The Dragonfly by Raymond Hopkins - HTML preview

EPILOGUE

I didn’t know how it was possible.  I still don’t know.  What I said to him at that point must necessarily come under the heading of medical confidence.  I see him from time to time, not always in my professional capacity and he appears to the casual glance to be a well balanced and happy young man, albeit a much more lonely one than is normal for someone of his age.  In addition, there is an underlying layer of tension and disturbance, again more than is normal for someone of his age.  I have checked the story as well as I could and found nothing to show that Mr. Harris was fantasising totally.  There are too many hard facts for his story not to be true in principle, though how much is due to his closeness to death on the mountain is open to doubt, and clearly will always be.  Donald Vickers is real enough.  His daughter Gabrielle is, or was, real enough.  Even the mark on Donald Vickers’ forehead is real enough, as is the fact that it appeared only fairly recently.  I really do not know what to make of it, except to assume that Bernard Harris was saved from certain death on a bleak and lonely mountainside for some reason which is not yet apparent and which cannot be explained on anything less than logical grounds.

As for myself, well, I have been a scientist for most of my adult life, a man of reason and rationality, having adopted reason and rationality after losing my faith.  I am reluctant in the extreme to adopt any non-rational explanation of the story Bernard Harris told me.  I have come via a long road of tortuous self doubt to believe in the things I could measure in a scientific manner, and only in those things.  As a doctor, I have seen too much death to have any illusions about the possibility of there being life after it.  Heaven does not exist and Hell is what we make for ourselves here on Earth, except for one thing.  If what he tells me is true and I see no valid reason to doubt it, then should I now alter my view and accept that Bernard Harris was visited by... by what?  A ghost?  An angel?

 A human version of a dragonfly returning briefly to the water that gave it original life? 

If that is correct, then perhaps I have wasted my life after all.  If that is correct, then truly he has been touched by the hand of God and I have been given the awesome privilege of bearing witness to the fact.

 I wish I knew why.