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My Near Death Experience at The Beach

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Published: Sep 7, 2023

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A peaceful evening by the sea, the unforeseen turn of events, caught in the riptide, a glimmer of hope, rescued from the abyss, reflections on a near-death experience.

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The Mysterious Power of Near-Death Experiences

By Edwidge Danticat

Over the course of my life, I’ve had a few close calls, incidents that, had they taken place a second or a minute later, might have changed my life—or ended it. I’ve never had the classic near-death experience, the one that includes an out-of-body moment, when one’s spirit floats away from one’s body, to hover in a state of heightened awareness from the ceiling or some higher plane. I don’t know what it’s like to have died and come back, only what it’s like to momentarily feel that I might have possibly come close to dying.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I bought my first car, with a six-figure mileage, from a friend of my father’s. I was a reluctant driver at best—a terrified one, really—and an overused lemon was not a good starter car for me. Once, when I was driving along a busy street in New Rochelle, New York, the car turned on its own and headed toward a garbage truck in the opposite lane. There were only a few inches between us when both the truck and my car miraculous stopped. If the truck had hit me at the speed we were both going, I might have died.

A few years ago, I was standing on the landing of the steps in front of a friend’s apartment in lower Manhattan. The front door was an entire story above the ground. It had snowed a few days before, then had warmed up, and then the temperature had plunged again. Black ice covered both the steps and the sidewalk below. I’d just pulled the door shut, and had my back to the steps, when I suddenly felt myself slipping. My arms flailed, and for a moment I felt as though I were flying. I somehow managed to catch the railing before I could freefall all the way down. Had I plunged backward and landed head first on the concrete, I might have been at least brain dead.

There was also the time, soon after my mother died, when I looked up from my phone while riding in the passenger seat of our family car and realized that my husband had accidentally driven onto the wrong side of a highway ramp. Had any cars been coming off the highway at high speed, nothing could have saved us. That particular brush with death made me think of all the close calls that I, and a few people I know, have had over the span of a lifetime. Some of those close calls happen so quickly that we barely notice them. Others are so intense that they might change the way we think about not just living but about constantly being close to dying.

Every once in a while, a friend with whom I have traded such stories will send me links to close-call videos on YouTube. In them, people cluelessly walk into the paths of speeding cars, buses, and trains that somehow don’t hit them. Dangers graze but don’t annihilate them. In that one moment, it looks as though these people are covered with some invisible death-protection shield. Or, as my mother might have said, “It just wasn’t their time.”

I have wanted to sit down and tally my close calls. (There have been a few others involving being caught in the middle of a police chase, a near-drowning, and a dodged bullet during a drive-by.) But I have been afraid to do it. What if I tempt fate, and tip the balance, by paying too much attention? What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house? What if I start wondering if my house is even safe? After all, fifty-foot sinkholes have been known to spontaneously appear in Florida living rooms.

I once sat next to a woman in a commuter turboprop plane, who, as soon as the plane landed, started thanking God at the top of her voice. This same woman, at the start of the trip, had refused to change seats with another passenger who was travelling with a friend.

“My seat number is how they’ll identify my body if the plane crashes,” she said apologetically, though loud enough for everyone to hear. There had been some recent crashes involving the same type of plane in different parts of the world, I later found out, so her fear was justified. Surviving a routine plane ride had seemed like a close call to her, something to be extremely grateful for having lived through. She couldn’t fully trust that the plane would land and that we would all walk off and go on with our lives.

She had a point, I realized. After all, don’t most catastrophic events suddenly interrupt perfectly ordinary days? The “ordinary instant,” Joan Didion calls it, in “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” her memoir describing her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack and the process of writing about it.

“Confronted with sudden disaster,” Didion writes, “we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames.”

Unless a person is being executed, death rarely announces its exact place and time. Against the backdrop of the ordinary, it often feels abrupt, exceptional. And even if the circumstances right before death are extraordinary—if one is getting married, for example, or giving birth, or had just climbed Mt. Everest—how could these otherwise exceptional events not pale in comparison?

Among the first words Didion wrote after her husband died were, “Life changes in the instant.”

The ordinary instant.

“ Nou tout ap mache ak sèkèy nou anba bra nou ,” my mother had been casually saying for years. “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or, “We are all constantly cheating death, ” which is how I usually translated that Creole phrase to my mother’s doctors and nurses whenever she asked me to, usually after they tried to reassure her, during some agonizing diagnostic test or another debilitating chemotherapy session for her stage IV ovarian cancer, that everything was going to be okay. “ Media vita in morte sumus ” might have also been another suitable translation: “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was apparently afraid of death until he had a near-death experience of his own. One day, he was thrown off his horse after colliding with another rider. He ended up unconscious for several hours and believed himself to be dying. Then, as he recovered from his accident, Montaigne realized that dying might not be so bad. He’d felt no pain, no fear. The limbo state of being alive while feeling dead is what he found to be most intolerable.

“I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself,” Montaigne wrote, in his essay “De L’Exercitation,” translated as “Use Makes Perfect.”

This is, perhaps, why we have so many tales of near-death experiences, firsthand testimonials and fictional accounts whose authors are attempting to understand—and explain—what it’s like to exist in a body that’s hovering between life and death. There’s so much to imagine, so much to project into that inexplicable void of people’s medical and spiritual purgatories as they swing between living and dying.

“The poets have feigned some gods who favor the deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death,” Montaigne writes. The gods of which he writes might appear as dead relatives or heavenly figures, angels, spirit guides who offer the choice of either staying or going. Some writers, like Dante, in “Inferno,” have us travel with them through several circles of Hell, if only to possibly emerge frightened but cleansed, kinder and wiser than we were before.

While medical professionals might attribute these same type of visions and apparitions to neurochemicals working overtime, many of us would like near-death or half-dead experiences to be real, because we’d love to have a second shot at life, or we’d love to see our loved ones miraculously return from the brink before it’s too late. Or, as Dylan Thomas wrote, to “not go gentle into that good night,” and to “rage against the dying of the light.”

Writing about near-deaths means trying to penetrate that space where death could be imminent but living still remains a possibility. Whereas death is the end of life as we know it, and as others around us are living it, having a near-death experience means someone’s been given an opportunity that most other people haven’t had. Survivors might rightfully feel anointed—or guilty. A few might even wish they’d died, even though their survival had seemingly required supernatural interference or assistance from faith, if not fate. Their lives should have greater meaning now than mere existence. Or should they? Maybe there’s some larger mission to complete, something better to do, someone to love, or mourn.

Although it’s not a typical near-death narrative, my favorite close-call book is Michael Ondaatje’s “ The English Patient ,” a novel that is, among other things, about a man who escapes death only to spend the rest of his life mourning the woman he loved. Burnt beyond recognition, the so-called English Patient, Almásy, who is actually Hungarian, ends up in the care of a young nurse, Hana, who looks after him in an old Italian villa, at the end of the Second World War. Bedridden, Almásy is constantly thinking of Katharine, the married woman he fell in love with while exploring and mapping parts of the North African desert.

Even though the war has ended, the characters are still living with the constant likelihood of sudden death, particularly from the hidden explosives or mines that the retreating Germans left behind. Kip, the Sikh mine sapper and Hana’s lover, is the one who must dismantle many of those explosives, whether they’re hidden under bridges, in statues, or possibly in pianos.

Kip is constantly living in the shadow of death. The life expectancy of someone new to his job is ten weeks. Hana, too, has seen a lot of death as a nurse during the war. After helping Kip with one of his trickiest mines, Hana breaks down and declares:

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die, I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying with me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa, this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died.

Reading this, I think, Who would I want to be with before I die? Who would I want in my arms? Or whose arms would I want to die in? Certainly my husband’s. I would be hesitant, though, to subject my young children to watching me die. Would they be able to carry that memory with them for the rest of their lives? Would they be able to carry me?

Hana’s declaration also brings up the inescapable link between sex and death. One way the French refer to orgasm is as “ la petite mort, ” or “the little death,” an antidote to Freud’s “death instinct,” or what he saw as our longing to self-destruct and return to our preëxisting state through war and other means. Sex, after having just barely escaped death, would have been another way for Hana and Kip to continue to circumvent “ la grande mort ,” or “the big death,” and to counter one of Freud’s other notions: that we’re not convinced of our own mortality and can’t imagine our own deaths. (Though having watched my mother die, I can now perfectly imagine my own death.) Hana and Kip also cannot escape their mortality: it confronts them every day in the devastated landscape around them, and in the dying faces of their comrades and friends.

“In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this embrace would have been in flames,” Kip thinks, soon after Hana falls asleep in his arms.

Yet both Kip and Hana survive. And the English Patient continues to live, even though some of his friends, as well as his beloved, have died. But always shadowing the survivors of this internal and exterior war is one of Almásy’s favorite words from his native Hungary, “ félhomály ” (“twilight”), the type of twilight that the French call “ l’heure bleu ” (“the blue hour”), or what Joan Didion refers to in “ Blue Nights ,” her memoir of her daughter’s death, from acute pancreatitis, twenty months after her husband died, as “the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres,” and that Michael Ondaatje calls the “dusk of graves.”

