These NDE accounts were submitted to our website and are published here anonymously. Minor edits have been made to protect the identity of the experiencer and others who may have been involved with the experience. Note to researchers and authors: IANDS cannot grant permission to publish quotations from these NDE accounts because we have not received permission from the NDE authors to do so. However, we advise authors who wish to use quotations from these accounts to follow the Fair Use Doctrine. See our Copyright Policy for more information. We recommend adopting this practice for quotations from our web site before you have written your book or article.
Death is a taboo that, even today, many choose to be silent about. Growing up, I went to many funerals and saw firsthand the grief and sorrow that Death represents. The irony of being exposed to Death is central to my life. Here, I will discuss my own experiences with Death when I was a newborn as well as when I passed again in 2009.
In 2000, I was pregnant with my second child. My father, who was my rock, passed when I was 16 after a three-year cancer battle. My now husband and I had our first child our senior year of high school and married a few years later. I had just landed my first position that required my college degree that I had worked and sacrificed so much for. My husband had also just started his first job out of college. We were still in a financially tough spot, in our mid-twenties and struggling in our relationship and with past traumatic experiences. To say things were tough was an understatement.
To fully understand my story, we have to go back to my childhood in the small town of Hanko in Finland. As long as I can remember, I was criticized about my body. This started my self-depreciation and doubt that I would ever be good enough to be loved by a man, much less to be enough for anything else. I was simply the wrong shape and size to be considered for such a life. I truly believed that I wasn’t worthy of love.
On May 22, 2023, I died of respiratory and heart failure from stage 3 sepsis due to an undiagnosed gall stone. I had been struggling with a mystery illness that had seen me collapse in a grocery store on May 9th 2023, and almost again on May 16th. Both episodes resulted in emergency room visits, but I had been misdiagnosed and my case slipped through the cracks due to a DNA mutation related to the numbing of pain.
One sunny Sunday morning in late July of 2011, at age 62, I was part of a pack of motorcycle enthusiasts who set off from Cardiff to Newtown in mid-Wales on our Triumph motorbikes. I had been negotiating a series of hairpin bends on my Triumph Bonneville when I had a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle at 55 mph. I don't know to this day whether it was me that drifted or if it was the driver of that oncoming vehicle who cut the corner; it all happened so suddenly.
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