Kennison's Gifts-Author's Note

This story came to me in such a strange and enchanting way, that I thought the convergence of events that spawned the original idea might be worth telling.

In the summer of 1968, after surviving a tour of duty in Vietnam, I had a freakish accident, and had the first of my two death experiences. As I stopped breathing, and was clinically dead, I felt as if I was floating above the room. I could see the people below hovering over my body as they attended to my wounds. Luckily, I was resuscitated by an army buddy, and when I slipped away again, was resuscitated a second time by a paramedic administering CPR.

Later when recalling those events, it seemed to me that I had felt enormously at peace, and thought at the time, that if this is death, it will be OK.

Thirty-one years later, while living in Florida, I suffered a severe heart attack, died a second time, and had a completely different death experience than before. I saw old photographs from my life, beginning with my childhood, and leading up to the present. As they seemed to float past me, they became increasingly fast moving. As they reached almost blurring speed, they suddenly stopped, and I thought, wait, I have more photos to see.

I learned later that a doctor had been beating on my chest repeatedly, while waiting on the defibrillator. I was told that they had shocked me with the paddles three times before my heart began to beat again.

Sometime in the early 1990s, between those two major events, I watched a TV news magazine program that examined the stories of several people who had died, and been brought back to life. The TV show termed these as near-death experiences. Some of these people told of similar experiences to my own, and others said that they had been drawn toward a bright light, but were sent back by someone. All experienced a similar euphoric feeling and all seemed to think as I had, that if they had died, it was OK.

At another time, I watched a news magazine show that told of several people, who at a very young age and without any previous training had exhibited some phenomenal artistic abilities. The show did not attempt to explain this phenomenon, but simply left viewers to wonder how and why.

I was raised by a Christian mother who insisted that I attend church and Sunday school, but I have never been a religious person in a dogmatic sense. Though I do have my own spiritual beliefs, I have no particular argument with anyone else’s. So, when it comes to religious faiths, I am simply by nature the wondering type, and I don’t necessarily disbelieve in anything.

At the time the story idea came to me, I was spending four days a week on the road as a sales rep, and I was lonely and bored. My wife, I suspect being tired of listening to my complaints, suggested that since I was always telling stories to our kids, I should try to write a novel.

With all of the events I’ve previously described converging in my mind at the same time, I played a game called “what if ” that I had read about in one of my “how to write fiction books.” I thought, what if, when a person dies, their soul returns into that bright light that some of those folks on the TV said they were drawn towards. And if that is true, perhaps a new soul comes from that same light to inhabit the body of a new born baby.

From there, the “what if game” led me to imagine what would happen if a life, at the instant of its death, were to pass on to a new life, at the instant of it’s birth, some special gift. Which is the only thing I could come up with that explains the phenomenal artistic abilities of those children that I mentioned earlier—and from that stroll through the “what ifs,” the idea for this story was born.