This type of sorrow-filled dusk offers itself as an atmospheric bridge between life and death. It is the dying of the light against which we are constantly raging, the light over which death might indeed have some dominion, as it is part sunset, part nightfall, the gloaming, eventide, or prologue to the end. It is, as Didion writes, “the fading,” so it would not be unusual for it to linger over the holiest of places, those even holier than Chartres or any other designated holy place.

Places can be holy, Almásy reminds us, not because we are told they are, but because we want and need them to be. Places can be holy because we are sharing them with someone we love, just as some places become cursed because they’ve taken people we love away from us.

“It is important to die in holy places,” Almásy thinks, toward the end of the novel. Though sometimes as we walk this earth, with the memories of our loved ones shadowing us, we might also become our own holy places: roaming churches, cathedrals, and memory mausoleums.

This piece is drawn from " The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story ," by Edwidge Danticat, which is out July 11th, from Graywolf Press.

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By Justin Chang

By Meghana Indurti

5 who survived cardiac arrest describe what they saw and heard before reviving

Every year, more than 350,000 people have a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital . Few survive. While many people who have been resuscitated have no memories of the experience, a recent study suggests others recall something , whether it’s a vague sense that people are around them, or more specific dreamlike awareness. 

Unlike a heart attack where people are awake and the heart is still painfully beating, those in cardiac arrest are always unconscious. They have no heartbeat or pulse and need CPR urgently. In essence, they have “flat-lined” and are so near death there is no activity on electronic monitors.

What a near-death experience is has never really been defined. Researchers have been trying to explore what’s happening when a patient’s heart stops to see if there are themes or patterns of consciousness.

“There is an assumption that because people do not respond to us physically, in other words, when they’re in a coma, that they’re not conscious, and that’s fundamentally flawed," said Dr. Sam Parnia, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at NYU Langone Health, and the lead author of the recent study.

To find out more about the experiences of the few survivors who have a sense of consciousness during heart-related near-death events, NBC News connected with participants in the NYU Langone research and others from the Cardiac Arrest Survivor Alliance online community, a program of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, and the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation .

They shared what they saw, heard and felt during resuscitation, how their lives changed afterward and what they believe other people should know about death and dying.

"Calm, quiet, peaceful"

Greg Kowaleski, a father of three who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was 47 and playing a pick-up ice hockey game when he collapsed on the rink. Fortunately for Kowaleski, a pediatric cardiologist who is a good friend of his happened to be there, skating for the opposing team.

Dr. Jeff Zampi determined that Kowaleski didn’t have a pulse and immediately began chest compressions. Using an automated external defibrillator, or AED, Zampi was able to shock his friend’s heart back into a normal rhythm. 

Although the cardiac arrest was in 2021, Kowaleski still recalls the “incredibly vivid” memory he had while Zampi was resuscitating him. Kowaleski found himself boarding an airplane that was completely empty, the blue seats stretching out in front of him.

“The sun is really bright outside, like a beautiful day and I sit down next to the window in my seat, looking out on the tarmac,” he said. 

“As I’m sitting there waiting, I hear somebody call my name,” he said. “It’s my friend Jeff.”

In the memory, Zampi told him he was on the wrong flight and needed to get off. “I got up and I followed him out of the plane,” he said. “And then as we’re getting off the plane, boom! I came back. I woke up.”

Since then, Kowaleski said he’s struggled a little bit with what exactly the experience meant.

“The place where I went, wherever it was, I will say it was extremely peaceful,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced anything so calm, quiet, peaceful.”

What he does know is that he doesn’t really fear death anymore.

“It’s not a scary, bad place to go, wherever I was.” 

"There was no gender"

In 2016, Em James Arnold, a parent in New York City, had a cardiac arrest and was revived.

Arnold’s girlfriend started CPR, but the resuscitation lasted 90 minutes and required nine defibrillator shocks. A combined team of FDNY firefighters and FDNY emergency medical services crews responded to the 911 call, which was made by Arnold’s 12-year-old daughter.

During the near-death experience, the cardiac arrest survivor — who was assigned male at birth and now prefers they/them pronouns — had a profound and life-changing memory.

Arnold remembers traveling feet-first over an expanse of water, floating on what seemed to be a stone-like surface. Overhead was an endless sky, and Arnold felt completely safe, free of fear, and neither male nor female.

Arnold, now 53, has had gender dysphoria since about the age of 3 or 4, although they didn’t always know there was a name for the feeling that one’s gender identity doesn’t match the one registered at birth.

“For me, that was like a lifelong puzzle," Arnold said. "And then, when I go into cardiac arrest and I’m in that water, there was no gender, so there was no assignment there. It allowed me to embrace that of myself.” 

After waking from a three-day coma and a long hospitalization, doctors gave Arnold an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD, a battery-operated implanted device that can shock the heart if necessary. Two years later they had surgery to repair a damaged heart valve.

After the experience, Arnold began emerging out and presenting as mixgender/transgender and, soon after, married their girlfriend.

“She’s the one who walked me through this, as she constantly says to me, be yourself, be yourself, just be yourself,” Arnold said. “That’s the hardest thing for anybody to do.”

The couple has a new baby, now 8 months. The cardiac arrest “helped me understand that gender is nothing,” Arnold said. 

Like opening your eyes in a cave

Zach Lonergan, a 32-year-old scientist who lives in Pasadena, California, was regularly logging 15- to 18-mile runs with his friends as they prepared for the Los Angeles Marathon.

As part of the training, they all decided to run the Rose Bowl Half Marathon.

“We’re like, oh, 13 miles for a half marathon is no big deal,” Lonergan said.

However, when race day came in January, Lonergan wasn’t feeling well.

“Of course, I ignored my symptoms and decided to run a really fast race,” he said.

Despite feeling tired for the last few miles, he crossed the finish line. When he went to pick up his medal, he collapsed.

Without a pulse or heart beat, emergency workers performed CPR and shocked Lonergan's heart twice. 

Lonergan doesn’t remember the collapse.

He does recall being awake and aware in a dark place that was unfamiliar, describing it like opening your eyes in a cave. 

“It felt strange, but at the same time, it was the most peaceful time of my entire life,” he said. “In this darkness, I felt extremely warm, and extremely peaceful.” 

After he was resuscitated, doctors gave him an ICD implant that would shock the heart, if necessary.

After he recovered, Lonergan did feel some anxiety, especially when it came to running. However, he also recalls it being a time of “prolonged peacefulness.”

Grateful to be alive, he no longer feared death. He took a “reunion tour” to reconnect with friends he hadn’t seen in years. 

“You only get one life and you have to cherish the people you have around you,” he said. “I think that’s been the biggest gift that I’ve gotten.”

"All-surrounding sense of love"

Dr. Melinda Greer, 65, was being evaluated for chest pain at a cardiac intensive care unit when her heart stopped. Greer, a retired pediatrician in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, had asystole, a failure of the heart’s electrical system which causes the heart to stop pumping, or flat-line.

That was 10 years ago. She is finally opening up about what she feels was a positive experience.

As the nurse was performing CPR on her, Greer saw an “incredible white light” and felt “an incredible all-encompassing, all-surrounding sense of love.” 

She felt like she had returned to a “place that felt like home to me, and I was back amongst a group of what I can only call beings, because we weren’t physical, that I considered my group.” 

It was “a wonderful experience," she said. "I really was angry when they brought me back.”

After Greer left the hospital, she decided to retire early, focusing on creative pursuits and new experiences, rather than acquiring things. She encourages people to get more involved in the “positive aspects of living in a beautiful world.”

“Feel the wind, get out in nature, take off your shoes and socks and put your feet firmly on the ground and just listen to that inner voice, that’s what I would recommend," she said. "I wish I’d done it long ago.”

"I knew I could not leave them”

Connie Fuller, 55, lives in Warrior, Alabama, just north of Birmingham. In 2020, Fuller was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In 2021, she and her husband made the hard decision to sell their swimming pool business to spend more time together. But the day of the sale was particularly stressful, and she started having chest pain.

She was admitted to the hospital for observation, although tests had ruled out a heart attack. It was at this point that she developed bradycardia, an abnormally slow heart rate, and her heart stopped.

Fuller doesn’t remember when the nurse started CPR. She didn’t feel any pain, although she found out later that the nurse broke her sternum and several ribs, a common occurrence during CPR.

“I love her, she saved my life," Fuller said.

What Fuller does remember is hearing her husband’s voice when he came back into the room.

“We started dating when I was 14, he was 16," she said. "He sounded like that little 16-year-old boy. That was the voice that I heard."

She feels that her husband’s voice helped pull her back into her body, as the medical team worked to revive her.

