Objective witnesses to death as an awakening

Morse also relates the story of one of Germany’s most noted poets, Karl Skala, who survived a bombardment during World War II that killed his friend in the trenches. Then, Morse writes, Skala  “felt himself being drawn up with his friend, above their bodies and then above the battlefield. He could look down and see himself holding his friend. He looked up and saw a bright light and felt himself going toward it with his friend. Then he stopped and returned to his body. He was uninjured except for hearing loss from the artillery blast.” After the war he wrote this poem:

Would you really call this dying?

In the near light, but far away.
This light which our hope nurtures.
To the star, high above
everyone has traveled there in their mind
before your body, the mind, the spirit
belonged once to the stars
let this light shine deep in your heart, in your dreams on
this earth.
Death is an awakening.

Linda Houlberg, a hospice nurse in Oak Ridge, TN, published in Nursing ’92 an article about experiencing the death of Virginia, who was both her patient and friend. Virginia had fought hard against her cancer, because she wanted to keep living to be with her husband and two sons. But when the pain became too great, she gave up and just wanted to die.

“I’m ready,” she told Houlberg.

Virginia had worked out some of her feelings about dying by painting. One painting entitled The Light at the End of the Tunnel represented what she thought would happen to her as she died. On the night Virginia died, Houlberg had gone to bed about twelve-thirty. At twelve fifty-six she woke up and looked at her clock. She thought Virginia’s death had caused her to awaken, but then:

All of a sudden I saw her painting as clear as day. I felt her presence beside me, and I could see the tunnel in my mind’s eye. We began moving down the tunnel together, passing by the blue-and-black sides of the painting. I could see the yellow light at the end of the tunnel, and as we got closer, the light became brighter and white.

They reached the end of the tunnel together and broke into a field of bright light. Then Houlberg realized that she shouldn’t stay with her friend. “It isn’t my time,” she knew. “I still have things to do.”

In the morning Virginia’s son called to tell Houlberg that his mother had died at one in the morning. Houlberg sums up her own experience:

I can’t explain what happened to me. My psychic side says that I had an out-of-body experience, that Virginia was afraid to go through the tunnel alone, so she recruited me to accompany her. My logical side says that’s foolish. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I knew without any doubt that Virginia was with God—and feeling great.

Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Parting Visions: Uses and Meanings of Pre-Death, Psychic, and Spiritual Experiences (Villard Books 1994).