At Death’s Door : Regardless of Faith, Those Who ‘Return’ Have Similar Stories to Tell

About 8 million Americans say they know from experience what it feels like to die. They tell of disembodied travels through dark tunnels at immeasurable speeds, of being bathed in a brilliant light that conveys feelings of peace and love, of seeing the minutiae of their lives replayed. Are these hallucinations, induced by drugs or anesthesia? Perhaps, but most people who survive the near-death experience are never the same.

It might have been a side effect of painkillers that changed Steve Price’s life. It might have been a surge of natural energy that some mystics believe lies in reserve in us all.

Then again, it may have been evolution.

Whatever it was that kept Price from firing his gun ever again after he was nearly killed by a mortar fragment in Vietnam in 1965 has never been measured or analyzed or scanned. No one knows, so any theory could be applied.

Years later, Price’s near-death experience continues to shape his life, and the same is true for many of the 8 million Americans who claim to know how it feels to die.

Nine years after her own brush with death, Barbara Harris walked away from her husband and three children. She couldn’t reconcile her privileged life style with a desire to help others that was kindled when her life flashed before her, revealing each ripple that her actions had caused in the lives of others.

Similarity of Accounts

Just as many people can’t remember their dreams, the majority of people who have come close to death don’t recall it. But the 25% to 30% of those who do remember give similar descriptions.

They tell of disembodied travels through dark tunnels at immeasurable speeds, of being bathed in a brilliant white or golden light that conveys feelings of peace and love far beyond any earthly emotion, of seeing the minutiae of their lives replayed for their edification.

Some report joyful reunions with deceased loved ones who communicate telepathically. Others tell of a divine presence, or energy force, which they describe as the source of all love. They recall comprehending, for a mind-reeling instant, the secrets of the universe, and of the anguish and sorrow they feel when they reluctantly rejoin the living.

These descriptions are similar among other nationalities, with cultural variations. A Buddhist won’t see Jesus, for example.

Psychoanalyst Karl Jung wrote of having a near-death experience in the mid-1940s. English philosopher Sir Alfred J. Ayer, one of the world’s prominent atheists, had one just last year. (Ayer wrote: “It slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be.”)

Fear of Death Banished

No scientist who studies such experiences has been lucky enough to be around during one, so they can only chronicle the survivors’ accounts. The people invariably say they have lost all fear of death. Many feel angry and disappointed at being revived. “I felt so restricted, so trapped in this body,” said Al Sullivan of East Hartford, whose close call came during his heart surgery last year.

Those who were attempting suicide at the time seldom try it again. “The things that made people suicidal before are no longer meaningful,” said Bruce Greyson, a psychiatry professor at the University of Connecticut Medical Center who has interviewed thousands of subjects over 15 years of study. “People see their role in the universe-at-large. They see why they’re here--to take care of a family, raise a child, write a book.”

Virtually all of them are left with an unwavering belief in a higher power, regardless of prior convictions. But, at the same time, organized religion tends to lose relevance.

“The God I met loves everyone. It’s generic,” Kate Valentine of Oxford, Conn., said. She was a Roman Catholic before her 1981 brush with death, but said she has “become very unreligious.”

Many go on to lead less materialistic lives, and many change careers. Often they become nurses or social workers, or volunteer for community service.

“If a person was very materialistic before, his whole life may be disrupted,” Greyson said. “Relationships often break up, especially if they were based on materialism and power. For a successful businessman that could mean not being able to return to the job.”

Kenneth Ring, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, has studied near-death phenomena since 1976 and has written two books on the subject. “People become life-appreciators,” he said. “They don’t care about success, fame or fortune. They want to sail their boats on Long Island Sound.”

They often develop a deep hunger for spiritual understanding, along with a fervent desire to see conditions in the world improve. They tend to become more self-confident and less passive. Often, they like themselves better.

“I do miss financial security, but what really matters is love,” said Harris, 46. After she had back surgery in 1975, complications set in, her condition deteriorated and she passed out in her bed.

She came to in the hospital corridor.

“I turned to go back into my room--my first thought was that I’d get in trouble for being out of bed. Then I discovered I was looking directly into a speaker that was mounted on the ceiling.”

Confusion (If I’m here, who’s in the bed?) soon gave way to pure sensation. “I felt my grandmother holding me, cradling me.” The feeling was so soothing, so familiar, that moments passed before Harris remembered that her grandmother had been dead for 10 years.

She returned to her body, but a week later, still bedridden, she had a vision. “I drew out of my body and relived my life--all 32 years--in an instant.

“I heard myself saying, ‘No wonder! No wonder you are the way you are!’ I felt all the slates being wiped clean. I understood the reasons behind everything that had ever happened to me. It was the most healing therapy there could be.”

The Barbara Harris who entered the hospital had filled her days with garden club meetings. The one who left felt drawn to hospital emergency rooms. She became a hospital volunteer, then a respiratory and massage therapist.

Ultimately, Harris packed her clothes and her stereo into her Saab and drove away from her home, back-yard pool and private plane. Now she rents a tiny apartment in Newington, which she shares with two of her children.

Volunteer Worker

She speaks to nurses, clergy and others who counsel the dying, and does volunteer work as Greyson’s research assistant. She also leads monthly meetings of one of the two dozen near-death survivors’ support groups that have sprung up around the nation.

The need for such support is enormous, Harris said. “You can’t stay the way you are, and your loved ones don’t want you to change.”

Many medical professionals dismiss the near-death experience as a hallucinatory side effect of drugs or anesthesia. Others attribute them to lack of oxygen to the brain or to the release of some stress-related chemical in the body.