“I do remember thinking, this feels so good and so peaceful and it’s so calm and there’s no worries here,” she said. “But at the same time, I remembered my husband and my daughter and I knew I could not leave them.”

Based on her experience, Fuller advises family members to talk to patients, even when it seems they are dying.

“If it’s safe, and possible — allow the family members to be there to talk to the patient,” she said.

Fuller, who believes in God, wondered why she didn’t have experiences that are more like the traditional concept of heaven.

“Psychologically it’s been a lot to handle,” she said. "I thought, why wasn’t I in heaven? Why didn’t I see my relatives? Why didn’t I see the white light? You know, why didn’t that happen for me?”

Fuller turned out to have takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome , which is a weakness of the heart muscle that can be caused by severe stress.

“I thought at that time I had wasted my heartbeats worrying about a swimming pool store," Fuller said. "That’s when I prayed and I begged God, please give me one more chance to not waste any more heartbeats on something that’s not important. I won’t. I will not do that again.”

Theresa Tamkins is a health reporter and editor who has worked for BuzzFeed News, Health.com and Reuters Health. She covers infectious disease, fitness, nutrition and mental health, and has written for CNN, The Lancet, MSNBC, and WebMD, among others.

May 14, 2024

12 min read

Lifting the Veil on Near-Death Experiences

What the neuroscience of near-death experiences tells us about human consciousness

By Rachel Nuwer

Galen Dara Smith

F or decades François d’Adesky, a retired diplomat and civil servant who now lives in Brussels, spoke to no one about his near-death experience (NDE). It happened at the age of 13, when he was hospitalized for acute appendicitis. D’Adesky vividly recalls seeing his body on the operating table and then passing through a tunnel, where he met strange beings who radiated luminosity and goodness. “Your time has not come,” an older being, whom d’Adesky intuited was God, told him. “You have not undertaken your Earth mission.”

Then d’Adesky perceived traveling “at breakneck speed through time and space, back to the beginning of the creation of the world,” he says. He eventually arrived at a gardenlike paradise where spiritual beings—one of whom was his deceased grandmother, another a childhood friend who had died at the age of five—communicated telepathically with him. D’Adesky’s grandmother took him by the hand and led him back into the clinic, where he woke up in his body in excruciating pain.

D’Adesky spent his adult life striving to discover what his special mission was. Eventually he came to see it as the role he played in “making the world a better place,” he says. That included helping, as an official with the United Nations, to get a key resolution passed at the 2011 U.N. Climate Change Conference. It wasn’t until a few years later, though, when NDEs were entering the public discourse more often, that he started sharing the story of his pivotal experience beyond his immediate family. “I had been afraid for my reputation,” he says.

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Near-death experiences have been reported across time and cultures. An astounding 5 to 10 percent of the general population is estimated to have memories of an NDE, including somewhere between 10 and 23 percent of cardiac arrest survivors. A growing number of scholars now accept NDEs as a unique mental state that can offer novel insights into the nature of consciousness. “Now, clearly, we don’t question anymore the reality of near-death experiences,” says Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. “People who report an experience really did experience something.”

Those who undergo an NDE also return with “this noetic quality from the experience, which very often changes their life,” adds neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle, who writes about NDEs and other states of consciousness in his 2024 book, Then I Am Myself the World . “They know what they’ve seen.”

A handful of researchers, mostly emergency room doctors, began collecting qualitative data about NDEs after the 1975 publication of psychiatrist and physician Raymond A. Moody’s book Life after Life , which detailed patients’ accounts of near-death experiences. Since then, only a few research teams have attempted to empirically investigate the neurobiology of NDEs. But their findings are already challenging long-held beliefs about the dying brain, including that consciousness ceases almost immediately after the heart stops beating. This discovery has important implications for current resuscitation practices, which are based on outdated beliefs about what happens to the brain during cardiac arrest, says neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan Medical School. “If we understand the mechanisms of death, then this could lead to new ways of saving lives.”

Like psychedelic drugs and other means of altering consciousness, NDEs could also serve as probes for revealing fundamental truths about the mind and brain. Such states are perturbations to the system of consciousness, “and when you perturb a system, you understand better how it works,” says Christopher Timmermann, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. “If we want to understand the nature of experience, we have to take into account what’s happening at the margins of nonordinary states.”

Moreover, there are important existential implications, although exactly what those might be continues to be debated in the scientific literature and at conferences, including at a 2023 meeting held by the New York Academy of Sciences. It explored consciousness through the lens of death, psychedelics and mysticism. “These transcendent experiences are found in the major world religions and traditions,” says Anthony Bossis, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, who helped to organize the conference. “Might they have some greater purpose for helping humanity cultivate understanding and awareness of consciousness?” he asks. The weightiness of such questions makes careful study of NDEs and their rigorous interpretation all the more critical, Martial says: “It’s important to disentangle empirical findings versus belief.”

On an overcast February afternoon, Martial was meeting with the 20 members of her neuroscience laboratory when her phone began to ring. She had asked to be alerted if someone arrived at the Liège university hospital on the verge of death.

Martial bolted toward the elevator, and within about two minutes she made it into the hospital lobby, its crisscrossing escalators and geometric motifs reminiscent of an M. C. Escher drawing. In the resuscitation room, Aurore Ancion, an emergency physician and doctoral candidate in medical sciences, was already waiting. Laid out on one of the room’s two beds was a bearded man in his mid-70s, his hospital gown open to expose his belly and chest.

Despite being in the middle of an episode of atrial fibrillation, the man was alert and cracking jokes. He giggled nervously as Ancion, working around two emergency doctors, placed a cap over his head for an electroencephalogram (or EEG, to measure electrical signals in the brain) and adhered two oxygen readers to his forehead. Martial, standing in the back, peered through tortoiseshell glasses at a laptop, where two spiky lines in red and blue began scrolling across the screen—precise measurements, to the trained eye, of the patient’s brain activity.

The doctors eventually had to anesthetize the man and shock his heart back into a normal rhythm. Martial and her colleagues hope the data from his and other patients’ visits to the resuscitation room and from follow-up interviews will provide the most detailed picture to date of what transpires in the human brain during close encounters with death.

Many people who had an NDE describe one or more of a specific set of characteristics . They may recall separating from their body and viewing it in real time from above. They may pass through tunnels and see light, encounter deceased relatives or compassionate entities, and have a sense of vastness and deep insight. People may undergo a life review and morally evaluate the choices they have made, including by experiencing the joy or pain their actions caused others. “What’s intriguing is that when people die, they don’t evaluate themselves based on their own standards of morals,” says Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. “They evaluate themselves based on a universal standard.”

Although most people describe their NDE in glowing terms, a minority recount visits to hell-like regions, encounters with demonic beings or terrifying voids. In a 2019 study, Martial and her colleagues found that among 123 people who reported an NDE, 14 percent classified it as negative —a proportion Martial says she’s “sure” is an underestimate because of how disturbing these memories can be.

Somewhat surprisingly, religious people don’t seem to be more inclined toward NDEs. There is, however, preliminary evidence of another group being more likely to have NDEs: those who are prone to REM sleep intrusion, a condition that occurs when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep intrudes into wakefulness and blends elements of dreaming and waking. During the seconds or minutes it lasts for, people may have an out-of-body experience, sense that someone or something is in the room with them, or want to move but find that they can’t. In 2019 Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at the Copenhagen University Hospital network’s Rigshospitalet, and his colleagues recruited a sample of 1,034 adults from the general population in 35 countries. Ten percent of the study participants had experienced an NDE, and of those, 47 percent also reported REM sleep intrusion—a statistically significant association. Among the people who had not had NDEs, just 14 percent reported REM sleep intrusion.

Still, little is known about the neurobiology of NDEs. Open questions include whether they are driven by a single, core mechanism or are a more variable response to “understanding somehow that death is near,” as Timmermann says. A few researchers, including Martial, are peering into the brains of people who are approaching or undergoing death, in the hope of understanding what is going on.

In 2023 Borjigin and her colleagues published what they suspect could be a signature of NDEs in the dying brain . The researchers analyzed EEG data from four comatose patients before and after their ventilators were removed. As their brains became deprived of oxygen, two of the dying patients exhibited a paradoxical surge of gamma activity, a type of high-frequency brain wave linked to the formation of memory and the integration of information.

Borjigin had seen the same upwelling of activity in previous studies of the brains of healthy rats during induced cardiac arrest. In the rodents, the surge occurred across the entire brain. In humans, though, it was confined primarily to the junction of the brain’s temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, a region involved in multiple features of consciousness, including visual, auditory and motion processing. Past research has also associated the region with out-of-body sensations, as well as with altruism and empathy. Although these are all regular components of NDEs, Borjigin says, it’s impossible to know whether the two patients actually experienced an NDE because they did not live to tell about it. But “I could almost guess what they might have experienced,” she says.

