Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “The point is often made that these ‘clinically dead’ people have not actually died, so maybe their experiences are different from those that occur during irreversible physical death. However, the experiencers are convinced that they journeyed to the same realm that they will return to when they die, and this is why they no longer fear death. David Fontana, author of Is There an Afterlife, who spent many decades studying evidence for survival raises a bigger question. ‘It is little use saying that if a person is revived after clinical death this means they were not dead,’ he wrote in 2005. ‘It may indeed be that the boundary between life and death can be crossed, albeit briefly, in both directions. Why not? What is to stop us at least accepting this as a working hypothesis, and then studying what people have to tell us about their NDEs in order to learn what they have to tell us about this shadowy boundary between the two states?’
"Dr. Sam Parnia, who specializes in resuscitation science, has learned more about that shadowy boundary in recent years. Now, with such advanced techniques as cooling down a body, a person who has been dead for hours can be brought back to life because the cells within the body take may hours to die. And we are talking about a motionless, stone-dead corpse—a body with no heartbeat, no respiration, and no brain activity. ‘Recent scientific advances have produced a seismic shift in our understanding of death. This has challenged our perceptions of death as being absolutely implacable and final,’ Parnia wrote in 2013.
"In June 2011, a thirty-year-old woman died in the forest following an overdose of medications. She had been dead for several hours before the ambulance arrived, so her body temperature had dropped to 68 degrees F. The ambulance team could not revive her. The emergency doctors went through many procedures to try to revive the woman, and after six hours of treatment, her heart restarted. ‘Although she had remained physically dead for at least five to ten hours overnight while undergoing lifesaving treatment, and then for a further six hours while undergoing lifesaving treatment in the hospital, the woman was able to recover and eventually walk out of the hospital without organ and brain damage three weeks later . . . the woman had, in fact, died,’ Parnia reports.
“Two-year-old Gardell Martin fell into an icy Pennsylvania stream in March 2015. By the time the emergency rescuers arrived, he had been dead for at least thirty-five minutes with no heartbeat. He was taken to a hospital and then flown to a medical center, with no one able to revive him. Since he was so young and his body was cold, doctors continued trying to bring him back by continuous chest compression and the infusion of warm fluids into his veins and organs. This went on for an hour and a half. He was a ‘flaccid, cold corpse showing no signs of life,’ recalled Richard Lambert, a member of the critical care team. Then, a faint but steady heartbeat was detected. Gardell walked out of the hospital three and a half days later, after having been dead for 101 minutes.”
Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).
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