously, she tweaked her heart into a normal-feeling rhythm and hoped she remembered right. She dreaded a defibrillator, thinking it might send her into the brightness or the void, or lower her defenses enough for Death to drag her away.

Mentally and physically, Sarah felt suffocated. Her body knew she needed oxygen, whatever her will said about the matter. At least my lungs don’t burn, she thought.

Sarah’s abdomen and chest bloated and pressed painfully tight against the tarp. She wanted to lower her sense of touch, to avoid feeling a bursting abdomen, but could not, even with mantras. Slowly, the same happened with her other senses. At least I increased my pain tolerance, she thought. I don’t need eye contacts anymore.

But the lack of control worried Sarah, which brought Death closer. She knew if it restrained her, it would take her away. Meditation calmed her somewhat, but as soon as she thought about Death, its ability to capture her became stronger.

Again, Sarah decided to distract herself with an escape plan. To dig out, she needed to move. Though the memories of her impact faded slightly, she remembered the fall paralyzed her from the chest up. Moving her arms and legs was impossible; the fracture restricted her breathing and Sarah assumed it stopped her heart.

Then Sarah wondered if every part of her body needed to work at the moment. She felt that she still had arms and legs. The spine just sent signals; it did not control limbs, and she already proved herself capable of overriding the spine. She just needed to force her hand through the tarp and dirt. Linda and Bradley must notice her hand sticking out of the dirt.

Sarah made up a mantra to raise her arm: Raise my right arm. While visualizing raising her arm, she repeated it. The breathing motions helped, and her heartbeat reassured her somewhat. Her body felt very familiar again, despite the general disgusting wrongness. She raised her arm against the tarp, but tearing through was impossible. Sarah tried until raising her arm felt natural.

Then Sarah finagled her hand palm-up, raised her fingers, quickly taught herself to raise her arm in the new position, and stabbed the tarp with her long fingernails. Finally, her long fingernails broke through one layer of the tarp. She forced her hand through on the next raise and proceeded to stab the remaining layers. Her hand and fingers bruised and split and her nails broke and fell off, but, as she punched through the dirt, the worst feeling was her flesh peeling off her bones. Fortunately, her tendons remained intact. I’m going to lose my hand, Sarah thought.

Forcing through the dirt wore away Sarah’s hands and arms, and she doubted a surgeon could repair it. Her skin, fat, and muscles just felt too decomposed to salvage. Flesh was not supposed to tear the way hers did; she was quite familiar with minor injuries.

On the last arm raise, Sarah felt the air against the remains of her hand. She left her arm up, which was easier than moving it up and down, and enjoyed the feeling of fresh air. Sarah did not know how long digging out her arm had taken, but from temperature changes, she knew when it was day or night. Soon, she felt bugs on her hands.

Because Sarah had a heartbeat and respiration, and Linda and Bradley could see her hand, she relaxed slightly and rested. Few people could argue an adult with a self-sustaining pulse and a heartbeat was dead. Physically, she felt alive and weak. She thought the weakness was just mental exhaustion, but now she thought her body was wearing out. At the idea, Death reached out for her.

Sarah shook off Death again. She repeated a mantra to bend her wrist, and to her surprise, bending her elbow took relatively little effort. To uncover her face, she flopped her arm sideways and ineffectively flapped her wrist, letting her hand sweep the dirt. The effort seemed to keep Death at bay, but made her more desperate to breathe air.

Thinking about life outside the body farm panicked Sarah and the sense of impending doom surrounded her. So, she decided to think about it later, especially because there was no guarantee her plans were realistic. Whenever she panicked, Death grabbed her. Fighting shook him away, and Sarah struggled to remain calm with constant meditation. She knew she needed to uncover her face before Death killed her.

The sense of impending doom started to block out other things like the brightness had. But it was fainter than the brightness. Sarah hoped Linda and Bradley would uncover her soon—she struggled to teach herself a digging motion. She needed to concentrate but was becoming too scared.

