I don’t really have any memories from the day of my strokes. It’s weird knowing that you were awake… conscious… doing stuff and having conversations… maybe having existential epiphanies about life and existence… but all memory of those things has been burned away forever.

I say “burned away” because something I do have clear memories of is a crazed hallucination I had on the first or second night I was off life support in the ICU. In my “dream”, I was sitting in a room—in my mind—and seeing a film strip of memories in front of me on fire, burning to ash. If you’ve ever seen the anime “Erased”, it’s like the opening to that, but with fire.

(In “Erased”—which should be called “The Town Where Only I Don’t Exist” in the English version, but isn’t, because of chicanery—the main character is able to time travel his adult consciousness into his younger self in order to relive and change past events in his life. the opening shows his young and adult selves sitting in an otherwise empty theater. )

After my memory strip burned up, I was floating in a void, sure that it was the end for me. Somehow, I managed to burst out from the ocean of unconsciousness, a la Naruto in the “Diver” opening to Naruto Shippuden. I was utterly petrified and probably at my maximal blindness, but I can confidently pinpoint that moment as the moment I decided I definitely wanted to—and was going to—live.

My wife and best friend, Dave, were there when I burst out of life-death, and I remember telling my wife not to worry because Dave could just back up my consciousness and install it into a new clone body if anything went bad. Dave assured me he did not have that technology, but my brain was totally scrambled and I was unconvinced that the basis for Jonathan Hickman’s “X-Men: House of X/Powers of X” was fictional.

Central to the foundation of HoX/PoX is the concept that Charles Xavier stores backups of the minds of every mutant so that mutants never die permanently—but when resurrected, they’re missing any memories from between their death and most recent backup. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the implications of that.

Any answers I might have arrived at the day of my strokes, regarding life, the universe, or my part in either, were burned away forever (along with who knows how many billion other memories and brain cells). But if large chunks of me were utterly erased permanently, just like that, was I still really the same “me” at all? I wonder.

For those who haven’t heard me gush about it, I consider House of X/Powers of X to be the greatest and most transcendent comic book narrative of our time. It redefined and reframed decades of comic book history in a way I had never seen before and don’t expect to see again.

I tried explaining HoX/PoX to my neurology team when they came in to evaluate me—including my concern that I’d already died and been resurrected to a backup body—but they also insisted that they didn’t have that technology.

Jonathan Hickman was definitely ahead of his time.