On December 1, 1986 I was in a head on collision with a drunk driver. I think my coma was induced because of severe bleeding of my face. I had a closed head injury and was told my brain tripled in size. Due to swelling, they couldn't perform a CAT scan until three days after the accident. I don't remember anything.  The first year after the accident is like a blur. I am now divorced. My communication skills are not as good. I'm much more irresponsible. I've had trouble working. I hear voices when I’m stressed. The voices make me crazy, like it’s me physically but someone else acts out. I hear voices of faith. I listen real hard. It’s beautiful at times but the average person thinks I'm crazy. I've been with mental health since the year 2000. They say I'm schizophrenic. I take Zoloft. They had me on Haldol and then switched me to Abilify. When I was in a coma I was in a place of peace detached from anything earthly and it was the most beautiful peace that cannot be described here on earth. Since my accident my life is very difficult. I've changed personality wise. I had a frontal lobe injury. I'm trying to get disability benefits. I can't hold a job. I've been denied once but I've just submitted another application. It’s not normal in the eyes of most people. I consider it a blessing because our creator showed me a piece of heaven so I came back with that peace!

I was driving my new car that I had received for high-school graduation. I was only 16 years old, graduated high school in 3 years with almost a year of college completed and a full academic scholarship to university.

Anyway, I picked up my two soccer buddies to go hiking at a mountain pass called Hatcher's Pass. Solstice is highly celebrated in Alaska, as it is the longest day of the year and the sun does not go down, therefore many folks are jogging at 2AM or kayaking at midnight.

My friends and I played on the glacial rocks, and hiked around. We were getting tired, so we decided to head home.  On this trip, we weren't drinking or doing drugs (as teenagers so often do) so I was not impaired.

Driving down the mountain, we stopped briefly to use the outhouses and we got back in the car. I was driving. This is the last thing I remember. I sustained frontal lobe brain damage and posterior brain damage so I have no recollection of what happened except for the near-death experience.

Before I tell you about the experience, let me note that we got into a very bad single vehicle car accident. According to the individuals in the car, I possibly fell asleep at the wheel. There are no shoulders on these Alaskan roads. It is believed that I drifted to the edge, woke up, and overcorrected the car. The car flipped end over end and landed with my head going through the windshield into a tree. It is said that the first EMTs who showed up at the scene just covered me up so no one had to look at my shattered skull. They obviously could not get vitals, but I do not know whether I was clinically dead or not. At some point, a medical professional brought me back but no one seems to know the details.

I had sustained between level three and level four Le Fort fractures, which is to say that I shattered every bone in my face to dust (save my chin). Over 100 titanium plates, screws, and mesh were used to put my face back together, as well as cranial bone grafts, cartilage grafts, and much more.  I was hamburger meat.

I think it was while in the hospital when I first tried to remember what happened that fateful night.  And, as you read above, all that I could remember was our last bathroom break about 15 minutes before the car accident.  Yet, there was one memory that I did not understand, but it was so profound that the more I thought of it, the more obsessed I became with it. 

As I said, I don't remember the crash, just darkness. It was not a malevolent darkness. I was a 16 year old child who was not descending into any pit. I did not feel any evil. A possible explanation for this might be that I was blinded during the accident. They told my parents that I would be blind for the rest of my life and to make arrangements. Yet, somehow I can still see.  I think my blindness, possibly, did not allow me to see "the tunnel of light" or to look upon my dying self. I have always felt alone in my NDE, as every other individual with an NDE story that I know of has seen a tunnel, hovered over their body, met dead relatives, etc.  My experience was wildly different.

I have never written my NDE, and I have only described it to 13 people in my life. First, I feel as if there are no words in our limited vocabulary to describe what I experienced. Second, whenever I describe my experience, weird things happens. Either something weird happens to me or to the individual that I'm telling. This may sound delusional or self-aggrandizing, but I swear that it is true. What's especially bizarre, I always know who needs to hear it and when.  Of the people I have told, more than half were complete strangers.

So, the darkness enveloped me. I felt as if I was transcending time and space. Imagine what it would feel like to spiral through the galaxy as an entity that is not bound to any gravitational pull or specific trajectory. That is what the journey through the dark felt like. What I know to be true is that the direction I was heading had no bearing. It seemed to be everywhere. It was like rain. I was like rain. If drops of rain were souls and heaven was the giant puddle that catches and pools all souls, then I was a drop of rain water that was following my path toward the puddle. I knew I belonged to the puddle. 