A 2023 study led by Parnia and detailed in his forthcoming 2024 book, Lucid Dying , provides further evidence of brain activity after patients’ hearts have stopped. Parnia and his colleagues worked with 25 hospitals in the U.S., the U.K. and Bulgaria to review EEG and brain-oxygen data from 567 people who experienced an in-hospital cardiac arrest. Medical staff managed to collect interpretable EEG data from 53 of these patients. Most showed an electrical flatline during the crisis, but in around 40 percent of those cases, neurological activity consistent with that of conscious brains transiently reemerged—in some instances up to an hour into CPR.

A different subset of 53 patients from the study survived. Doctors collected EEG and brain-oxygen levels for too few of these people to draw a correlation between any potential memory they had of the event and their brain activity. The authors were able to interview 28 of the survivors, and six had a “recalled experience of death,” as Parnia refers to NDEs.

Parnia and his colleagues also sought to test conscious and unconscious awareness, including reports of out-of-body experiences, by projecting a series of 10 random images on a tablet placed near patients’ heads and by playing a repeated recording of the names of three fruits—apple, pear, banana—to them through headphones every minute for five minutes while they were unconscious. None of the survivors could remember the images that had been projected. One person who had a recalled experience of death correctly named the fruits in order, although this could have been by chance , Parnia says.

Violet Isabelle Frances for Bryan Christie Design; Source: “Near-Death Experience as a Probe to Explore (Disconnected) Consciousness,” by Charlotte Martial et al., in Trends in Cognitive Sciences , Vol. 24; March 2020 ( reference )

According to Parnia, this study presents “a coherent, mechanistic explanation” for how and why people have recalled experiences of death. When someone starts dying, Parnia says, the brain becomes dysfunctional. Some actions are immediately lost, such as brain stem reflexes, but others that are normally suppressed to optimize performance for ordinary life suddenly become disinhibited because the brain’s natural braking systems are no longer working. As a result, “your entire consciousness comes to the fore,” Parnia says. The purpose of this change, he suggests, is to prepare the person “for a new reality”—the transition from life to death, a condition in which, Parnia believes, consciousness endures.

Other scientists flatly disagree. “When you have an NDE, you must have a functioning brain to store the memory, and you have to survive with an intact brain so you can retrieve that memory and tell about it,” Kondziella says. “You can’t do that without a functioning brain, so all those arguments that NDEs prove that there’s consciousness outside the brain are simply nonsense.”

Kondziella, Martial, and others instead theorize that NDEs might be part of a last-ditch survival tactic . Species across the animal kingdom “play dead”—a behavior technically called thanatosis—when they perceive a mortal threat, typically from an attacking predator. If fight-or-flight fails, the instinct to feign death kicks in as an attempt to forestall the danger. The animal becomes immobilized and unresponsive to external stimuli—but with continued awareness so that, given a chance, it can escape. “Personally, I believe the evolutionary aspect really is the key to understanding what NDEs are and how they came about,” Kondziella says. “There is a perfectly valid biological explanation.”

Martial and others have also criticized the methodological rigor of Parnia’s study. One concern, Martial says, is that the team based its findings on visual readings of patients’ EEGs rather than on “a proper statistical analysis.” Parnia says he and his colleagues applied the standard method for reading EEGs that “every physician in the world” uses in clinical practice. Those who are criticizing the study, he adds, are “just ignoring it because [they] don’t like it.”

In their latest study, Martial and her colleagues plan to use the most rigorous approach to date to collect both subjective and objective data from around 100 patients, including EEG and brain-oxygen readings, plus information from several rounds of interviews and surveys with survivors in the group. The University of Liège team is also trying to more thoroughly evaluate claims about out-of-body experiences. Around 79 percent of people who have an NDE report leaving their body, and some wake up knowing facts about their environment that they seemingly should not know. “I’m not saying it’s not true, but here we want to objectively test it,” Martial says.

To this end, she and her colleagues have decorated the hospital resuscitation room with unexpected objects and images, some of which are hidden in places that could be viewed only from the vantage point of someone near the ceiling. While a patient is in the resuscitation room, including while they are conscious, the team plays an audio clip of various words and animal sounds once every minute. They will test for recollections of any images or sounds in follow-ups with surviving participants, and they will also use video recordings to compare people’s memories with reality.

A n easier approach to studying NDEs is via safe proxies such as hypnosis, induced fainting and psychedelic drugs. None of these methods produce true NDEs, but the states they trigger may have some overlap with the dying brain. In 2018 Timmermann, Martial and their colleagues published a study comparing NDEs with the effects of N,N -dimethyltryptamine (DMT) , a mind-altering component of ayahuasca, a South American plant-derived psychedelic brew. Trace amounts of DMT also occur endogenously in humans. “There’s speculation that that’s somehow underlying NDEs, but the data are very elementary,” Timmermann says.

In the study, 13 volunteers received intravenous DMT in a lab setting and rated their experience on a scale commonly used to measure NDEs , developed by psychiatrist Bruce Greyson in 1983. The researchers compared the DMT group’s scores and subjective accounts with other people’s taken from an NDE database that Martial and her colleagues have been compiling since 2016. (The database includes around 2,000 accounts, accepted from anyone who contacts the Liège team claiming to have had an NDE and then fills out a lengthy questionnaire.)

They found “striking overlap” between the DMT and NDE groups, Martial says, with people in both describing a sense of entering into an unearthly realm, separating from their body, encountering mystical beings and seeing a bright light. People in both groups also reported feelings of peace, unity and joy. There was just one significant difference: those in the NDE group more frequently experienced reaching a border demarcating a point of no return.

Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who pioneered studies of psilocybin and who died last October, reported similar findings with his colleagues in 2022. The authors compared 3,192 people who had undergone an NDE, a psychedelic drug trip or a non-drug-induced mystical experience. The team found “remarkably similar” long-term outcomes across subjects in all three groups, including a reduced fear of death and lasting positive effects of insights they had gained.

In another study currently undergoing peerreview, Martial, Timmermann and their colleagues interviewed 31 people who had experienced an NDE and had also tried a psychedelic drug—LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT or mescaline—to see what they had to say about the similarities and differences between the events. Participants reported stronger sensory effects during their NDE, including the sensation of being disembodied, but stronger visual imagery during their drug trip. They reported feelings of spirituality, connectedness and deeper meaning across both.

In comparisons of these mystical experiences, “the common ground that’s striking to me is in things like a profound, deep sense of love—that all is love and that consciousness is love,” says Bossis, who studies the effects of psilocybin in people with terminal cancer, focusing on relieving end-of-life distress, enhancing spirituality, and providing a greater sense of meaning and fulfillment in life. “There’s also a sense of transcending time as we know it and a greater acceptance of the mystery of life and death.”

To Guy Vander Linden, a retired government administrator in Brussels, his NDE is still a “gift.” It happened in 1990 after a serious bike accident. He was enveloped by a force of overwhelming love and a deep sense of “spirituality not connected to religion,” he says. He also felt an expansiveness in which “I was everything and nothing.”

Vander Linden left the hospital a different person. His fear of death was extinguished, he says, because he now knew that “to die is something fantastic.” He no longer saw value in material things and got rid of his car and two extra houses. He also felt compelled to share his NDE with others through books and conferences. These changes affected his relationships, including with his wife, whom he has since divorced. “She said I’m crazy,” Vander Linden recalls. “To come back with an experience that others haven’t had—it creates conflict.” Years later he is still able to tap into the love he felt when he was bathed in the clear light of what he’s come to conceive of as universal consciousness.

Regardless of how people interpret NDEs, studying them may expand the boundaries of resuscitation, provide a better understanding of mind and brain, and shine a flicker of light on some of the deepest mysteries of existence.

Rachel Nuwer is a science journalist and author. Her latest book is I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury, 2023). Follow her on X @RachelNuwer

Life After Death: A Narrative Exploration of Near-Death Experiences

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
• 2 University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA.
• 3 University of Wyoming, Casper, WY, USA.
• PMID: 35686845
• DOI: 10.1177/00302228221108544

Death awareness and near-death experiences initiate shifts in awareness, priorities, and relationships. This narrative inquiry explored the stories of four individuals who had near-death experiences. Participants shared their experiences before and after the experiences. Findings include considerations of how mortality awareness connects with life experiences. Resonant threads across narratives included Interactions with Death, Life after Death, and Meaning in Life after Death. Specifically, findings explore near-death experiences, how life was changed following interactions with death, and the meaning-making process through death awareness. Findings and discussion explore the impact of death awareness as well as considerations for those in death and trauma-related fields.

Keywords: death awareness; mortality; narrative inquiry; near-death experience; trauma.

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How a near-death experience could change the way you live

A man's forehead and his eyes which are closed. Inside him a tunnel of light with floating iridescent particles, in the end a light. Raquel Aparicio for NPR hide caption

A man's forehead and his eyes which are closed. Inside him a tunnel of light with floating iridescent particles, in the end a light.

Randy Schiefer remembers being woken up by his mother's screams at four in the morning.

