My Near-Death Experience: A Not-So-Ordinary Day
At 23 years old, I was vibrantly alive. I was one credit short of having a bachelor’s degree in Theology, working as a McDonald’s manager, and having the time of my life. I had a family who loved me, great friends, a crush on a very cute guy, and plans to return to school for nursing. I was a normal young woman with a bright future ahead of her.
One tiny blip on the radar of my ordinary, happy life was this annoying habit of having an ankle that would twist on the tiniest uneven surfaces, causing me to careen to the ground without warning. The orthopedic surgeon assured me that a simple surgical procedure would stabilize my ankle. It seemed like an important step to take before I started the process of becoming a registered nurse.
The plan was to have surgery, with a spinal anesthetic, tighten the loose tendon in my ankle, wear a walking cast until it healed and get on with life. I eagerly agreed to move forward.
On that very ordinary day, the day of my surgery, I remember signing reams of paperwork in a cubicle with brown wooden partitions giving an illusion of privacy, with my mom sitting next to me. I felt a twinge of nervousness as most people do before surgery, comforted that she was beside me, quietly supporting me and joking with me, as was her way. I also remember being pushed in a wheelchair sometime after the surgery by an exuberant young lady in the youth group I led, zooming down the halls and laughing as we went. I remember very little of anything else for the next two years. What I share with you now, about the events of surgery, have been told to me by health care professionals who were present, family members and medical records.
As the story goes, the surgery went well, and the tendon was repaired. Then something unusual happened. The spinal anesthesia spread much higher than it normally does. I experienced a “high” spinal – meaning the numbness of my lower body climbed into my chest cavity – causing my lungs to stop expanding and my heart to stop beating.
A code (an overhead page alerting a special life-saving team) was called into the operating room, and they went about saving my life. The code team and the surgical team would have administered oxygen and performed chest compressions as part of their resuscitation efforts, like you see on all hospital medical dramas. In spite of their best efforts, which did save my life, my brain did not receive enough oxygen and I experienced brain swelling, or cerebral edema.
Once resuscitated, they wheeled me into the intensive care unit, past my frightened parents, who were in the surgical waiting area. Unconscious, my body was showing signs of anoxia, or outward signs that my brain didn’t get all the oxygen it needed to simply wake up and carry on. I had the clinical appearance of what is called ‘posturing’ in medical jargon. My arms were tightly flexed, toes pointed, and there was a rigidity about me that is quite different from someone who is simply sleeping.
The physicians did not know if I was going to survive. If I lived they did not know what my brain function would be, or if I would ever again be normal. My family and friends entered the waiting zone, that dreadful space of feeling powerless, worried and hopeful all at the same time, while I went dancing.
An Ocean of Love
While my family was waiting to see if I would live or die, I found myself in another realm which we refer to as ‘heaven’ but was unlike anything I had ever imagined.
I found myself within an environment that I can only describe as Love or Light but unlike any physical experience of love or light I have ever known. I was within, and part of, the energetic force of Life itself, and I knew this was God.
It felt like I went on forever, boundaries did not exist, but I was also small, compared to this ocean of Love I found myself within. I was one with everything, as if we all shared one heartbeat, but without the heart, or the beat. If another part of Love was experiencing something, or knew something, so too did I. It wasn’t like trees were over there, animals over there, people over here and God up there. It simply was the totality of everything.
I was Love, freedom, joy and peace all at the same time – and so was everything and everyone else. And within all of it was a buoyancy, a feeling that I can only describe as laughter rippling throughout everything. The concepts of separation, rejection, and unworthiness are laughable. We are Love and we are one. There was some sense of individuality but only in the sense that a droplet of water is part of a waterfall, or crashing wave, or roaring river.
My earthly life simply vanished. I had absolutely no desire to return because I had no memory of ever being here. I didn’t care what was going on with my physical body. I found myself in an existence that felt more real than anything in this life ever has. It felt very much like I was home.
That meant I felt limitless, light and free. There was absolutely no ego, no personality to please, no desire to fit in, no concept of separation, no fear. All of that had melted away when I left my body.
I no longer had five senses, but I heard music, saw colors and experienced touch. Everything was alive, conscious, and connected. Exquisite, ethereal, harmonious, music enfolded me, lifted me, and was me. We are frequency, each of us a different note within the music of Creation.
I saw the most brilliant colors imaginable, much more radiant than any color I’ve seen on Earth. “Seeing” color was different from looking at an exquisite color and feeling inspired. That’s a wondrous feeling, but it pales in comparison to the colors I saw, and became when I was out of my body. We are so incredibly, vibrantly beautiful! All of creation, animate or inanimate, is made of this melodic, colorful, energy of Love, of God, and it is stunningly beautiful.
I felt weightless and free, kind of like floating in a swimming pool on a warm day. I did not have a single care or concern. In fact, they didn’t exist. It was as if everything heavy had remained in my body and I was nothing but liquid light. I say liquid because there was a subtle density to whatever I was part of – not heavy or even measurable, but still that feeling of substance. I had never known such connection, belonging and feeling of being cherished as I did while free of my body.
I didn’t miss my family at all, which sounds peculiar, because I loved them, but from my perspective we were not separate. I didn’t miss them because every experience and perception of separation that I had ever known, including the sense of loss that comes from our experience of one person dying before the other, vanished. In less time than it takes you to blink, we would have been together in that realm where time does not exist, no matter how much chronological time had passed here. There was only now.
There is another reason I didn’t miss my friends, family or beloved pets. As incredulous as this sounds when the world feels so polarized, we all actually love one another with a fierce and joyous intensity. We love one another with exactly the same intensity there as we do our most cherished family members here. I didn’t miss my family because I felt like I was home, and all of life, all humanity was my family.
While it’s true that the experience of Love is all encompassing in that realm, our experience of love here is anything but perfection. The bonds of intense love we share here, with a few select people, do not lessen or disintegrate when we leave our bodies, it’s just that we suddenly find ourselves feeling that way toward everyone. And, while enfolded in that Love in that realm, we are absolutely capable of journeying alongside our family and friends still in physical form. ‘Dead’ people do hear us. They do talk to us, they do strengthen us and they do share in our lives. But the experience of loss we know so well, is unique to having a body. They don’t miss us, but we miss them and from their place of Love, they are more capable of seeing us, understanding us, and supporting us then they ever could while alive. And they do.
That part of me that remained in tune with my family’s life experience is ultimately what brought me back to my body. While I would have been quite content to stay right where I was, the cries of my younger brother reached me, and since my life’s work was incomplete, I came back.