Farmer sees his father during his NDE

Greyson’s research also included interviews over a two-and-a-half-year period with almost 1,600 patients who “were admitted to the inpatient cardiac service, of whom 116 had had a cardiac arrest, in which their hearts stopped completely, documented in their medical records. Claude, a seventy-two-year-old farmer, was one of those whose heart had stopped. The day after he was admitted, I made my way to his hospital room, introduced myself, and asked if he’d be willing to talk with me about what happened to him. He gave me a puzzled look, as if it was perfectly obvious what had happened to him. But he agreed to talk.

“I told him I understood that his heart had stopped, and I asked him, as I ask every patient, “What was the last thing you remember before you blacked out?” “I was slopping the hogs,” Claude began slowly, “and I started feeling dizzy, so I walked back to the barn and sat down on a bale of hay.” He paused, and then added, “And that’s the last thing I knew.” “And what was the next thing you remember after that?” I asked. “I woke up in this bed, with wires on my chest and a tube in my arm, and I don’t know how the heck I got here.”

“Trying to sound matter-of-fact,” Greyson says, “I asked a third question that I put to all these patients: “And what do you remember in between those two times?” Claude hesitated, as if he was sizing me up, and then said, just as matter-of-factly, “I thought I was going to meet my maker, but my paw—he’s been gone maybe fifteen years now—stopped me and said I had to go back.” Greyson kept his voice calm and professional, although he was eager to hear a near-death account from an unbiased source. “Tell me about meeting your paw.” Claude looked at me patiently, and after a very brief pause, he said, “I just did.” I nodded and tried to figure out how to word a follow-up question. But Claude closed his eyes and said, “I’m tired. That’s all I have to say.”

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021), 45-46.