He was 16 years old at the time. It was 1969, and his family was staying at a hotel while on vacation in New Jersey.

He ran toward the screams and found his father having a heart attack. He had some CPR training so he began some mouth-to-mouth resuscitations. But it wasn't working.

He ran out into the hallway, pounding on doors trying to get somebody to come out and help.

"But nobody did," Schiefer says.

Changed by a Near-Death Experience

Schiefer's father died that night. He was devastated. What's worse is that every time he thought about his father, he would be consumed with feelings of guilt and fear. He'd think about him on that hotel floor and then inevitably he'd think about his own eventual death.

"I would go into panic attacks," Schiefer says. "I'd get real tight in my chest and the only way that I could control it is just try to settle myself down and say, 'Okay, get it out of your head, get it out of your head.'"

For Schiefer, death was a black wall, a question mark. That is, until he faced it himself.

He had what's known as a near-death experience — which have been documented around the world and can lead people to change the way they live their lives.

Facing Death

In March 2020, Schiefer had what felt like a very persistent flu. His doctor had told him he just needed rest but as the days went on his symptoms got worse. He tested for COVID-19, and was positive.

Things deteriorated fast for Schiefer. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was put into a medically-induced coma and placed on a heart-lung machine.

Randy Schiefer was put into a medically-induced coma as doctors scrambled to find ways to treat his severe case of COVID-19. Courtesy of the Schiefer family hide caption

Randy Schiefer was put into a medically-induced coma as doctors scrambled to find ways to treat his severe case of COVID-19.

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He was unconscious for nearly a month. But he came through, after a convalescent plasma treatment that his daughter Lisa Schiefer pushed for. He received the blood transfusion on a Friday and by Sunday, the doctors were able to turn off the heart-lung machine that had been keeping him alive.

"My lungs had completely cleared by that Tuesday. My kidneys started to function fully again and so did my liver," Schiefer says. After the medication wore off and Schiefer was steadily improving, his daughter was permitted to keep him company in his hospital room. "Only after I was allowed at his bedside did he start communicating with me about what he experienced," she says.

An Unexpected Experience

Near-death experiences can occur when someone faces a life-threatening situation such as cardiac arrest or is under deep anesthesia.

Some people have reported the feeling of leaving their body and observing their surroundings. For Schiefer, his journey started with what looked like an airplane fuselage. Schiefer says there was a moment while he was in a coma when he remembers his consciousness awakening. He was traveling through a kind of tunnel, with light streaming through like windows in an airplane.

"Beautiful, warm, loving light," Schiefer says.

The tunnel brought him to a large room with arched windows and stained glass. It was also permeating with that same warm, loving light. Then Schiefer says a gentleman approached him and said he didn't belong there — that he had to leave. He walked out through giant oak doors into an even more serene scene.

"I remember going through the doors and it took me out into a golden city, and it was absolutely stunning," says Schiefer.

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When he first described the city to his daughter Lisa, he said it was like Paris, but more beautiful, more pristine. He says the grass in the parks was a deeper green than anything on earth.

"And I've been to the highlands of Scotland," Schiefer says.

But this awe-struck stroll took a turn when Schiefer realized he didn't know where he was or how to get back. He felt lost.

"I remember sitting down and I started to panic, and I started to cry," he says.

That feeling of warmth left him. He says he felt cold and scared.

"Suddenly I looked over my shoulder and saw this big white staircase that rose up in the sky as far as you could see," says Schiefer.

He began climbing the staircase, crawling on his hands and knees, and then he says someone called him by name, grabbed him by the shirt and whisked him away.

"I remember it going black, back to my little dark sedated world," Schiefer says.

His daughter listened to Schiefer's story intently, but let him know that he hadn't traveled to any cities lately. In fact, he'd been in a coma in a hospital room for nearly a month. But he insisted the experience was real. When she offered up that it was probably a dream or hallucination from the heavy medication that didn't sit right with Schiefer. "My dreams were foggy. And my hallucinations were just stupid. I saw nine dancing panda bears on the ceiling," Schiefer says. "But this was so real. I was there. I was involved with my environment and I felt so much peace and love and acceptance. More than I have ever felt before."

A Noticeable Shift

Schiefer's daughter Lisa started noticing differences in her dad almost immediately after he got home — like when he started opening up about that night he watched his father die from a heart attack.

"My mom and I sat at the kitchen island and he just spoke," she says. "He was telling us about it."

The sign that welcomed Randy Schiefer home after his brush with death. Courtesy of the Schiefer family hide caption

The sign that welcomed Randy Schiefer home after his brush with death.

As he was talking about that night in New Jersey, he asked his daughter to get an eyeglasses case from a closet.

He took the glasses out and stared at them. He looked a little stunned as he told her that the last person to take them out of their case was his father.

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"My dad was 16 when his father died," she says. "He's almost 70 now. That tells you how long those glasses have just been sitting in their case."

This wasn't like Schiefer. He wasn't one to divulge emotional details, especially when it involved the deaths of loved ones.

"Pre-COVID dad never talked about death. We didn't talk about dying. We didn't talk about god. We didn't talk about the afterlife," Lisa Schiefer says. "We didn't talk about any of that."

It was moments like this that caused her to think differently about what her dad had shared in the hospital. She began seeing his near-death experience as what it was for him — something real.

What We Know About Near-Death Experiences

Experiences like Schiefer's aren't uncommon.

Researchers have found that between 10 and 20% of people who have a documented cardiac arrest — that is, when their hearts stop — will report a near-death experience, says Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia.

Greyson has been studying first-hand accounts like Schiefer's for about 50 years, looking for patterns.

"The best definition we have is that it's a profound experience that many people have that includes enhanced thought processes," Greyson explains. "Your thoughts are faster and clearer than usual. You have a sense of being in a timeless state. You often have a review of your entire lives.

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"It includes strong emotions, like a sense of overwhelming peace and well-being, a sense of oneness with everything, an experience of unconditional love, a sense of being outside the physical body," he adds.

Most surprising to Greyson is that people can see things in their near-death experiences that will later be corroborated as accurate. Like certain tools used during open heart surgery or conversations that happened when they were unconscious, or pronounced dead during.

But most significant to Greyson is what comes after a near-death experience.

"I've got story after story of people who couldn't go back to the same profession, people who were, say, career police officers who couldn't shoot after a near-death experience, of people who were in competitive businesses who no longer felt it was meaningful to get ahead at someone else's expense."

Greyson says these people often change their careers, or make other dramatic lifestyle changes.

That was Schiefer's experience. Along with a willingness to discuss death freely he was open to talking about all sorts of existential questions. He also started to dig deeper into his family's Christian faith and began praying regularly. As a result, he says he's become a better version of himself.

"I'm much more open, much more welcoming, much more understanding than I was before, I think much more loving as a husband and father as I was before," Schiefer says.

Randy Schiefer needed intensive physical therapy after nearly a month in a medically-induced coma. Courtesy of the Schiefer family hide caption

Randy Schiefer needed intensive physical therapy after nearly a month in a medically-induced coma.

Adjusting to the New Randy

Before his brush with death, Lisa Schiefer says her dad seemed a little lost. Just going through the motions. But now, he has newfound energy. He's excited and optimistic. And he loves sharing his near-death experience with anyone who is curious.

"He loves talking about it, which is good for him. I'm glad he has a hobby," she laughs.

But the adjustment for her hasn't been easy.

For one, each time she hears her dad's story it takes her back to the most terrifying few weeks of her life — sleepless nights spent worrying about whether she'd get the dreaded call from the hospital.

"It's not exciting for me to sit back and listen and be reminded of how my dad almost died," she says.

And she was so grateful they were one of the lucky ones whose family member came home, but there was still a period of mourning.

She says her dad has always been her best friend. So even though this transformation she was witnessing was a good thing, she missed that pre-COVID version of him. The one who was a little short-tempered and closed off at times.

Randy Schiefer's daughter Lisa spent a lot of time with him in his hospital room as he recovered from a life-threatening case of COVID-19. Courtesy of the Schiefer family hide caption

Randy Schiefer's daughter Lisa spent a lot of time with him in his hospital room as he recovered from a life-threatening case of COVID-19.

"Selfishly, I felt very alone," Lisa Schiefer says. "I felt very hurt and frustrated. I would think, 'I just want you to go back to pre-COVID. I want to have my dad here, and I want to pretend like these six weeks had never happened.'"

Schiefer came home more than two years ago, and the family has since found a new rhythm. His daughter moved to Florida permanently to be a short drive from her parents.

But Greyson says that some families don't make it through an experience like this one.

"Often they can't accept the changes," Greyson says. "They feel they don't have the same values in common anymore."

Regardless of whether or not a loved one wants to validate a near-death experience as "real," they often can't ignore the real changes that come from them. Some of these changes have caused Greyson to rethink preconceived notions.

"I was raised in a scientific household, and I didn't believe any of this stuff before I started encountering it," Greyson says. "But after 50 years of studying thousands of cases, I can't deny that they happen and that they profoundly affect people's lives and present us with things that we don't have materialistic explanations for."