“Death is a state; dying is a process,” said Richard Blacher, a psychiatry professor at Tufts University and the New England Medical Center Hospital. He favors the anesthesia explanation and says those who claim to have died and returned to life are making an error in logic.

“Driving to New York City is not the same as New York City,” he said. “You’re not going to get a taste of New York by driving there.”

As the arguments continue, improved resuscitation techniques and medical procedures are making close calls with death increasingly common. A 1982 Gallup Poll found that 8 million adult Americans had had near-death experiences, and also called that a conservative estimate. As their number grows, so does the conviction among a handful of scientists that the phenomenon warrants serious study.

Tremendous Impact

“Our understanding of death has a tremendous impact on how we treat people who are dealing with death, people who are suicidal, people who are facing their own deaths or grieving for loved ones,” said Greyson, who is research director of the 700-member, nonprofit International Assn. of Near-Death Studies, which disseminates information, sponsors studies and provides support services.

Although they do not prove that there is an afterlife, the experiences are powerful catalysts to change, said Greyson, who has interviewed thousands of subjects. One, a former Mafia hit man, now counsels wife beaters in Ohio. A college professor quit his job to hitchhike across the United States. A laborer with a high school education immersed himself in quantum physics after waking up one night and blurting out the word quantum . (Neither he nor his wife knew what it meant.)

Just as radical as some of the life style transformations are the hypotheses that are offered to explain them.

Kundalini , Sanskrit for coiled up, refers to a subtle biological force said to lie dormant at the base of the spine. When it is activated, the energy travels through body channels, or chakras , to unleash physical and psychological fireworks. Kundalini theorists believe such awakenings can catapult individuals into states of higher consciousness similar to those described by near-death survivors, and with equally profound effects.

Kundalini awakenings, achieved through spiritual disciplines such as yoga and meditation, can cause transformations virtually indistinguishable from those that follow near-death experiences. The fact that such parallels exist doesn’t prove a common cause, Ring said, but “it does at least suggest the possibility that there may be a general biological process that underlies them both.”

Theory of Evolution

If so, the seeming profusion of near-death experiences in recent years could be demonstrating an evolutionary mechanism designed to propel all of humanity toward a higher consciousness, some scientists have suggested.

Whatever the cause, there is no denying the effect, Ring said. “The person you become is really different. The person you were is lost.”

Steve Price of Killingworth, Conn., was nearly killed when a mortar fragment pierced his lung in Vietnam. Once a schoolyard bully, he said: “I’ve become so sensitive that when other people hurt I can feel it. I talk to people about metaphysical things. Before, I would’ve made fun of them.”

A burly man whose forearms are mapped with tattoos, Price still gets tearful when he recalls the summer night he relived his life in an instant while waiting for a medic to reach him. Three days later, the wounded Marine was wheeled into surgery at a field hospital, but his conscious mind took a detour and wound up on the ceiling.

“A white light encompassed me. It took me in. I felt such warmth and peace . . . . I didn’t say the word God for a long time, but now I can say that the light was God. It was like the most loving mother embracing her infant, only a million times more than that.”

Unable to Fight

Price recovered and returned to the war. “I led my unit. I did all the things I was supposed to, but I never shot my gun. All I ever wanted was to be a Marine, but I realized I couldn’t do my job.”

Instead, he joined the National Guard “because it helps people instead of going to war.”

“Before . . . I was afraid to die, even though I was in the business of killing,” he said. “I was so afraid to die that I couldn’t live.”

These survivors describe more than a spiritual transformation. They also talk of physical changes, which Greyson and Ring are trying to measure.

“People often report that their vital signs change--their respiratory rates, their heart rates,” Greyson said. “Beyond that, very great changes are reported in the ways they metabolize food and drugs--in heightened sensitivities to light, sounds, smells, tastes. Some can’t tolerate perfume. Some can’t drink alcohol.”

Kate Valentine, a mother of three from Long Island, resigned herself to dying when she developed a lung infection, circulation problems and an irregular heartbeat after surgery for thyroid cancer in 1981. “After being sick for a long time, you become physically and emotionally whipped,” she said.

A Healing Visit

One night, after putting her affairs in order, Valentine fell asleep in her bed and found herself at the edge of a valley. “The colors were incredible, as if all my life I’d been looking at the wrong side of a tapestry, then suddenly turned it over.”

She saw no one, but felt a loving, peaceful presence beside her. “I wanted to go into the valley, but was told, telepathically, ‘No.’ ” The next morning she awoke free of pain. “My heart wasn’t skipping beats or pounding or anything. My hands were normal--they had been almost black.”

The “new” Kate Valentine directs a senior citizens’ center and tries to help troubled souls who cross her path with baffling regularity. “I could go on and on about the house cleaners who never cleaned, the plumbers who never plumbed. People on the brink of death, bereavement, tragedy, somehow find their way to my door.”

Paul Valentine, a general contractor, accompanies his wife to Harris’ support meetings and volunteers with her at a local soup kitchen. They agree that Kate’s experience strengthened their marriage.

Searches for Answers

For a long time, she said, she told no one, not even her husband, about the experience that prompted her to change her ways. “Then a friend of mine died of cancer. Suddenly, I needed to know why I lived and she died.” No longer able to deny her experience, Valentine began trying to understand it.

She’s still working on it, as are Steve Price, Barbara Harris and countless others whose celestial wanderings took place in the blink of an eye, but whose struggle to resume the earthly existence may go on as long as they live.

Nearly 25 years after he almost died, Steve Price said, he is finally beginning to live.

“I’ve taken a long look at myself. I’m just now seeing somebody in there who’s worth saving.”