Being Marie Celeste

As surreal as her life had been in the past few years, Marie Celeste didn't find this additional bit of weirdness jarring in the least, this unexpected inheritance from a great-aunt she never knew because her parents had never talked about her, and she didn't even care whether such a person really existed, or this was one more odd occurrence in the series of odd occurrences her life had become. Six years had passed since her "visit to the other side", as she jokingly liked to call it, and even to this day, despite all of her pondering and rational analysis, she couldn't figure out how she was still alive. The kiss of the great beyond, the experience of being no more, had left an indelible imprint on her psyche, a turning point whose life altering quality she could neither explain nor deny.
She didn't want to call it what it was, despite the countless support group meetings and counseling sessions and friendly pep talks, because the term near death experience sounded so clinical, like a machine's mechanical failure, what did those people know about life and death, anyway?
They all seemed so keen to offer advice and guidance, which Marie Celeste bitterly cast into categories inside her mind sorting them into unwelcome, marginally useful and simply inept, because she couldn't describe it to another person, that last-minute decision not to walk past the halfway point of the passageway that connects life to the other life, connects, not divides, and the absolute knowing that death doesn't really exist.