This is about the character Heartman, a researcher of the "Beach" (the afterlife) in the video game *Death Stranding*.
Once upon a time, on the day Heartman was undergoing heart surgery at a hospital, an unprecedented disaster struck humanity, claiming the lives of countless people. Heartman's wife and daughter also became victims of the disaster. Although the hospital where Heartman was having surgery was far enough from the disaster zone to avoid direct damage, the calamity caused a power outage, shutting down Heartman's artificial heart-lung machine. As a result, Heartman died.
When he came to, Heartman had been transferred to the afterlife, the "Beach." Around him, the hollow-faced souls of those killed in the great disaster wandered aimlessly. There, Heartman spotted his wife and daughter and rushed toward them, but immediately afterward, a mysterious force pulled him away from them and dragged him somewhere else. Heartman cried out in tears to his wife and daughter: "Wait! Don't leave me behind!" That was the last time Heartman ever saw his wife and daughter.
When he opened his eyes, Heartman was back on the operating table in a hospital in the world of the living. The backup power for his artificial life-support system had kicked in, and he had miraculously been resuscitated. However, plunged into despair over the loss of his beloved wife and daughter, and driven by an overwhelming desire to see them again, Heartman decided to attempt suicide—for just three minutes at a time. He would stop his heart and use a defibrillator device, set to trigger after three minutes, to forcefully shock his heart back to life.
By doing this, Heartman was able to explore the afterlife for short periods. Day in and day out, he repeated suicide and resuscitation, wandering the afterlife in search of his wife and daughter, eventually becoming the world's leading authority on the afterlife.
As a result of continuing such an abnormal lifestyle for many years, his heart became deformed, causing him to develop a strange condition where his heart would naturally stop every 21 minutes. Since then, to prepare for the death that visits him every 21 minutes, Heartman has kept a resuscitation device strapped to his body at all times. He dies and is brought back to life 60 times a day, experiencing this over 218,000 times—all to save humanity by solving the mystery of the afterlife, and simply to see his beloved family once more.
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