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that, no warning, everything changes. It could have been the same thing for me. But, you know, E.J.’s death was just so unfair. He’s healthy, he didn’t do anything to get the cancer. He just got it. If I had died, that was on me. I was the one who caused it by going out on the pond and falling through the ice. So between what happened to E.J. and me, it hit me pretty good.
    â€œI realized you don’t get any guarantees on how long you live. I tell my kids, I tell Gregory, if he’s going through a tough stretch [in hockey], you can’t get too upset with little things you think are big things because, well, you never know . . . which is funny me saying that, because when I coached, [like] any coach, we all get so goofy about a loss or a losing streak, but it’s really not life-altering stuff, even if we think it is when it’s happening.”
    Campbell has since dabbled a little in trying to understand the hereafter. He’s read material about people with near-death experiences, in particular Dr. Eben Alexander’s
Proof of Heaven,
a bestselling non-fiction book that chronicles the story of the atheist neurosurgeon who came out of a week-long coma believing he had come in contact with heaven.
    Campbell’s own near-death experience didn’t leave him with any deep or abiding knowledge of what happens, or doesn’t, after you die, but he was unquestionably curious about those two visions that had come to him so vividly at the precise moment when he thought he was about to die.
    â€œWho knows what it all means?” he said. “Is [life and death] just fate? Are you just lucky to live or unlucky to die? Is your time just up? I don’t honestly know the answers to those questions, but I’ve thought about them. I don’t really talk too much about [the visions] because I think people look at you like you’re a bit crazy. It’s not like I saw myself at the gates of heaven with Roger [Neilson], my dad, my grandfather, all there waiting for me, waving at me. That’s not it.
    â€œI’m no more religious now than I was before [the near-death experience]. You know, I’ve always believed in God, gone to church, so you do kind of wonder about it all. I mean, was it something more than dumb luck that got me through it? I think maybe it was. I guess I really wonder about that moment in time, those seconds, when you think you’re dying. I know I went from being anxious to panic-stricken to ‘I’m done,’ and I won’t forget that scary feeling of thinking my life was over.
    â€œI think of those poor people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and as they were falling to their death, however many seconds it was that they were still alive while they were falling, what must have been going through their minds? There was a story I saw of a construction worker who fell off a 70-storey building and died when he landed on top of a 15-storey building, so for 55 storeys and however long it takes to fall that far, he was alive. What was he thinking? What was that like for him? Because I can tell you, for the last 30 to 40 seconds I was underwater, I was certain I was dying. But I didn’t, and I’m not sure exactly why.”
    Campbell is wholly certain of only two things, really.
    One, after coming so close to dying, he’s happy to be alive; he cherishes each and every day.
    Two—and he isn’t being flippant about it—he hopes others will think twice before they venture out like he did: “I’ll never go out on another pond. Growing up, I’d play pond hockey all the time. There wasn’t a day went by when I was a kid that I didn’t walk across the frozen pond in town and never thought twice about it. But I can’t do it now. Those days are over.”

CHAPTER 2
Magic Hands, Healing Hands
Mark Lindsay’s ART Form and Desire to
“Stay Hungry, Hidden and Humble”
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    The best