Glimpsing Heaven by Judy Bachrach

Author:Judy Bachrach [Bachrach, Judy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1371-7
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Listeners, relatives and friends, would tell Charlotte she had a psychotic episode, or it was a dream, or some vision she saw during an epileptic seizure and later recollected.1

Charlotte went to her local hospital emergency room, but the staff there had nothing to tell her except that what she saw and heard wasn’t the result of a psychotic episode. She thumbed through the phone book, finally contacting—desperately—a neuropsychiatrist (her own neurologist was then on vacation), who patiently explained that when the brain dies, the abilities to question and reason also die, and Charlotte agrees that’s just what happened. Her brain was dying. Everything that occurred to her that evening after the sun had set can be explained, she says, by science.

She had felt her form “dissipating away” the night before. “It was going back to the universe,” she reflected. And she still feels that’s what will happen when she dies a second time. “That’s what happens to all matter and energy,” she explains. “Our energy returns to the Earth and my body turns to dust.”

That much she can accept, in a way. And yet Charlotte couldn’t stop crying. She was terrified of dying. She now knew what it was like.

On returning from vacation, her neurologist told her she’d suffered from “a frontal lobe seizure.” Charlotte is not so sure, however, that explains what happened to her.

So much remains unresolved. To this day, over a year after Charlotte’s encounter with death, she simply cannot shake its effects, both the tranquillity and beauty of the early portion of the encounter, and the frightening second part, which was much shorter. It isn’t just the total disbelief that originally greeted her account of what death was like that disturbs her—an account she usually keeps to herself these days, in any case. It’s the dark. That still terrifies her: “It’s too reminiscent of the black, the fear is gripping in my chest,” Charlotte explains. Every night, she sleeps with lights on in the next room.

Also, the stories of death, anyone’s death, now haunt her persistently: “The deaths of children,” Lorrie tells me, “the deaths of those who die instantly—she keeps imagining all those deaths.”

And, of course, her own death: Charlotte imagines that as well, “Because I know—that place again,” she says. “There will be no coming back when I die of natural causes. It will be my time. And yet I love life!”

Her friend Lorrie thinks about that often. “I wonder if Charlotte is just scared of dying too soon,” she says. “She hasn’t yet gotten married, she doesn’t have a child. I think she needs to be fulfilled, to know she wasn’t here on Earth for naught. I tell her, ‘When all that happens you’ll be more prepared.’ ”

Whenever an especially mean-spirited individual crosses their path, Charlotte will tell Lorrie, “That person is not going to have a good trip.”

She feels in so many ways fortunate. Not simply because she came back from death but because she came back with a purpose: to do better this time around.

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