You have all seen stories about people who have "near-death” experiences. I dislike the term near-death because to me and many other people who have gone to the “other side,” the experience is more accurately termed a "death” experience. I have had more than one "near-death” experience in my lifetime.
One is etched on my memory permanently. In terms of a “near” death experience versus a “death” experience, I remember very distinctly the feeling of having my soul leave my body. If that is not the act of dying, I do not know what is. My drowning experience happened the day of my grandfather’s funeral, on August 2nd, 1961. One might say that was not a very auspicious day to create an emergency scenario.
My parents were both heartbroken after the funeral service and the wake was set to occur at my grandmother's house which was built at a lakeside community in northern New Jersey. My parents were distracted by the funeral, and I am sure they both were looking for a place to sit quietly and reflect, rather than to shake hands and be amongst a crowd of people. The funeral reception was held at my grandmother Mavie's house which was crowded with weeping friends and family. My mother, Shirley, had me dressed in a newly purchased white shirt and shorts because she wanted me to look pretty. It was a day in the beginning of the month of August, within a week of my fast approaching sixth birthday.
The lakeside community where my grandparents lived, Highland Lake, is located at the highest point of New Jersey. Scenically beautiful, the entire area is built around a network of “man-made” interconnecting lakes, supplied by the water from a natural lake. Highland Lakes is located adjacent to the 34,350-acre Wawayanda State Park. Looking to the south from my grandparent’s dock you could see the beach and swimmers sunning themselves on rubber floats.
In the1960's learning to swim was a fun recreational activity that was pursued by children, but seldom an activity that was taught as an act of precautionary safety. (Many submersion accidents occur when the victim hits their head upon entering a body of water, regardless of whether a child or adult learns how to swim. This statistic and others like it pertaining to drowning were seldom recorded at that point in time.)
That day I recall that my mother, Shirley, wanted me to remember the day but not to be too sad, and to her my new white outfit represented resurrection. As Mavie’s house started to overflow with people, my mother was approached by the next-door neighbor who offered to take me next door and feed me lunch with her two children. I remember overhearing Mother protesting the idea of me leaving the wake. Mother said she felt it was important to expose my brother and me to the real world and loss, and she protested my leaving the wake. I was an extremely active child, and she cautioned the neighbor to watch me carefully while supervising me.
Mother was prescient, and she had always felt uneasy about the lake and the possibility of water-related accidents. Having voiced her concern on several occasions, she always made sure to track my activities when we visited the lake. When Mother finally relented and allowed me to go next door, my brother, Noel, asked to go fish off the dock. Mother asked Noel to keep an eye out for me if he saw me wander away from the house next door.
The neighbor, Mary, had two boys, Skip and Roger, and both were teenagers at the time. Mary made a delicious lunch of peanut butter and jelly with tomato soup. I remember right in the middle of eating the sandwich, Roger jumped up and said he was going for a swim.
Roger did not return to the table and after a while his brother Skip took off to look for him. About twenty minutes later Mary asked me to go look and see if I could see either Skip or Roger playing in the lake. She did not know whether I could swim or not, but Mary cautioned me to just look and then come back. As I approached the dock to her house at the waterside, I could not see either brother, so I stepped closer to the dock’s edge. Large rocks bordered the lake, and as my eyes searched the water for a glimpse of the boys, I was unaware that the rocks were very slippery due to the chemical purging that was done to prevent algae growth.
It was summertime and I was wearing rubber soled flip-flops on my feet. I remember thinking I would be able to see better by climbing up high onto a large rock that bordered the lake. The next thing I knew my feet slipped out from underneath me, and I felt as I entered the water a sharp pain as the back of my head hit the rock. I was instantly knocked unconscious. I have no memory of the first few minutes after my head hit the water, but I had one horrifying memory that haunted my dreams for years. Slow suffocation.
I regained consciousness for a brief period in the water, beneath the surface, and I was panicked and disoriented. When I opened my eyes, I could see that the water was a murky green color. I felt extremely cold. I heard odd sounds under water which mimicked the sound of lawn mowers. Much later when describing this event, I was told it was my eardrums adjusting to the depth of the water. The lake was up to thirty feet deep in some areas.
As I tried in vain to breathe, with each attempt to take a breath I was swallowing water. The memories I have of that period when I was under the water and struggling to breathe are etched deeply in my subconscious memory forever. The actual definition of drowning is “suffocation by submersion in water.” One analogy might be holding your breath for as long as you can under water with your eyes blindfolded and then opening your mouth and trying to take a breath. Every time I opened my mouth, I thought air would come in, but instead water kept rushing in and I had no control.
I was screaming and crying, and no one could hear me. In my childish mind I could not fully understand what was happening, but for a moment I remembered something my father had taught me. He said, “If you are ever in trouble, put your hands together and pray, and God will take care of you.” I am not sure if that act is what saved my life, but if you could picture me at that point in time, I was naive enough to do just that- in the water- I put my little hands together and prayed. I felt as if God heard me and I was comforted.
