When I woke up from the coma in late 2012, the topic of near death was on everybody’s lips. This was due to an American neuroscientist who had published a book called Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Nobody had heard his name before, but that year the name Dr Eben Alexander was everywhere. The book raced to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and the scientist was being interviewed across mainstream media.
Alexander’s experience ticked all those boxes. I could tell just from the title, Proof of Heaven. I was intrigued but scared. Why? Simple. I hadn’t seen heaven. I hadn’t seen angels. Nor God. It had been empty and infinite. What I had seen had been very different. It had been ritualistic. I had been comforted by tribal African women who sang to me and helped me. I had drifted into a great and expansive nothingness. I had been helped back home by a strange and intriguing otherworldly I called the Forest Man.
I know that now you are itching to know more. That is the nature of these strange and mystical experiences. ‘More,’ we say, hungry for all the little details. ‘Tell me more.’ And yes, they are so unusual. The details and the whole experience of an NDE are so fascinating.
So, the title alone, Proof of Heaven, was a red flag to me and my stranger, more African and dare I say shamanic experience of near death. I was unable to read the book at that time. I was unable to read anything at all really, as a much bigger thing had happened. My husband died just three days after I woke from the coma and got out of hospital. I had been taken to see him when he was in his last stages of life. I was in a wheelchair, having just fought my way out of death, and he was entering into it. He was already in a coma as the tumour had created a suppression of his central nervous system by the time I saw him, and he was unresponsive. I didn’t even wonder at that stage whether he too was elsewhere in the spirit realm, looking for me.
I was unable to cope with that strange duality. I was so fragile that the enormity of the experience had to be put aside. I also needed time. I was still fighting my way back to health – I had been in a coma for close to a month and the physical recovery from that was painstaking and tough. I was battling with grief, and learning to walk again, eat again and talk again. My focus was on physical recovery and weaning myself off the mass of drugs that were keeping me ‘stable’.
Being a journalist and author, I wanted to record the events and feelings in writing.
Once I had recovered enough fine motor function I started by texting, then eventually I sat down with my laptop and noted down everything I remembered. It was long and detailed. I wrote down the entire journey, and even grouped the experience into the clear various phases.
Slowly the experience of being ‘so close to death’ faded. And the ordinariness of life took over. I was back in the non-magical world, and it felt solid and secure and comfortable. I was so relieved to be there.
Make money. Shop for groceries. Do the children’s homework. Pay the bills. I was reeling from the sheer experience of being alive. It was a strange and gifted time that also required putting others first. My husband had died. My two children, aged seven and nine, were horrendously traumatised, having almost lost both their parents. I had normality to attend to. I had to get up and make school lunches. The crazy journey I had been on was parked for another time.
But you are going to hear this time and time again in the stories that follow:
Some things you just know.
It was impossible to forget.
It was not like a dream; it was hyperreal.
I too could not forget. The experience was so vivid and real. I knew I was carrying some mystical secrets with me. Sometimes at night I would just close my eyes and feel myself shooting through the universe and into the ‘great nothingness’ where I’d ended up in my travels. I would remember the Forest Man by my bed. I would feel the warm arms of the tribe of women who had taken me into one of the sprit worlds. I could still hear their songs.
But the thing is, the recollection was not entirely pleasant. A lot of it was hugely confusing and frankly scary. It may sound blissful as you sit in your comfortable house reading with the warm sunlight on your skin – these stories of travelling across a vast universe. It may sound wonderfully freeing to be a ‘light being’, able to soar and travel, but the truth is, it was not. I was empty, alone and aimless. I was lost and I had no idea how to get home. You are going to read other stories in this book that are similarly distressing, even downright terrifying. You are going to read about a good person who was shown hell itself in her NDE.
And so, as I moved away from the coma, weeks turned into months. I didn’t want to think about how very close death had come and how far away I had been. I put pictures of my beloved children everywhere to remind myself that I was back on earth. I had a family and a house, and I was real again.
A year later I wrote an article for Women’s Health magazine, aptly titled ‘A year on’. It detailed my physical recovery from the coma. I wrote about the months of physiotherapy, learning to breathe again and then walk again, to drive and even relearning to remember where I had parked my car. Nowhere in that Women’s Health article did I talk about the deeper journey.
Was that the case of wrong publication to tackle this? It was a heartfelt piece, but it didn’t detail the ‘woo-woo’ about travelling into other realms and worlds. But I did send it off to an NDE journal as a documented experience. That felt like I had ticked a box – the journalist’s need to record the facts.
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