This week, something a little different. I am re-sharing an essay I wrote last year on Medium about my near-death experience, after it came up a couple times recently. I’ve been meaning to move this over to Substack, and this seemed like the right moment.
The back of the wheelchair presses into my shoulder blades. It’s 2009; I am 22 years old. Footrests prop up my feet. I don’t know what I’m wearing and can’t remember getting dressed. All I know is that I passed out in a stall in the bathroom of my college dorm. I fell on my face and my glasses will have to be fixed. I called my mom, who called the dean of students, who arrived at my door with campus security and drove me over to the hospital.
When I passed out the first time, it was an instantaneous blackness. Like a deep blink. One moment standing, the next on the floor. That’s all. This will be important for what happens next.
I never had as much as an irregular period until that year. So when my menstrual blood started coming out in a torrent, I thought there had to be a simple explanation. I read stories about women bleeding through airplane seats on the internet. Okay, that had never happened to me, but surely that didn’t mean anything was really wrong. The possibility of it being something serious did not even wander through my head. I was a senior at a tiny liberal arts college in the Midwest, and the most pressing health issue I’d faced was having my wisdom teeth removed. It didn’t occur to me that I could bleed out until my hemoglobin level was so low I’d require a blood transfusion. It didn’t occur to my doctors until several months later that it could be something as serious as cancer.
Someone wheels me into an office where a strident woman is trying to get my insurance information. My thoughts sputter and weave. I can’t stay in the present moment. Doesn’t this woman understand that everything is growing dim and warm, that I can hardly keep my eyes open much less hunt for an insurance card that I probably don’t even have with me because I am a college student who has never been sick with anything more than a flu, never broken a bone or had to have stitches? I can barely comprehend that I am sitting here.
And then I am not. My body is, but I am floating away. The dark blooms threatening my vision disappear. I am drifting like liquid into a golden light. The light is everywhere. Everywhere there is singing.
Insurance woman says my name and I blink my eyes open for a fraction of a moment. I see that she looks scared, hear her say, “Stay with me,” and then to someone else, “I can’t keep her with me.”
I tumble away again.
It will take me a long time to even begin to make sense of what happens next. For more than a decade, I will tell almost no one. I will fight a fear of death (which I am not “supposed” to have anymore); words like astral travel and soul journey will fill me with a strange mix of homesickness and dread.
Before that day, I had not given much thought to death. I had lost, in my life, three dogs and a grandmother. I had not known how to sit with my grief for any of them. My family had raised me to be spiritual but not religious, so I did not believe in a conventional afterlife. My friends and I talked about past lives and speculated where we might once have lived, but I was not prepared in any way for the immediacy of my own mortality. The way my soul could set free of my body in the space of a breath.
I am floating into the golden light. It is warm and a waterfall is flowing before me, and beings soar through the sky and dive into the waterfall, and it is so beautiful, so overwhelmingly sublime, and I feel as if I have come home, as if I never left. And everywhere, in every single particle of existence, there is singing. The song, the songs, the sound — it suffuses the light, the beings, me. Everything is sound.
It seems that the flying, diving, arcing, joyous light-bodied beings communicate to each other but do not notice me. Maybe in another moment, someone will come to greet me, to tell me where I am and why I’ve come back.
Someone says my name.
Over the next decade and more, I won’t even record this experience in a journal. (I will be somewhat shocked to discover this.) I will be afraid to commit it to words. I will constantly downplay it, even in my own head. After all, I did not “clinically die,” so it can’t have been a “real” near-death experience.
I will go on to be diagnosed with cancer, a few months later. I will have surgery; I will undergo chemotherapy; I will lose all my hair. I will recover. My experience floating into that golden light will become one strand in the braid of everything else that will happen in my life. Yet looking back, I will wonder if this briefest of moments, this luminous instant, is not the river from which everything else flows. That moment of traveling outside yet within. Of glimpsing what lies beyond the boundary of my skin and bones.
I open my eyes to a dim, dull ER ward. Harsh fluorescent lights, dingy beige cabinets. A nurse has been saying my name and now presses my shoulder. “There you are. You’re back.”
A beautiful experience. I also had a time when I was hit head on by a car while on my motorcycle. They say I was flying through the air before hitting the road, but I experienced the pleasure of going up to brightness and peaceful beauty. Everything seemed right and good, and I was content, but then I heard my name being called, and I was back at the scene here on earth. No fear. A hard recovery, but I absolutely have no fear of the time when my spirit will soar from my body. Julie K