Greyson says that uncertainty didn't always sit well with him, but he's learned to embrace it.

"It becomes like an old friend ," Greyson says. "Probably because near-death experiencer after near-death experiencer has told me that the universe is a friendly place. It's nothing to be frightened of. And the fact that you don't know the answer doesn't mean there isn't one there. That there's something that's greater than us that is in control of things. I can't say that I believe that, but I certainly have absorbed the feeling that this is a safe place to be."

For Schiefer, his explanation is simple. He's no longer afraid to talk about death because he's no longer afraid of death.

The panic attacks that used to plague him have stopped.

And if you ask Schiefer why he's no longer afraid of death, he puts it this way:

"I've been there. I've been there. I've experienced it."

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How to Write An Informative Essay

How to cite scientific papers, quillbot vs turnitin, quetext vs grammarly, native american weapons, near death experience essay sample, example.

By Johannes Helmold

I was on vacation in Ganapatipule, which is a town on the coast on the west side of India, situated right on the Indian Ocean. I was with my long-time friend, Janu, and his mother, staying in a hotel for a few days. The vacation so far was the embodiment of relaxing: eating fresh mangoes, waking up late, dining out all the time (mostly fish curry), swimming a few times a day in the Indian ocean, and joking around with old pals.

Around three in the afternoon on a cloudless day, the beach on our side was empty of people besides my friend, his mother, and I. It was freeing to be alone on this vast beach, known to be a holy place among Hindus. Ganapatipule is named after the god Ganesh, and there is a famous Ganesh shrine near there where a swayambhu (a sculpture erected from the earth itself in the form of a god) is worshiped. Bathing in the ocean around this area is supposed to cleanse people of their negativity and visiting the shrine also purifies individuals as well.

As I started to swim in the warm ocean, jumping over waves, I left my friends behind. I was wearing a white kurta, or a traditional garb for men in India, which was heavy in the water, but my feet was easily touching the ocean floor at all times. I usually washed my clothes by swimming in the ocean when I was there.

But at one instant, I felt that my feet could not touch the ocean floor anymore and I plunged into the water, weighted down by my clothes. The waves kept coming and now they were menacing, as I was getting sucked into the depths every time they came—even if I rose out of the water and tried to swim back to the part of the ocean where I could get a foothold. I had been sucked into a riptide, in fact, and was stuck in a dipping valley, despite my hard efforts to reach safety and my yelling to my friends in the distance.

After struggling heavily for a few, long minutes to go against the suction of the riptide, and shouting to my friends in the distance near the shore to no avail, I began to relax, accepting my fate. I no longer fought to reach the edge of the ocean valley to get a foothold, and in the process of being pulled into the ocean and coming back up to the surface, I talked to God out loud. I discussed what I had did wrong in my life and what I did right. I concluded in reflection that my life was fulfilling overall, and I felt ready to die, accepting the present circumstance as reality.

Yet as soon I surrendered myself to the situation, a huge wave came and pushed me out of the riptide and the deep valley I was sucked into. On the drift of the wave, I landed near my friends, who seemed astonished at my expression and my words of description. They were unaware that I had been trouble. But it did not matter at the time—I was happy to reach land again and felt my life was renewed.

I later learned the time I swam was inauspicious for swimming at Ganapatipule , as the natives believe the god Ganesh bathes around three in afternoon in the ocean there. It was as if Ganesh forgave me for the intrusion, and released me from the anger of the ocean against divine protocol.

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Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics

The great majority of near-death experiences (NDEs) reported publicly over the past four decades have been described as pleasant, even glorious. Almost unnoticed in the euphoria about them has been the sobering fact that not all NDEs are so affirming. Some are deeply disturbing.

Few people are forthcoming about such an event; they hide; they disappear when asked for information; if inpatient, they are likely to withdraw; they are under great stress. What do their physicians need to know to deal with these experiences?

Varieties of Distressing Near-Death Experiences

We have documented three types of distressing NDE: inverse, void, and hellish. 1 The brief descriptions below illustrate the types. All examples are from the authors’ files unless otherwise indicated.

Inverse NDE

In some NDEs, features usually reported in other NDEs as pleasurable are perceived as hostile or threatening. A man thrown from his horse found himself floating at treetop height, watching emergency medical technicians working over a his body. “No! No! This isn’t right!” He screamed, “Put me back!” but they did not hear him. Next he was shooting through darkness toward a bright light, flashing past shadowy people who seemed to be deceased family members waiting. He was panic-stricken by the bizarre scenario and his inability to affect what was happening.

A woman in childbirth felt her spirit separate from her body and fly into space at tremendous speed, then saw a small ball of light rushing toward her: “It became bigger and bigger as it came toward me. I realized that we were on a collision course, and it terrified me. I saw the blinding white light come right to me and engulf me.”

A woman collapsed from hyperthermia and began re-experiencing her entire life: “I was filled with such sadness and experienced a great deal of depression.”

The Void NDE

An NDE of the “void” is an ontological encounter with a perceived vast emptiness, often a devastating scenario of aloneness, isolation, sometimes annihilation. A woman in childbirth found herself abruptly flying over the hospital and into deep, empty space. A group of circular entities informed her she never existed, that she had been allowed to imagine her life but it was a joke; she was not real. She argued with facts about her life and descriptions of Earth. “No,” they said, “none of that had ever been real; this is all there was.” She was left alone in space. 2 , pp. 1–5

Another woman in childbirth felt herself floating on water, but at a certain point, “It was no longer a peaceful feeling; it had become pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens, and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth. It was worse than any nightmare. I was spinning around, and I realized that this was eternity; this was what forever was going to be…. I felt the aloneness, the emptiness of space, the vastness of the universe, except for me, a mere ball of light, screaming.”

A woman who attempted suicide felt herself sucked into a void: “I was being drawn into this dark abyss, or tunnel, or void…. I was not aware of my body as I know it…. I was terrified. I felt terror. I had expected nothingness; I expected the big sleep; I expected oblivion; and I found now that I was going to another plane … and it frightened me. I wanted nothingness, but this force was pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go, but I never got beyond the fog.”

A man who was attacked by a hitchhiker felt himself rise out of his body: “I suddenly was surrounded by total blackness, floating in nothing but black space, with no up, no down, left, or right…. What seemed like an eternity went by. I fully lived it in this misery. I was only allowed to think and reflect.”

Hellish NDE

Overtly hellish experiences may be the least common type of distressing NDE. A man in heart failure felt himself falling into the depths of the Earth. At the bottom was a set of high, rusty gates, which he perceived as the gates of hell. Panic-stricken, he managed to scramble back up to daylight.

A woman was being escorted through a frighteningly desolate landscape and saw a group of wandering spirits. They looked lost and in pain, but her guide indicated she was not allowed to help them.

An atheistic university professor with an intestinal rupture experienced being maliciously pinched, then torn apart by malevolent beings. 3

A woman who hemorrhaged from a ruptured Fallopian tube reported an NDE involving “horrific beings with gray gelatinous appendages grasping and clawing at me. The sounds of their guttural moaning and the indescribable stench still remain 41 years later. There was no benign Being of Light, no life video, nothing beautiful or pleasant.”

A woman who attempted suicide felt her body sliding downward in a cold, dark, watery environment: “When I reached the bottom, it resembled the entrance to a cave, with what looked like webs hanging…. I heard cries, wails, moans, and the gnashing of teeth. I saw these beings that resembled humans, with the shape of a head and body, but they were ugly and grotesque…. They were frightening and sounded like they were tormented, in agony.”

Three Types of Response

These NDEs are traumatic in their realness, their rupturing the sense of worldly reality, and the power of the questions they raise. Three common responses cut across all experience types: the turnaround, reductionism, and the long haul. 2

1. The Turnaround: “I needed that”

A classic response to profound spiritual experience is conversion, not necessarily changing one’s religion but in the original sense of the Latin convertere meaning “to turn around.” The terrifying NDE is interpreted as a warning about unwise or wrong behaviors, and to turn one’s life around: “I was being shown that I had to shape up or ship out, one or the other. In other words, ‘get your act together,’ and I did just that.” 4 , p. 46

Movement toward a dogmatic religious community is common in this group. Clinical social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp observed, “All the people I know who have had negative experiences have become Bible-based Christians…. They might express it in various sects. But they all feel that they have come back from an awful situation and have a second chance.” 5 , p. 85

Fear may remain a powerful influence, but a strict theology may offer a way out. The atheistic professor above who experienced being maliciously pinched, then torn apart by malevolent beings left his university and attended seminary. 3 Others also reported newfound devotion, “I’ve stopped drugs, moved back to Florida, and now I’m in Bible college. I used to have a casual attitude toward death, but now I actually fear it more. So yes, it was a warning. I was permitted another chance to change my behavior on earth…. I’ve taken my fear of death and given it to the scriptures.” 4 , p. 43 Since then, I have dedicated my life to the most high God Jehovah, and spend 60 hours a month speaking and teaching about the Creator of Heaven and earth and all living creatures. I’m not worried now about when I die, because now I know that God has promised us something far more.”

