'I Died:' Women Share What Their Near-Death Experiences Were Like

the light started to appear and that's when i realized that this was death this was my death when i died i was 31 what i experienced from that moment on just changed my life forever my name is betty j edie i am 78 years old i had a near-death experience my name is jessie sawyer and i've had a near-death experience if anybody had told me 10 years ago that i would have had a near-death experience i would not have believed them i didn't believe in these things i didn't even believe in god anymore i had

started becoming sick and i was going to different doctors and specialists and nobody could figure out what was wrong with me and eventually after about nine months of different tests and smaller procedures they decided that a hysterectomy would help them kind of get a better idea of what was happening inside of me they didn't find anything wrong on the inside they did a uterine and ovarian biopsy and everything was clear so after two nights in the hospital i was released to go home it probably only been six to eight hours and i just felt this

extreme pain in my stomach it felt like someone had taken out my insides and put them in a blender blended them on low power poured gasoline on them lit them on fire and then shoved them back inside of me so my husband rushed me to the er they admitted me i had very low blood pressure my heart rate was 145 i was running a low grade fever and they did some scans and found out that i was bleeding internally i didn't have enough blood in my system to really put me back into a surgery so

i started receiving antibiotics i had blood transfusions it was probably between like two and four o'clock in the morning and when i slept i i there was no way i ever could escape the pain but i'm staring at the wall and it was like the best way i can describe it is that my eyes opened and then they opened again and when they opened again i was in this endless misty white room it was like just this space and the very first thing that i realized was that i was able to stand up straight which

is something that i hadn't been able to do since the surgery and i was astonished at how perfect i felt no pain i just i felt like the perfect version of myself and so that really stuck with me and in the distance i saw somebody kind of waiting and i immediately even though i didn't see this person at first i immediately recognized who it was and it was one of my best friends named anthony who had died about two years before and i was just so happy to see him i wanted to run up to

him i wanted to hug him i wanted to tell him how much everybody missed him and then i realized that this was about me this wasn't some joyous reunion that that something serious was happening and then behind anthony and to my right the light started to appear and that's when i realized that this was death this was my death and anthony was there to take me home the light started off as this shimmer and then it grew there's no way you can describe it it is the most profound most unconditional love and the light is

everything that ever was and ever will be i instantly felt connected to the entire universe i kind of was presented a choice i had something called a life review where i was shown the impact that i had during my life on the world around me it wasn't judgmental it was more subjective it was you know this is the energy that you put into the world during your life and i love you i'm part of you i went in for a routine hysterectomy and it was during or after the hysterectomy that i actually experienced my death

i was out of recovery and in my private room when i awoke at about 9 9 30 in the evening i didn't feel any pain it was just this feeling as though every last drop of blood had drained from my body and i tried to reach for the nurse but i was too weak to reach the little buzzer that they had placed by the side of my bed i then felt this sensation coming up from my feet a numbing type thing and then all of a sudden i felt a movement in my chest and then

there was a sound like a pop my spirit came up out of my body in a very tremendous speed and i could look down and see my body laying on the bed while no two near-death experiences are the same those of us that research them see a very consistent pattern of elements very often there's that life-threatening event the person's nearly dead they're unconscious or they may not even have a heartbeat at that time they have what's called an out-of-body experience consciousness separates from the body and typically goes above the body they may then go into

or through a tunnel they often see a mystical unearthly brilliant light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the tunnel they may enter an unearthly beautiful realm they may see their deceased relatives at the loving reunions even deceased pets by this time they're typically feeling overwhelming positive emotions they really feel like this realm that seems unearthly to us is really their home when i came down and looked at my physical body lying on the bed then i knew that i had died and i thought oh my god i'm dead i don't know

how i died but i'm i'm dead then suddenly appearing by the side of my bed were three ancient looking men ancient in that they were old but they were beyond old and they explained to me that i had prematurely died i wanted so much to see my family so i went out the window and i traveled to my home my husband was sitting in a chair reading a newspaper so i went over and stood by him and i felt concerned that he didn't know i had died and neither did my children and i worried about

them i worried how their life would be should i not be there for them and as i wondered about that i could see each child i just saw each phase of their life and that their lives would be fine even without me so i felt content as any mother would that you know what they're going to be okay then i went back traveled quickly back to the hospital bed and was drawn into this immense tunnel there was sound there was music there were chimes it was extremely relaxing very comfortable and i went through the tunnel

