Pennsylvania
www.messagesfromthelighttv.com
I was in my early 20s, carefree and serving in the U.S. military. Fear had no place in my life as I felt I was invincible. The day I experienced death lingers on in my memory as though it were yesterday.
An army buddy and I were canoeing down the river. I had no life vest on and couldn’t swim. But, again, I had no fear. We reached a point where we felt we had gone far enough and decided to turn around. The only problem was that my friend had been drinking and was being a bit reckless. For some reason he put his oar in the water on the rapid side where I was working with mine. Doing so made the canoe lopsided, and it flipped throwing us both into the strong current.
While he quickly swam to shore, I was left holding on to the canoe in a state of panic. I searched for a life jacket hoping that one had fallen out, but there was none. All the while, my friend was yelling from the bank telling me to swim, but I couldn’t.
Then I let go. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I let go as though the current would miraculously carry me to shore. The next thing I knew the water was sucking me under. I could no longer breathe as I struggled frantically to stay alive. Then suddenly it was dark, very dark.
I saw a light. It first appeared like a pinhole and then grew larger and larger. And as the light grew, the more beautiful and peaceful it became. I seemed to be floating higher and higher. Then suddenly I heard my mom’s voice. She had passed when I was very young.
When I came to the end of this light, I stood before what appeared to be a window. My mother’s image was so clear, so vibrant standing by this window. She looked at me asking if I thought the afterlife was beautiful. At this point I took the opportunity to take in the vastness around me. The beauty was beyond words—flowers, animals, vibrant colors with an intense crystal clarity. I could actually smell the fresh crisp air. It was so peaceful.
How long I was standing there I don’t know. But I remember being so consumed with the beauty of it all that I wanted to stay there. Then I heard my mother’s voice. “Steve,” she said, “it is not your time. You have work left to do on earth.” Again I didn’t want to go back; I wanted to stay, but I could feel my mother slowly guiding me back to my physical body.
Suddenly I was floating above the scene in the river watching my friend drag my body to shore. Then he desperately performed CPR while screaming, “Don’t you die on me. God, no, don’t do this to me.” All the while, tears streamed down his face. He was a medic as I was at the time and knew exactly what to do. So when I didn’t respond, he kept up the breathing, compressing, and checking my pulse repeatedly. Finally he made a fist and slammed it into my chest.
At that point I was back in my body, coughing and spitting up water. I was in shock over my ordeal, but I was okay. After we calmed down, I told my buddy what had happened. At first he didn’t believe me. But then I told him how I had seen him drag my body to shore. I told him how he had asked God not to let me die and then slammed his fist into my chest. At that point he could not deny what I was saying was true. He could not deny that I had, in fact, died and come back.
He told me that he had jumped into the water three times to try to save me before he finally felt me under the water and pulled me to the surface. Looking back, all I can say is I no longer have any fear of death. I know that when we pass, we go to a peaceful place—a paradise filled with sheer beauty and empty of any pain or suffering.
The Circle Bed
Barbara Harris Whitfield
Georgia
I was born with a deformity, a curvature in my lumbar spine called “scoliosis.” It never bothered me until 1973 when it suddenly became the focus of my life. I was hospitalized four times during the next two years, each time for two weeks with traction and injections of Demerol to help alleviate the pain. Looking back on it now, I believe, just as many other NDErs do, that my back pain was a metaphor for my life, which had gotten off track.
Finally, I underwent surgery, a spinal fusion. I awoke after the five-and-a-half-hour operation in a Stryker-frame circle bed. This strange bed looks like a Ferris wheel for one person. There are two big chrome hoops with a stretcher suspended in the middle. I remained in that bed for almost a month, and then I was placed in a full body cast from my armpits to my knees for six months.
About two days after surgery, complications set in and I started to die. I remember waking up in the circle bed and seeing this huge belly. I had swollen up. The swelling was pulling my incisions open, and it hurt. I called for my nurse, and then I started screaming.
People in white came rushing in. It was a dramatic scene, just like those you see in hospital dramas on television. I had no idea what was going on because I hadn’t become a respiratory therapist yet. It seemed as if everybody was pushing carts and machinery, throwing things back and forth over me. They hooked me up to all kinds of machinery, tubes, monitors, and bags. Overwhelmed emotionally, I lost consciousness and later that night woke up in the hall outside my room. I floated back into the room and saw my body. I felt peaceful, more peaceful than I had ever been in this lifetime. Then I went into a tunnel where I was greeted and held by my grandmother who had been dead for fourteen years. Before this I had never once thought about her surviving her death. I didn’t believe in that. But now I knew I was with her. Her love enveloped me and together we relived all our memories of each other. I, too, could see and feel all this through her eyes and her feelings of each moment. And I know she experienced how her actions and her love had comforted me in my childhood.
Suddenly I was back in my body, back in the circle bed. Two nurses were opening my drapes. The sunlight was startling. It hurt my eyes. I asked them to close the drapes. I tried to tell my nurses and then several doctors that I had left the bed. They told me that it was impossible and that I had been hallucinating.
MY LIFE REVIEW
About a week later, I again left my body in the circle bed. I was no longer on the critical list, but I was still debilitated and weak. I had been rotated forward onto my face. I was uncomfortable. I seemed to have been in that position for too long. I reached for the call button, but it had slipped away from where it had been clipped to the bed sheet. I started to call, then yell, then scream frantically, but my door was closed. No one came. I became hysterical. I separated from my body.
As I left my body, I again went out into the darkness, only this time I was awake and could see it happening. Looking down and off to the right, I saw myself in a bubble—in the circle bed—crying. Then I looked up and to the left, and I saw my one-year-old self in another bubble—face down in my crib—crying just as hard. I looked to the right and saw myself again in the circle bed, then to the left and saw myself as a baby. I looked back and forth about three more times, then I let go. I decided I did not want to be the thirty-two-year-old Barbara anymore; I’d go to the baby. As I moved away from my body in the circle bed, I felt as though I released myself from this lifetime. As I did, I became aware of an energy that was wrapping itself around me and going through me, permeating me, holding up every molecule of my being.
Even though I had been an atheist for years, I felt God’s love. This love was holding me. It felt incredible. There are no words in the English language, or maybe in this reality, to explain the kind of love God emanates. God was totally accepting of everything we—God and I—reviewed in my life.
In every scene of my