Living Beyond: Making Sense of Near Death Experiences

Angie’s Background

Her mother left home when Angie was just 9 years old. She had to care for the family – cook, clean and provide mothering for her little sister as best she could. Her father was an alcoholic who was lost in his own despair and ill-equipped to care for two little girls. Worse still, as time went by, she experienced sexual abuse. She put up with this to protect her sister. After these episodes she would cuddle her dolls in bed and feel utterly worthless and unlovable.

She married early at 19, but within a week her husband had yanked her off the ground by her hair. Years of abuse continued. Angie suffered a broken tooth and a broken nose, but the emotional abuse she endured was far more damaging. She eventually succumbed to addictions and behaviours that were contrary to her beliefs in abstaining from alcohol and drugs and relations outside of marriage. Angie had two boys of her own, but could not escape the inner feelings of self-loathing that trapped her. She believed that she had no control over her behaviour, her thoughts and her emotions and fell into a dark depression. She felt she would be doing her husband and children a favour by taking her own life.

When Angie was a teenager, her stepmother told Angie how, after a serious car accident, she had floated above her body in the emergency room. She heard the doctors saying that the family should be gathered because she likely would not survive. She was then enveloped in a warm and loving light filled with peace. Loved ones who had passed on met her in the light as she hovered above her body. They told her that it was not her time but that she could choose. She was told that if she returned, her life would be difficult. She chose to come back.

To Angie, this peaceful bliss sounded superb and thoughts of suicide became more urgent. She twice put a loaded shotgun in her mouth but did not pull the trigger. ‘If I had, I would not have been able to return to my body after my NDE,’ she remarks today.

At the age of 26, in January 1991, she slit her wrists and then swallowed nearly every drug in the medicine cabinet.

Angie’s Life Review

Her NDE began in the classic fashion with an awareness of her spirit separating from her body. She was not taken to the brilliant glories of Paradise, however, but remained in darkness. She noticed a large screen in front of her on which a 3D slide show of her life began playing out chronologically in vivid detail, beginning in her mother’s birth canal followed by her birth. She experienced her delighted mother cupping Angie’s head in her hand.

What seemed strange as the images flew past was her adult understanding of each person who appeared on the screen – what they were thinking and feeling at the time, even those in the room when she had been a baby. ‘I knew how each person felt who had ever interacted with me.’

Despite being totally captivated by the events shown on the screen and the emotions that they evoked, she became aware of a supportive ‘presence’ with her, without actually seeing who or what this presence was. She knew that he was male and that he knew her and loved her.

The pictures rushed along until she saw herself dead, lying on the couch. Then, just as suddenly as they had started, the pictures stopped.

The Sorting Ground.

Angie searched the darkness. Where was she? Darkness enveloped her, not the wonderful, warm light she had anticipated. The darkness continued in all directions and seemed to have no end. ‘It was an endless Void,’ she concluded. In spite of being surrounded by absolute darkness, she could see on a heightened level. To her right, standing shoulder to shoulder, was a line of teenagers. Otherworldly intuition kicked in and Angie deduced that they were suicides like herself.

‘With a laugh, I opened my mouth, but before I could form the words, they came tumbling out, “We must be the suicides.” I wasn’t sure whether I had thought the words or had attempted to say them, but they were audible without my having to move my lips.’

But had the others waiting in line heard her telepathic message? They showed no emotion if so. Then the lad next to her slowly turned and looked blankly at her before turning to look forward again. He had heard her, but there had been no expression on his face, no warmth or friendliness. He returned to looking ahead in a transfixed stupor.

Angie saw a girl towards the end of the line, who looked to be about 16 years old. Might she respond? Angie drew a blank. ‘She was just like the rest of them, her empty gaze fixed on nothing, staring blankly forward. They were all dead, and so was I!’

Without warning, Angie felt herself being pulled away by an unknown force, leaving the line of teenagers behind.

The Prison

Angie found herself deposited in a shadowy realm stretching as far as she could see. There were people there, apparently mumbling to themselves because she could observe no communication taking place between them. They appeared to be caught up in their own misery to the exclusion of making connection with anyone else. They stood, squatted or wandered aimlessly about.

Men and women of all ages were trapped there, but one observation struck her – there were no children.

With growing alarm as she looked around. She became convinced that this was a place where suicides were imprisoned.

The old man closest to her was in a pathetic, filthy condition, squatting on the ground and apparently resigned to his fate. He appeared to have ceased thinking altogether and took no notice of anything around him. ‘He was completely drained, just waiting.’ She felt his trapped soul had been there a very long time. ‘In this dark Prison, a day might as well be a thousand days or a thousand years.’ She even wondered whether he could be one of the most famous suicides in history – Judas Iscariot. Then she felt embarrassed for the thought, in case he had picked it up. If he did, he showed no sign of it but continued his hopeless, impassive waiting.

It struck Angie’s restless, probing thought processes that this was a land of nothing – no love, no privacy, no sleep, no friends, no light, no growth, no happiness, no relief, no television, no books – no access to knowledge and no way to use it. It was an empty world, where no connections could be made. It was not how she had imagined suicide would be.

Angie found the solitude oppressive and terrifying. Her sense of being alone and helpless seemed to burgeon. How many eons would she remain in this awful condition?