2. Reductionism: “It was only …”

As a response to a distressing experience, reductionism has been described as the “defense [that] allows one to repudiate the meaning of an event which does not fit into a safe category” and to “treat the event as if it did not matter.” 6 , p. 35

A woman whose anaphylactic reaction precipitated an NDE with both loving and frightening elements concluded, “There are actual rational explanations for what I experienced…. The brain, under stress, releases natural opiates that stop pain and fear…. Lack of oxygen disrupts the normal activity of the visual cortex…. Too much neural activity in the dying brain causes stripes of activity…. Our eyes, even closed, interpret those stripes of activity as … the sensation of moving forward in a tunnel…. There are more brain cells concentrated in the middle of the cortex than on the edges so as we get closer to death, the brain interprets all those dense cells with their crazy activity as a bright light in the middle of our visual field. It’s all very scientific.” 7 , p. 95

Her conclusion is that, based on the scientific evidence, the experience had no ontological meaning. Any lingering anxieties will go unaddressed.

A woman who had a terrifying experience during childbirth likewise dismissed the reality of the experience: “Perhaps it was the effect of the ether and not an NDE.” A woman attacked by a lion dismissed the memory of her NDE as hallucinatory: “I often wonder if, in the shock of the attack, my mind played tricks on me, and that I may have just been unconscious and my brain deprived of oxygen.”

A man who for many years had spoken publicly about his radiant NDE had a second experience, in which he felt attacked by gigantic, sinister, threatening geometric forms, leaving him with a deep-seated pessimism and terror of dying. Learning that drug-induced hallucinations include geometric forms, he concluded that his second NDE was “only a drug reaction.” This may be an appropriate conclusion clinically, but the experience remains. Reductionism provides a temporary buffer to mask questions and anxieties, but does nothing to resolve them.

3. The Long Haul: “What did I do?”

Other experiencers have difficulty comprehending or integrating terrifying NDEs. These people, years later, still struggle with the existential implications of the NDE, “I had an experience which has remained with me for 29 years…. It has left a horror in my mind and I have never spoken about it until now.” And, “After all these years, the nightmare remains vivid in my mind.” “For some reason, [31 years later] all the memories are back and vivid…. It’s like living it all over again, and I don’t want to. I thought I had it all resolved and in its place, but I’m having a really bad time trying to put it away this time.

Also, “For the next 50 years, I would try to repress the memory of the black, threatening experience, because it felt so real it continued to be frightening, no matter how old I got.” And, “I’ve been married for 33 years and I do not even discuss the experience with my husband…. Yet it is as clear to me today as it was when it happened.” Additionally, “I just buried the whole thing as deeply as possible, got very busy in civic affairs, politics…. It seems pretty clear to me now, though the specifics aren’t in place, that there’s some core issue that still needs dealing with.”

”I see this vision as flashbacks constantly. I cannot get this out of my head…. I still see it in my mind from my own eyes. It has been two years, yet I have never talked about it. My husband does not even know…. I want to put this behind me, but am unable.”

This group is often articulate people haunted by the existential dimension of their NDE, searching for a cognitively and emotionally grounding explanation. They find a literal reading of the event intellectually unacceptable, but reductionist explanations only assign a cause without addressing meaning. They struggle to make sense of the distressing NDE without destroying them (and their trust in the workings of the world) in the process.

More than others, these experiencers enter psychotherapy, some for many years, though without data, this may indicate nothing other than openness and financial means. Too often physicians prescribe medications to mask questioning and dismiss the NDE as fanciful or pathological; therapists will not address the matter or leave the client feeling blamed or romanticize spirituality and cannot deal with its dark side; and clergy have no idea what to say or reject the experience outright.

The religious element of their NDE is often an absence:

“I was filled with a sense of absolute terror and of being past the help of anyone, even God.”

“I looked around me. Consciously searching for … God or some other angelic creature, but I was alone.”

“I expected the Lord to be there, but He wasn’t… I called on God and He wasn’t there. That’s what scared me.” 4 , p. 53

Overwhelmingly, their questions include some variant of “What did I do to deserve this?” or “What are the rules, if the rules I lived by don’t work?” Not for a long time, if ever, do they lose their fear of death.” The man above attacked by a hitchhiker still struggled with the aftermath, “I’ve pondered if I was in that hell, will I go back on my death? Was I sent there for something perhaps I’ll do in the future, or something I did in the past? … I don’t believe in a hell, but it was such a strong experience, there is always that underlying uncertainty and trouble and fear.”

Posttraumatic Growth

The psychological literature on posttraumatic growth did not exist in the early years of our study of distressing NDEs, so that aspect of response remains underreported. As a growing number of studies make clear, even the most devastating life event, “like the grit that creates the oyster, is often what propels people to become more true to themselves, take on new challenges, and view life from a wider perspective.” 8 , p. 7 This is a promising and as yet underdeveloped approach for clinicians working with those who report struggling after a distressing NDE. 9

Seven Things to Know about Distressing Near-Death Experiences

• Distressing NDEs occur under the same wide range of circumstances and feature most of the same elements as pleasant NDEs. What differs is the emotional tone, which ranges from fear through terror to, in some cases, guilt or despair. The reports typically lack two elements common in pleasant NDEs: a positive emotional tone and loss of the fear of death.
• A notorious reluctance to report a distressing NDE may lead to long-lasting trauma for individuals as well as limiting the data on occurrence. A literature review covering thirty years of research concludes that as many as one in five NDEs may be predominantly distressing. 10
• The etiology of all such events remains unknown. Despite decades of clinical studies, none so far adequately explains either the cause or function of NDEs. Further, NDEs cross so many clinical circumstances and demographic bases, there is no way to predict who will have what type of NDE. No evidence supports the conventional assumption that “good” people get pleasant NDEs and “bad” people have distressing ones. Saints have reported extremely disturbing NDEs, 11 , pp. 63–75 while felons and suicide attempters have encountered bliss. 12 , pp. 41–44
• Pleasant NDEs tend to convey universal messages of compassion that cross religious and philosophical systems. Distressing NDEs typically have less focused messages but follow the ancient shamanic pattern of suffering/death/resurrection, which in less metaphoric terms can be read as an invitation to self-examination, disarrangement of core beliefs, and rebuilding. In practical terms, a common interpretation of a distressing NDE is that it is a message to turn one’s life around.
• The description of any NDE is shaped by the experiencer’s pre-existing mental categories and vocabulary. As example, although the archetype of a benevolent guide is common in NDEs, individuals typically identify the presence according to their own cultural vocabulary. Any report identifying an archetypal individual by name is a perception that may or may not be factually true but cannot be confirmed as such. Understandably, it is facts like these which religious groups and materialists alike may find troubling. Secular Westerners often believe an NDE indicates a psychotic episode.
• The primary effect of many NDEs is a powerful and enduring awareness that the physical world is not the full extent of reality. Because this perception runs so deeply counter to Western materialism, and conversely because its implications affect some dogmatic theological teachings, the new conviction commonly overturns experiencers’ personal life and social relationships abruptly and permanently.
• A major challenge for physicians and other scientists dealing with reports of near-death experience is to manage this intrusion of non-materialist religious and philosophical language and understandings into the hard data of clinical thinking. Curiously, it is at the extremes of religious fundamentalism and material scientism that one finds literalism an issue. For fundamentalists, the accounts are believed to be literally, physically actual; for convinced materialists, they must be dismissed as lunacy because a literal, physical actuality is impossible and no alternative concept is acceptable.

Raymond Moody, in the article introducing this series, observed, “The best practice for physicians is to stick strictly to clinical and research concerns.” 13 , p. 371 The post-NDE convictions of patients and their family members with whom physicians must interact are likely to make that a difficult suggestion to follow. Non-judgmental listening may be the most workable alternative.

Like the better-publicized pleasurable NDEs, distressing near-death experiences are both fascinating and frustrating as altered states of consciousness. Because of the deeply rooted concept of hell in Western culture and its Christian association with eternal physical torment, they pose serious challenges to the individuals who must shape their lives around such a profoundly durable event, and to their families, friends, and physicians. In the absence of clear-cut clinical data and universal cultural views, physicians are advised that neutrality of opinion and careful listening are likely to constitute best professional practice for addressing these difficult near-death experiences.

Nancy Evans Bush, MA, (left) is President Emerita, International Association for Near-Death Studies. Bruce Greyson, MD, is the Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences and Director, Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Contact: moc.liamg@5hsubnan

None reported.

• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

Categories:

• Coping With Grief

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Personal Narrative: A Near Death Experience Essay

People always say that in a near death experience, your life always flashes before your eyes. I waited for that moment to happen, but all I saw was the series of decisions that led me to the situation I was in. I remember this morning clearly, the day I had been waiting for, When I received my SAT scores. I had never been a super bad student, just never really a good one, grades have never been important to me, it was always about friends.