The next sensation I can remember was the feeling of hands in the center of my back and someone desperately shouting “Help!” Roger, who had gone for a swim in the lake, found me floating on my back in the water and picked me up treading water until someone appeared at the dock to help him. All the neighbors in the small community were inside Mavie’s house at the wake when they heard the commotion. When Mother was informed what had happened to me, she tried to run straight through a plate glass window to get to me. Even though no one described to me what had occurred in the moments that followed pulling me from the water, I recalled all that happened and was able to describe these events to my parents in vivid detail afterwards.
The beach lifeguard was one of the first people on the scene. I can remember the sound of people around me screaming and crying, and I was aware there were people surrounding me as my body was laid down on the dock. The era that mouth to mouth resuscitation was first taught was in 1954. It was used as a method of reviving a victim of cardiac arrest. My father had witnessed these resuscitation methods used on the battlefields while fighting in World War II. The lifeguard tried reviving me by slapping my back to force water out of me, a common method or resuscitation back then. My uncle tried leaning me on my side and hitting the middle of my back. When my father arrived, I clearly remember hearing him say, “Please God not another one!” My father used mouth to mouth resuscitation, and after several tries, he succeeded in getting me to breathe.
An ambulance had been summoned. Because of limited access to the location, help did not arrive quickly. The nearest hospital was more than thirty minutes away. Twenty-five minutes after I had been pulled from the water I was being lifted into the ambulance. As I was being loaded for transport, I could hear my brother, Noel, begging to come with us, but the medics would only allow my parents in the ambulance with me. I heard Mavie, our grandmother, saying soothing things to him. My parents climbed in the back with an emergency worker. My parents were both crying. The ambulance drove at ninety miles per hour down a bumpy winding road, bouncing us around in the rear of the cab. The ambulance driver drove at a very steep angle downwards on a mountainous two-way road appropriately named, "Breakneck Hill". I was vomiting blood and a foamy substance the entire time. I later learned my mother lost one of the jewels on her wedding ring during that ambulance ride to the hospital.
Before the ambulance arrived at the hospital the ambulance driver radioed in to say I was “DOA” (Dead on Arrival). Mother did not register what the acronym meant but Daddy did, and he said something to the driver through the window that separated the ambulance cab from the rear of the vehicle. Everyone in the ambulance was crying, and I recall feeling no physical sensations at that point in time. It was as if I was observing the entire scene from above my body.
When we arrived at the hospital, I “watched” from above as my body was taken in. My father was talking to the ambulance driver who got out of the ambulance and threw up. Daddy was consoling him saying, “This was not your fault. You did everything you could do.” I remember seeing Nuns leaning out of the hospital windows and thinking, “I must be in heaven.”
As I was floating above my body, I could see people at the hospital as well as my parents, who were confined to a waiting room on the other side of the hospital, far away from the room I was transported to. In the emergency room there were at least five nurses, who were all dressed like Nuns. The doctor on duty said, “I’m not going to let a five-year-old die! Adrenalin STAT!” Someone cut my shirt off with scissors. I remember thinking, “Mommy is going to be mad! They are cutting my new shirt!” I did not understand that there is no time to unbutton a shirt during a medical crisis.
The next thing I felt was excruciating pain when a huge needle of adrenalin was injected directly into my heart. This was immediately followed by a powerful sensation of flying back into my body again. My heart was beating, but my breathing was shallow, so they prepared to transport me upstairs to the intensive care unit.
The hospital I had been transported to, now called St. Anthony's Community Hospital, is a Catholic hospital originally established in 1916, in Warwick, New Jersey. At that time, the nursing staff was comprised of Roman Catholic Nuns, Franciscan Sisters of the Poor. As my body was being transported onto a gurney for transfer, I overheard one of the Nuns, Sister Rose Margaret, request to carry me upstairs in her arms instead of placing my body on a gurney. The doctor gave his permission for her to do so. Sister Rose Margaret, said prayers as she held me in her arms while the elevator transported us up several floors to the ICU.
The doctors told my parents that if I ever awakened from my coma, I would never know them, and I would never speak again. For all intents and purposes, I would be a “vegetable.” My medical diagnosis was very grim. My symptoms ranged from a “frothy hemoptysis,” which is to say I was coughing up bloody sputum. My skin was a grey-blue color. They drew my blood every day for testing, and the color of my blood was deep blue. Cyanosis is a medical condition in which there is a blue tint to the skin, which means the body is not receiving enough oxygen-rich blood.
My skin tone remained blue for months after I was released from the hospital. I was diagnosed with “pulmonary edema,” which is an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the lungs, and this in turn resulted in “dyspnea,” which means I had difficulty breathing. Many years later it was estimated that, according to the Paediatric Glasgow Coma Scale, the coma I was in was rated the number one, which means I had no response of any kind to external stimulation. Keep in mind that patients in a comatose state were not intubated as a part of treatment in 1960. I was breathing on my own, without a tracheotomy and without an oxygen mask.