Aside from this really bad analogy, I cannot think of any better way of describing it. Like a magnet, this collective was drawing me to it. There was no human emotion attached to it. I did not fear. I did not doubt. I did not question. The only human emotion I could feel was pure, unrelenting, unconditional love. Take the unconditional love a mother has for a child and amplify it a thousand fold, then multiply exponentially. The result of your equation would be as a grain of sand is to all the beaches in the world.  So, too, is the comparison between the love we experience on earth to what I felt during my experience. This love is so strong, that words like "love" make the description seem obscene.  It was the most powerful and compelling feeling. But, it was so much more. I felt the presence of angels.  I felt the presence of joyous souls, and they described to me a hundred lifetimes worth of knowledge about our divinity. Simultaneous to the deliverance of this knowledge, I knew I was in the presence of God. I never wanted to leave, never.

The next realization was a voice here and there. The noises of the ICU, nurses, doctors, people crying when they came near me. My eyes were sewn shut, mouth wired shut, breathing through my neck, hair shaved off, and face crushed. This happened 17 years ago, and I have not found anyone with my injuries that has survived. Is my personal near death experience unique? I would like to think that it is not.   

I was hospitalized in Vietnam with burns from the above combat action. The doctors were trying to stabilize me so I could make the flight to a hospital in Japan. I have no recollection of boarding the aircraft and came to full consciousness the next day in Japan in a hospital bed in the burn ward.

My roommate in Japan had lost an arm and a leg and was severely burned too. When he saw I was aware and awake, he rushed to tell me a story about his fire team coming to him, perhaps in a dream, but they had all been killed in the same action where he got wounded. They spoke to him and told him to relax and not worry about them or feel guilty about surviving and not saving them. Just get on with your life now, “We’re OK."

He asked me if that was a real experience or a dream. I told him that I did not know, but I would pay close attention to what his team had to say. As he told me this, my out-of-body experience came back to me in a rush out of nowhere. Until that moment, I had no conscious recollection of it. As he spoke, I remembered being in a C-130 hospital ship, stacked floor to ceiling with stretchers all holding other wounded GIs. I can see the interior of that plane and all the rest of it as clearly today as I did then.

I was watching myself on this stretcher and this did not seem in the least unusual. Two air force nurse captains were working on me. One had my nose pinched-off and was giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The other had her left hand on the center of my breastbone and with her right hand was pounding my chest rhythmically.

I watched this dispassionately as I sensed that I was going up and away, further and further back from the scene, to a wonderful, cool, white-light place that was so beautiful, unlike anything I ever knew, before or since. It held for me a tremendous sense of peace and serenity, but then I realized what was happening and wordlessly said, "No, wait. Not now” (like I had too much left to do). I came to about a day later in Japan, knowing I was safe. That's when I heard my fellow-patient's story.   

The aftereffects of something like four heart attacks on distant shores were enough persuasion for me to consider my existence. When I was young, dying was not a reality. It was something that other people did that I was not even considering.

In 2006, during a painful 48 hours in Nanning, China, I became aware of a higher realm of consciousness than I normally live in. I find it almost sad that these times seem are so far and few between. I remain hopeful that they will again visit me while I remain in this form.

It has been said that if one were to lose their fear of dying, all other fears would dissipate into a great cosmic pool of discarded experiences. This “no-fear” was a window that I was afforded that summer—and I will never be the same again. In any case, it seems that my prospect of dying brought me nearer to where I started…one with God.

The heart attack pain, which was the same as the acid reflux I’d had been diagnosed with for three years, was wracking my body and mind. The pain and discomfort was enough to make me want to die for relief. It lasted from Friday until Monday, and as I witnessed the reactions of body and mind under the onslaught of dominating physical forces I simply forgot to consider a fear of dying. This forgetfulness went on for seven days from attack to surgery and hospital recovery. I was so busy observing and living in the experience the usual ramifications of losing this earthly body were not within my mental grasp.

A great discovery was realized when my body went into surgery at the hands of Chinese doctors. I found myself hovering 10 feet over the scene. My body was there, the doctors and nurses were there and I had become a mere viewpoint observing from the outside. It was at that point I knew for the first time in my earthly life that I would never die and that I was a part of the Great I Am.

Since that time, I am different. A window briefly opened and I saw an existence that I would die to live in. So I go on now with a renewed interest in observing this world; perhaps I will be blessed again to see more clearly through such a smoky glass…and the true journey we are all on.

My summation is simple. Eternity lies within the hearts of all of us. God is not up there, out there, or sitting on a throne in the clouds meting out judgment and punishment on what he has created. I once thought this silly way. I know now that God is in the heaven that exists within every one of his creations; as is stated in the Christian Bible “Heaven is within you.” God is the drive and the force in all life that seeks to lovingly survive…no matter the hardships. He is the instinct for a mother sparrow to build a nest, lay her eggs, and feed her young. He is what makes us stop and correct our wrongs because he created us with checks and balances within the heart. God manifests himself when I show kindness to you…God in me touches God in you at that very moment.