The spots for athlete and genius in my seemingly perfect family had already been filled by my younger brother and older sister, so I put my effort into doing the one thing I could do that no one else would- be popular . I’m not really trying to say that I’m the most popular girl in the world but I’ve always been good at making friends, and in a competitive family like mine, in a small town, I used it to my advantage. Although no matter what I did, I knew that there was that underlying lower expectation for me than my siblings, so at some point I guess I lowered my own expectations for myself.

Around a month before the SATs started, I was sitting at my desk in my history classroom in the same seat always sit in when my best friend, Kayla, leaned over and whispered to me, “Hey, Bells, I think those two dorks are talking about you” Across the room I could see some girls I hadn’t bothered to learn the names of whispering and looking at me. It didn’t bother me until the small girl with glasses and baggy jeans said, “Sure, Bella’s moderately pretty, but she’s dumb. Shes gonna peak in highschool, probably not even going to get into college. Kaylas eyes got wide as she got up to go defend me as she always was doing but i pushed her back into the hard blue plastic chairs that had probably been in the classroom since the 80’s. “Kay, stop it’s fine they’re just losers. ” I brushed it off as i always did and went back to looking at my phone. Later that night the words of the girl i generally wouldn’t give the time of day to just kept repeating in my head, because i didn’t want it to be true. Hey high pitched voice was driving me crazy as i tried to push it out of my head.

I had never spent much time thinking about what i was going to do with my life once high school was over in a short year and half from then, but i knew it wasn’t going it be a waitress at the Denny’s on walker road. I broke down and decided that i was going to prove the girl with the high pitched voice wrong. For the first time in my life I raised my bar higher and actually tried. I was told my whole life that if I just applied myself, if I just tried I would succeed. I blew off my friends, who asked frequent questions like Bell, what’s going on?

Are you OK? Are you SURE you want to miss another party this weekend? I glued myself to SAT preparation books. Once the actual test that would for the most part, determine my future, rolled around I was a wreck. I don’t remember much about the actual test, but I still feel how uncomfortable those hard plastic chairs were and that my hands were so sweaty I stopped counting the times I dropped my pencil after 8. After the testing was over, I thought i would be relieved, but instead i was more nervous than ever.

I spent every moment thinking about every problem i got wrong, every problem that would stop me from getting into college. I’ve always had high anxiety, about everything, and i learned to lower my expectations and expect the worst in order to cope with it. “Come on Bell! You have to get up it’s time for breakfast! ” My mom screamed at me with an annoyed tone at me across the house. I had already been up for 2 hours, staring at my ceiling because I wasn’t quite ready to be surrounded by my family. I finally pulled myself out of the tangled mess of sheets that had become by bed from my restless night of sleep.

My whole body shivered and my toes curled as they touched the cold hardwood floor of my room. I slumped out into the kitchen where my mom, older sister and little brother sat with a huge array of food for breakfast. I was too nervous to be hungry so I sat down and put my head on the table. “You know Bella and Lana get their SAT scores back today, right? ” My little brother Porter added to the conversation, making me give him a death stare because it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. “I totally forgot! Are you excited Lana? What do you think you got?

I’m sure you got another perfect score baby! ” My cheeks burned with embarrassment, annoyance and a hint of jealousy as my parents went on to praise my older genius sister has they always had, Completely forgetting my existence. I was used to my mom’s obvious preference to Lana- In everything but something about my own stress levels set me off. I got up and turned my back on my family before they could see the hot tears of anger running down my cheeks. I silently and calmly walked back to my room, making sure that i kept my cool in order to show them i didn’t care.

I slammed my door closed and I began to remember that there is no way that i did good on my test, It’s not possible. I’m Bella Drake, the dumb one, Lana Drake is the smart one. I always had been, always will be right? I mean how did I think that I could just change overnight, there was no changing the fact that i would never be as good as my older sister. I heard a small knock on my door and before i could stop tell Porter to leave me alone, he let himself in my room. “Porter. Get. Out. Of. My. Room. Now. ” I barked at him with a poker face.

He didn’t say anything as he slowly walked towards me, as if i was a rabid animal that might bite his head off. He sat on the corner of my messy bed in silence for a few moments until he broke it by saying, “You really need to clean your room, you can barely see the floor. ” I couldn’t help but laugh at his lame attempt to make me feel better. I threw a pillow at him and he began laughing with me until we were both in hysterics on my bed. I had always been close with Porter, probably because he was the only one who I wasn’t scared of being vulnerable around.

People seeing me weak had always been one of my biggest insecurities, I was always fine to everyone but Porter. He grabbed one of my fluffy pillows and threw it back and ran out of my room for his life. He didn’t ask me about my SATs or anything, he just made me smile. I looked over at my laptop sitting across my room that seemed to be taunting me, laughing at me because i was too scared to open it. The little silver rectangle that sat still and alone scared me more than anyone or anyone, It had the answers that likely told me that I wasn’t as good as my sisters waited for me on that screen.

I started walking towards the evil looking device to, conquer my demons, when i was interupted by my screaming ringtone. I dove across my bed, glad there was an excuse to leave my laptop to its deep sleep. I looked at my bright screen to see a call from kayla that i immediately picked up. “Bell, Jess is throwing a party tonight. You are going. You have no choice I’m kidnapping you. SATs are over and you no longer have an excuse to blow me off. ” I smiled at Kayla trying to force me. “Of course, I’ll be there Kay, want me to pick you up? ” I asked with a giggle. Oh thank god i thought i might actually have to kidnap you. Yes sounds good i’ll see you at 8 bell! ” Kayla said enthusiastically as she cut off the call. I smiled at my crazy best friend and looked at the time which was already 12. I went to my desk and sat down staring at my laptop once again. I opened the cold metal laptop and before i could type my password in, my heart started pounding and I slammed my devilish laptop closed. I took a deep breath and tried to push the negative thoughts that seemed to constantly be controlling me out of my head but I couldn’t.

I laid down in my bed and closed my eyes as tight as i could as i tried to just stop my mind for a little. When i woke up i tried to pretend like i wasn’t ignoring anything, like i was just getting ready for a party as usual. I pulled out my flat iron and began straightening my long curly and kinky dark brown hair I always resented because i got it from my dad. I slapped on makeup to my light brown skin until it looked as if I had nothing but clear skin. I never understood the point of putting on makeup to make it look like you don’t need makeup, but i did it anyway.

I curled my eyelashes and put in my hoops while i picked out a pair of light wash ripped jeans and a dark red plain t-shirt to go with. I slipped on a long gold necklace and my converse, grabbed my keys and purse and headed out to pick up kayla. When I walked past my mom in the living room, reading something on her kindle i half expected her to ask where I was going or tell me to be careful, but she didn’t. I rolled my eyes as i slammed the front door hoping to get some satisfaction out of the loud noise, but i didn’t. My arms immediately were covered in goosebumps as i stepped outside in the cold december.

I went into my purse to grab my phone and as i did i lost my footing on the slippery steps, but i luckily caught myself. i carefully made my way to my iced over car and practically had to pry the frozen door open. Once I was In i turned the heat of the car all the way to attempt at defrosting myself from those few seconds outside. I pulled my phone out and texted with my frozen fingers to kayla that I would be there in about 5 minutes. I couldn’t pull the SATs out of my mind no matter how hard i tried. It was like i was trying to trick myself into thinking that I forgot about them, but even my usual trick wouldn’t work.

I turned the volume up on my stereo as far as i could and pulled into Kaylas driveway. She came running out with her shoes in her hands and practically jumped into my car. “Hola Chica, I missed you! ” Kayla practically squealed while changing the station on my radio. I smiled and started driving but she gave me a confused look. “Bell, I know you, what’s up? Are you ok? Did you get your scores? ” she said interrogatively. “Nah, I haven’t really worked up the courage to look at them yet, it’s fine i’ll check them when I get home tonight. I lied brushing her questions off my shoulder.

My negative thoughts were getting pounding in my head along with the loud music and Kayla singing along, and then i get a text. I looked down at my phone just for a second, it was a text from my mom that read, “Lana got her scores, a 1600! ” There was no how did you do. There was no how are you. There was just Lana, as usual. In that moment my head seemed to explode with the million things surrounding me. My world went in slow motion as the december ice covered roads took control of my car. Everything spun around and around.

Every ounce of stress, anxiety, of self loathing and hatred escaped my head for the first time in my life, and there was a moment of stillness. My life wasn’t flashing before my eyes, but there was a moment of realization. I realized that I spent my short life on people who didn’t deserve me, but i wasn’t alone. Everything became clear, and beautiful. I spent my short life anxiety filled trying to please others, and now I was just another girl who was in a car crash. There was nothing important about me, I was just a person. I am just a human, and for the first time i loved myself. Then everything went black.

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