During the next ten days as I lay in a coma my parents remained in New Jersey, visiting me every day. During that time, my father drove to our home on Long Island so that he could bring me my teddy bear. Years later when I was an adult, he recounted what it was like for him to go into my empty room and retrieve my teddy bear. Daddy said, “I remember that trip. When I went inside the house and walked up the stairs to your bedroom it was flooded with sunlight. To me it seemed dark. You were not there, and it was as if the light had gone out of my life permanently. When I picked up your teddy bear to bring it to you, I slumped to the floor of your room and cried until my eyes hurt.”
One day when my mother came to my room, she made an anguished comment to the doctor. “It doesn’t look like she’s breathing!” The doctor told Mother to hold a mirror up under my nose, and when she saw vapor from under my nose on the mirror, Mother started to cry. I remember feeling the wet warmth of her tears on my cheeks and thinking, “Don’t cry Mommy. I’m here.”
There was no scientific explanation as to how I awoke from my coma. One day I woke up and immediately asked to see my brother. Somebody ran from the room crying and brought my brother to my side. Sadly, in the era of the '50’s children were not allowed to visit patients who were in ICU. He came with my parents when they visited, but he was kept from seeing me, and had to wait in the waiting room area. I remember the day I awoke, my brother came into my room, and we hugged and cried, then everyone cried, even the doctors and the nurses.
The day I left the hospital my doctor sat me down on his lap and asked me, “Do you know what happened to you, young lady?” I said, “I fell in the water, the day my grandfather died and went to Heaven.” He said, “That’s right, and you went halfway there with him.” He gave me a hug before I left. Then Sister Rose Margaret gave me a hug goodbye. There were a lot of tears and smiles at the same time.
When I returned home, the parents and kids on the block were lined up waiting to greet us. My story had been in the newspapers, and the moment I emerged from the car a nasty little boy on the block said to me, “Too bad you didn’t die.” This immediately made me cry. For months afterwards I had nightmares of drowning in green murky water, and I would awake screaming and crying hysterically. Every time I became agitated, I would suffer from hemorrhagic nosebleeds.
My blood remained a dark blue color for a full week after I emerged from the coma. Due to lung and heart damage, my blood was not oxidizing. Somewhere in my attic there is an old photo of my frail blue body holding my teddy bear, standing in the hospital parking lot. The photo was taken on the day I was discharged. One day when I was in my forties, I came upon the photo in a box of photos that my parents had kept. I could not believe the color of my skin, and I was shocked that my parents had kept the photo because it was such a sad image.
Dyspnea, or difficulty breathing, stayed with me for years. My physician prohibited my participation in any type of exercise that would significantly accelerate my heart rate, because of the danger of overheating. I wanted to be a ballerina when I was a young girl. My drowning accident ended my dance lessons. I suffered from anemia well into my adulthood. Once I got into fitness in my teens, I became adamant about eating properly and the anemia subsided.
There are integral aspects of my life that were changed forever by my drowning accident. Everything about who I am as a person was formed from that moment in time. I spent hours and hours of my childhood sitting in a doctor’s office. My pediatrician prescribed prophylactic antibiotics for seven years following my accident to protect my heart from an infection, a very forward-thinking methodology at that time. Childhood memories after my accident consist of being very sickly and having unreasonable restrictions placed on what I could do, such as never engaging in normal physical activities or in P.E. like my peers. As would be expected, my parents were very over-protective, and I was sheltered from a lot of things.
Our family life was altered forever by my drowning incident. After I got out of the hospital my relationship with my brother was never the same. He was loving and took care of me like older brothers do, but I often sensed that he felt resentment towards me because of the way I was treated by my parents. Thankfully, in our adult years after our parents died, we both learned how to communicate with one another better and on a more loving basis.
As for myself, I lost out on many childhood activities, but I also gained a unique perspective on all of life. From the time when I was a teenager through into my adult years, I asked God, “Why me? Why has my life been spared and so many others are not?” In the world of psychology that feeling is termed Survivor’s Guilt. Eventually, through self-examination, meditation, and reading, I was able to release that feeling from my consciousness.
Based on a subconscious memory of the slow underwater suffocation, I had a morbid fear of water. Despite multiple attempts by my parents to teach me to swim through formal lessons in the years that followed my accident, I failed miserably each time I took a swimming lesson, which was a constant frustration for twenty-one years after my accident.
Then when I was twenty-seven, I moved to Florida and made the commitment to learn to swim. After hypnotherapy administered by a psychiatrist, and with the help of a swim instructor who was also a psychotherapist, I enrolled in private swim lessons. After months of lessons, where I broke down in tears each day, I was finally able to learn to swim. Swimming my first lap in the pool was an indescribably wonderful feeling, and I eventually made it to a mile which is thirty laps in an Olympic pool, and sixty laps in a short-course pool. I have been addicted ever since.
As time passed, I researched drowning statistics and decided I wanted to reach out to others who had been affected by drowning, and to help others avoid that fate in any way that I could. This is one of the reasons I am still on earth: to bear witness to the power of faith, and to teach others how to be safer. There is no way to be completely safe in water and no way to completely prevent drowning incidents. If I can spread the word and help even one person learn to be safer in or near water, then I feel my life will have meant something.
For every parent who has lost a child to the water, I honor their loss. Those of us who strive for the cause of water safety will never forget.