into the tunnel and traveled into this black space then suddenly i saw a form at the very end of the light and as i approached the light i could see the figure moving with arms spread out like this and he was jesus christ and i reached for him and put my arms around him as he held me too [Music] and he said it's not yet your time it's not yet your time [Music] some angels or guardians or guards or supporters of him and me came there were three women and he said show her everything that

she needs to know then they took me to a garden and they said for me to be there to stay here enjoy yourself i went through the garden and walked and it was beautiful beyond any description you just simply can't even imagine the colors and the beauty the flowers of every kind and other kinds that we don't even have here this is when i learned that i wouldn't remember a great deal of what was going on i called these men warring angels in that they came into the garden and they said are you ready for

more and i says yes i am and they took me and and it was like a freedom of flight it's like we just rose up into the air and we just went and we traveled from planet to planet and then jesus said that i needed to return back to earth and i said oh please i can't go i excuse me i didn't want to to leave the love that i felt there the total acceptance [Music] i saw a beautiful man that i recognized to be the father god and i ran to him and fell at

his feet my head on his lap and he said you have a mission and i want you to see what that mission entails then you must go back i remember traveling quickly the next thing i knew i saw my body i went into the body because not because i wanted to but because i was compelled to and i felt the dark dankness of it the human body compared to the spirit body is so so different at the end of the experience there's often a choice about whether to stay in that beautiful realm or to return

to their earthly life when that decision is ultimately made and they return to their earthly life and they recover then they can share their near-death experience i was shown how my death would impact my family so i was shown my two children who at the time were five and two years old i was shown what their grief would be like i was shown how that would impact them throughout their life that they would miss me but that they would be okay that their life would thrive another person that really stood out was my husband's grief

that grief was i felt it i felt his grief like it was mine it was really intense i wanted to float down to my husband's body which i could see sleeping on the fold-out couch i wanted to tell him that everything would be okay [Music] anthony kind of squeezed my shoulder lovingly and he smiled at me like i had answered some unspoken question and then anthony and the light both started going this way and i started falling backwards into my body going back into my body hurt leaving my body did not it was like jumping

into an ice cold pool after being in a sauna it's hard for me to say it was a miraculous healing but i suddenly started expelling all the blood that had been pulling in my abdominal cavity i expelled over two liters of blood and 800 cc's of fist-sized plots it scared the entire nursing staff it scared my family i mean scary when you see that much blood coming out of a person but what was odd was that my vitals were improving i was actually stabilizing not getting worse the doctors still don't know what caused my illness

to begin with why my symptoms were happening exactly where i was bleeding from internally nor do they know really how i healed from all of that we've had people blind from birth that have highly visual near-death experiences and that's medically inexplicable we have near-death experiences that occur under general anesthesia and that should be if you will doubly impossible to have your heart stop while you're under anesthesia and yet there are typical near-death experiences in addition to that when you think about it when you have a cardiac arrest or your heart stops beating instantly blood stops

flowing to the brain 10 to 20 seconds after that the electroencephalogram or eeg a measure of brain electrical activity goes absolutely flat it should be impossible to have any kind of a conscious experience and yet by the hundreds people report near-death experiences so at my checkup i asked my surgeon i said i saw a light while i was in the hospital and i was really careful and he said oh i've i've heard of that happening to people but i've never had a patient tell me that and i said well how close was i and he

said jesse you were walking the line there for a while it was later five years later that i went to my doctor and i said something happened to me i need to discuss it with you and i want to know if you had any idea that i died and he said yes i i was aware of that following a near-death experience you can imagine it's generally very life transformative people that have a near-death experience of course almost uniformly don't fear death from their perspective they know what lies beyond death's door and they know that it's

wonderful of course they have an increased belief in afterlife for exactly the same reason but their values also change they tend to become less materialistic more loving they may change professions or they may change relationships if they can't express their new values [Music] i started doing service because service is our best gift to god when we're helping other people it is to be of service to them so i went to the hospital here in seattle and volunteered at the cancer research center where i could work with the dyan patients as well as their families so

i did that for several years i began going to various church organizations to speak to share i want to go back and i had jesus promise me that he will return me to where i laughed when i had to leave him when i started to kind of i guess rejoin the world i felt this intense love for everyone not that i was necessarily a selfish person beforehand but this new feeling was that i cared about everybody i saw i have no fear of dying not that i ever really considered death before but i could die

right now and i would be perfectly okay with that you