Dying by Martin Shepard

Author:Martin Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1579620698
Publisher: The Permanent Press

9

An Ending

or a Beginning?

(Life After Death)

Death is not a puzzle to be solved any more than life is.

—Rev. Robert Neale

WHAT DOES DEATH feel like? Is there trauma? Does awareness stop abruptly? And what of the possibility of life after death?

All religious dogma claims that there is continuity of life, yet we tend to believe only what we directly apprehend. One man claims he’s talked with God. Another woman states she’s communicated with a dead relative at some seance. They have their encounters and they believe. But if I’ve not undergone a similar experience, I remain skeptical. To me, they might be either misguided, charlatans, or lunatics as well as tellers of truth. Or simply people seeking comfort from an uncertain existence in a bewildering universe.

There are, however, a myriad number of accounts by people who have approached or actually passed through the portals of clinical death. Although their stories are necessarily limited, these remain the best indicators we have as to what the end of life is about.

In 1871, Albert Heim, a Zurich geology professor and mountain climber, fell more than seventy feet while climbing.

“What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time,” he later wrote. “Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundred-fold velocity.”

At first he thought of practical things to do upon impact. Then his experiences became other-worldly.

“I saw my whole life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light, and everything was beautiful without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent music, a divine calm swept through my soul. I became ever more surrounded by a splendid blue heaven with delicate roseate and violet cloudlets. I swept into it painlessly and softly and saw that now I was falling freely through the air and that under me a snowfield lay waiting. Objective observations, thought, and subjective feelings were simultaneous.”

Heim lost consciousness, but survived the fall with relatively minor injuries. He later collected anecdotes from others regarding near-fatal falls and in 1891 published his findings in the yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club.

Ninety-five percent of those he interviewed reported experiences similar to his own. He concluded that people who actually do die from falls “have, in their last moments, reviewed their individual pasts in states of transfiguration. They have fondly thought of their loved ones. Elevated above corporeal pain, they were under the sway of noble and profound thoughts, heavenly music, and a feeling of peace and reconciliation.”

Another account comes from a very sane and skeptical clinical psychologist I know who had a most uncanny experience twenty-five years ago. She was taken to an operating room for abdominal surgery and while under anesthesia had a “dream” that she had died.

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