Based on temperature changes, Sarah guessed she waited overnight for Linda and Bradley, and she hoped they checked the site every day.

Sarah heard Linda and Bradley approach. She flapped her hand up and down and mentally called, Hey! Linda! Bradley! I’m in here! I’m still alive! Dig me out! What took you so long? Though she instinctively wanted to yell, she worried about losing control. If she lost control one more time, the sense of impending doom would surround her and Death would kill her.

But the sense of impending doom lessened slightly. Death seemed unlikely to grab her, but Sarah thought it might.

“Did we leave a hand exposed?” Bradley asked.

“No,” Linda said. Exasperated, she said, “I hope nobody broke in to hide a body. Good place to hide a body.”

“It has to be a sick practical joke,” Bradley said.

Linda and Bradley examined the site for signs of tampering.

Frustrated, Sarah flapped SOS. She forgot if it went dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot or dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash. With a pause between them, she alternated SOS and OSO.

“Halloween decorations don’t tap OSO,” Bradley said, as Linda opened the cage.

Sarah switched to SOS.

“And they don’t switch to SOS,” Bradley said.

“I’m going to feel the pulse,” Linda said.

“How?”

“Her elbow.”

Sarah considerately held her arm straight up in the air. Linda felt Sarah’s pulse. Feeling another human relieved her and drove the sense of impending doom further away. Sarah clenched her hand around Linda’s arm, startling Bradley and causing Linda to scream and fall over backward. Her arm slipped from Sarah’s grasp. Bradley did not say anything for a moment, but Linda was scrambling away making frightened disgusted sounds. In retrospect, Sarah thought holding Linda’s arm was a bad idea—it would have terrified Sarah, too.

Sarah thought, Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t realize I’m a zombie!

Bradley bent over Sarah’s hand. “Tap once for yes and twice for no,” he said. “If I take your pulse, are you going to grab me?”

Sarah tapped twice.

“Okay,” Bradley sighed. He grudgingly felt her pulse and said, “No pulse,” and retreated as quickly as manfully possible.

I have a pulse! Sarah thought. Why didn’t you feel it?

To Sarah’s relief, Linda asked, “Are you alive, honey?”

Sarah tapped once and continued SOS.

“What if she has a heartbeat and no peripheral pulse?” Linda asked.

“Good idea,” Bradley said.

Already preparing to dig with their hands, Linda called 911 and Bradley other body farm employees. The dispatcher hung up and again when Linda called back. Bradley tried next. He convinced the dispatcher that, while admitting dead bodies belonged on a body farm, this particular one was abnormal.

Linda and Bradley dug over Sarah’s face—they knew exactly where it was. The tarp blocked much light, but she was happy to see it. The sense of impending doom faded away and Death itself slowly retreated into the void. However, she thought it might check on her.

Carefully, Linda cut through the plastic tarp with her pocket knife. Sarah took a deep breath, forcing herself to breathe as if surfacing while free diving, and breathing fresh air felt better than after a free dive. The sense of impending doom vanished, and Death steadily faded away.

Sarah waited hours before attempting to regain more control of her body. Neither the sense of impending doom nor Death itself returned.

In the hospital, the doctor determined she was brain dead, but Sarah vigorously answered yes and no questions to convince him she was alive. Her brain function returned slowly and never to its full extent, but for much of her remaining life, her will overruled her brain. Sarah spent the remainder of her life in the hospital, as surgeons gradually removed as much of her body as possible while also keeping her alive. Initially, she stayed awake through surgeries, and to her relief, the anesthesia dulled the pain. Even sleeping scared her; she thought anesthesia would kill her. Eventually, she felt safe enough to sleep. She forced the other organs to work and made herself live until they did. Many automatic functions returned, but she was dependent on machines to live. As she physically healed, her control slipped away. The less Sarah forced her body to work, the faster her condition deteriorated. She went into a coma, then died peacefully.