• P.W.L. is a physicist with one of the largest public utilities in Canada. He had an NDE in 1965, a decade before Life After Life appeared. P.W.L. only realized that other people had had a similar experience when he happened upon the condensation of Moody’s book in Reader’s Digest in 1976. He never spoke of it to others until 1989, when he took an introductory course on the New Testament at the Toronto School of Theology. Early on a Saturday in January 1965, he was involved in a serious car accident on the Gardiner Expressway, the major arterial roadway running along the Toronto waterfront. The police closed the Gardiner immediately afterwards and the story was carried in the final edition of the Toronto Star the same day. His memory of the actual crash was “wiped out,” he says. He was not wearing a seat belt and only learned later that he had been battered between the two doors and the steering wheel and then thrown clear. He does remember lying waiting for the ambulance and giving his girlfriend’s phone number to some bystanders. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital where, in emergency surgery, his ruptured liver was sutured and repairs done to a series of tears in his lower intestine. While unconscious on the operating table, P.W.L. had “an amazing experience.” He became aware of a bright, round, yellow light overhead. “Then, I was up there beside the yellow light, watching the operation from the vicinity of the ceiling. I could see myself in the yellow illumination, in sharp focus on the operating table below. There was medical equipment above my body but it didn’t impede my view in any way. I had the feeling that I was in the arms of God. An overwhelming sense of unconditional love and concern and support completely saturated me, in direct mind-to-mind contact, and it persisted for an indefinite duration. There was no dialogue involved. And then I woke up in the recovery room. My immediate reaction was, ‘So that is what God is like!’” Having graduated from university in physics not all that long before, he says he was a “nominal Christian” with considerable skepticism prior to his NDE. He is aware that what happened to him is not firm proof of anything, but it changed his religious outlook completely. “Before, I could only hope, but now I know what God is like and that God loves each of us, whether we deserve it or not.” One immediate result of the NDE, he says, is that he proposed to Jean, his girlfriend, while he was still in hospital, and they were married nine months later. I met with this man not long ago at the close of a lecture I had just given. We discussed his NDE briefly and I must say that I have seldom met anyone whom I would judge to be less given to hallucinations or flights of fancy than this particular scientist.
• Several women wrote about NDEs or out-of-body experiences they had had during the process of giving birth. Two of these were instances where the baby was either born dead or died during the delivery. P.R., for example, relates that on August 1, 1947, she had the following “unforgettable experience.” She was in the delivery room of the local hospital. “Something had gone wrong with the way the baby was being born. Suddenly, I remember, I found myself walking up a path in a beautiful garden. The scent of the flowers was over-powering. I was walking towards a figure dressed in white, surrounded by a bright light. This person was holding a baby in his left arm and holding his right hand out to me. I heard someone calling me from what seemed a long distance away and suddenly I was out of the garden and back in the delivery room. One of the nurses, who happened to be a friend of mine, told me that the baby had died. I have not been able to talk about this very much but have told members of my prayer group.”
• J.C.S. writes: “On my father’s deathbed, but while he could still speak, he told my husband and me that he had nothing to fear now that the end of this life was drawing to a close. Then he told us about his bout with pneumonia in 1939 or 1940, pre-antibiotics, at home. He said he had never felt so ill before or since. Then he ‘died.’ He was at the ceiling of his bedroom looking down at the doctor seated by his bed shaking his head at his body, with his parents standing arm-in-arm behind the doctor. His father was grim-faced clutching his wife who was sobbing gently. Dad was met by a being of pure, warm inviting light. No words were spoken, but there was clear communication. This being was to be his guide. The ceiling ‘disappeared’ and he found himself, with his guide, on the edge of a shining path. He was gently told that he had died to the life of that body below. Seeing his parents’ obvious distress, my father asked if he could make them happy. His guide told him that he had a choice to make. The path that led to the next life beckoned, but he could return to his body. He was warned that much physical pain might ensue. Even as Dad watched the doctor begin to pull up the sheet to cover his face, Dad chose this life. He felt a wave of approval and then he was back in his body looking up at the shocked face of the doctor. After Dad had finished speaking, his countenance was beaming and he appeared to be other-worldly. Visiting hours were over. Dad kissed both of us and said that this was likely his final ‘good bye’ to us. He slipped into a coma that night and died a couple of days later without speaking again.”
• One of the replies I received came from the Reverend Ken Martin, pastor of Siloam United Church in London, Ontario. Martin wrote to me on August 22, 1989, to say he had recently had a remarkable out-of-body experience during a “silent heart attack.” It was the first of two attacks, and Martin, who is forty-eight, had been feeling tired and overworked. He told me he had made notes in his diary the same night he had his NDE and offered to share them. I spoke with him on the phone, discovered that the NDE had had a profound effect upon him, and invited him to send me his account. Here it is, verbatim: “I was sleeping earlier tonight with my wife, Beverley, when suddenly I awoke. There was an incredible pain in my chest and I was suddenly aware of being lifted up from the bed into the air. I took a fleeting, backward glance at the bed and saw Beverley sleeping, and then I was transported right out of the room into the sky. The sky was very dark in the background and yet there were swirls of very bright lights. I found myself caught up in one of these swirls. It was like being at the small end of a long funnel that was opening wider and wider. I was rushing through the funnel in a fast-moving swirl of light. It was incredibly bright. It was also warm and I felt very much at peace and extremely contented. It was as if there was a great strength lifting me and pulling me forward. I experienced the feeling that I was going home. There was no pain, no depression, and no worries about finishing my thesis, earning a living, or whether or not I would be able to return to work. It was as if these things were gone forever. I had a very definite feeling that I was coming home from someplace I had left a long time ago. Then I saw an extremely bright light ahead of me. All was so peaceful, warm, and well. I was rushing faster and faster into this ever-widening swirl of blazing light. It was as if someone was summoning me to come home but I heard no voice. The overwhelming feeling was one of incredible peace. Then, abruptly, I was yanked back and found myself in my bed again. I felt deeply disappointed and cried out: ‘Oh no, not this again!’ I guess that was a terrible thing to think and voice. Although there had been a few seconds as I first had felt myself being lifted into the dark sky when I felt disappointment at leaving my family, that feeling had quickly left me, overwhelmed by the sense of peace. Now I was back in bed with all the pain and depression and worry. I wept because I had come back. I now have a deep feeling that ‘home’ is somewhere else and would like to go back. When will I resume my journey? It was incredible!” Martin has now lost forty pounds—he had been up to 195—is swimming regularly on his doctor’s orders, and is back at work in a busy parish. In his accompanying letter to me, he says he now knows first-hand that “there is nothing to be afraid of after death.” He is also convinced that there is so much more to life than what we have known on earth. “Yet, I am also convinced that we Christians are in for a big surprise and that we have certainly made our God far too small.” He added that, apart from his wife, he has told nobody else about his experience. He has not, at the time of my writing this, shared this experience with his congregation. “Why not?” he queries. “Likely because I’m afraid of being called eccentric, crazy, or worse.”
It is impossible to do more than skim the surface of my flood of mail on this and related subjects, never mind describing in any adequate way all of what is now available on near-death experience. Letters have come from the educated and the uneducated, from the religious and the non-religious, from those who believe in life after death and those who previously were total skeptics. Many of those who wrote to me were not