NDE- Near Death Experience and Carrying a Tune

The joy of living is greatly enhanced when you intimately know about death. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO EXPERIENCE. [Interesting. I accidentally hit the cap lock for that sentence.] Emphasis aside, no one courts this kind of experience, it happens. Mine occurred when I was 24 years old. As horrific as they can be, I was having a miscarriage, and worse, it was not proceeding well. My husband rushed me to the hospital. They gave me an emergency D & C and seemingly that went well until I was wheeled into the recovery room. I immediately started  violently shaking and as my husband said I was, "red hot to the touch." Downhill from there: my BP plummeted, my breathing became shallow and my skin color drained away. The Doctor finally came in and my husband reasonably asked, "what the hell is going on?" To his chagrin the Doctor replied, "I really don't know". He called the crash cart and immediately started a vena cava line into my heart. Desperate measures for a critically dangerous situation. This was my husband's experience and it was terrifying.

You never know what life means till you die: Even throughout life, tis death that makes life live, gives it whatever the significance.  Robert Browning

By contrast this was my experience: I was calmly and euphorically floating above all of the chaos, floating rather blissfully on the ceiling looking down. To this day I am unsure  exactly how long I was there, floating above it all, but the euphoria continued. Finally a deep voice came to me and said, "You can stay here and go on or you can go back, you must decide." I was feeling so good, so blessed...but then I took another look down. Below was my 24 year old husband, who I passionately loved, sitting in the hospital chair. He had his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, slumped over crying. Then it came to me, that I had a beloved eight months old baby boy who delighted me every day. Right then I chose to go back into that body.

My poor little body had been so ill used by the operation. It turned out that the hospital that had in inadvertently given me a staff infection intra utero. As soon as they discovered that cause they were able to treat me with antibiotics and I slowly healed from the ordeal. 

When we finally, days later were settled at home with our baby and me on the mend, I did report all this to my husband. I knew he would find it odd, my experience of floating above the bed, seeing him and the Doctor from above and having to choose life.

Interestingly neither I nor my husband talked about this near death experience for ten years. From my perspective that was a mystical, profoundly moving incident that I had never even heard. I knew then that I couldn't begin to understand what had happened to me. One thing was, I knew that I looked at the world very differently.  I investigated this experience, by myself yet kept this experience to myself.

Ten years passed and we were walking down a Seattle street about to go to the opera when I said; "Do you ever think about the time that I almost died." My husband stopped dead in his tracks and said, "I thought you were going to die and I was devastated. I was afraid of getting left to raise our eight month old baby by myself." "That must have been awful for you," I said, " yet I still can recall the euphoria and the choice." I added, "Why do you suppose that we've never talked about it?" "Too scary??" he said. We laughed nervously. As conversations on death go it is about on a par with Woody Allen's quip, "it is impossible to experience one's own death and still carry a tune."

Many years later I ran into a woman on the street who had heard that I'd a near death experience  [NDE] and she could hardly contain herself. "Two months ago I had a heart attack and was revived and had a NDE!" "Wow", I said, "I haven't told many people about that, I am glad to know someone else had a this experience." One thing led to another and I agreed to give a lecture to Hospice and since she was on the Hospice board, we agreed to give the program together. We live in a very small community and ordinarily you expect ten or so people show up for these monthly hospice meetings. We announced in the paper that we were speaking about our personal NDE. That night we set up the room with approximately fifteen chairs arranged in a circle. To our amazement almost 70 people showed up for the program. In the audience was a woman who, after I told about my experience, she related her NDE that was stunningly similar to mine. As I did, she felt touched yet isolated by this experience. Today it is not unusual to hear these stories, but more than 40 years ago you just didn't hear about the NDE at all.

I wrote all of the above to explain why having dodged the bullet at such a young age I feel so grateful to be alive. I chose life, I chose my husband again and my now 47 year old son and I would do it again. I was then blessed with another son and would gratefully choose to live for him too. 

Sadly, one that was taken from me, my tiny Sarah Emily chose not to come alive into this earth. I honestly believe that she assessed all of the illness that she'd be saddled with and chose to float on elsewhere.


susansmagicfeather copyright 2011 and revised 2018 Susan R. Grout all rights reserved.