"Plus, my children didn’t deserve to lose their mother if it was preventable, and I was being given the gift of the ability to keep that from happening. Some don’t get that option. Then again, I reasoned, perhaps my children had come into this current life with the knowledge that they would one day lose their mother. However, I also felt that if I was being given a choice to return, then losing their mother was not a given, and not something they should have to suffer as children in this lifetime.
The missing wedding ring on my smooth hand when I looked at it in the Garden might have been a harbinger of all of this. Still, I had a hard time believing that we would get divorced. Barry and I were perfectly happy with each other and our growing family.
"What I did not yet realize was that the Elizabeth who returned from the Garden was not the same Elizabeth who had been struck by lightning in the synagogue parking lot. I was simply no longer the person Barry had married.
"So I agreed to return to my life to raise Jeremy, Andy, and our daughter-to-be, whom I had a burning curiosity to meet and raise, and whom I already loved. I also knew that the changes in me were going to make me a different type of parent than I had been previously. I understood that while I would be different, Barry would still be the same as he had always been. I wanted very much to share my new knowledge with my children as I raised them. I didn’t want them to be saddled with my old black-and-white, rigid way of thinking. I wanted them to understand the nuances of varying shades of gray.
My companion in the Garden cautioned me that going back would be physically very painful. My burns and burst eardrums were physical injuries to my body that I had not felt yet because I had not been in my body to suffer them. By reclaiming my physical self, I was also agreeing to accept whatever pain was there to bear. I understood that I would have to spend time off my burned feet. My companion reiterated that I needed to remember the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love. Since I was returning to my life as a different person than I had been when I left, that loving feeling would be tremendously comforting and reinforcing as I tried to fit back into society as a dramatically changed person and continue my life.
"He also told me about another kind of pain I would feel as I returned to my body. He said he would have to “help” me back into my body by hugging me tightly, so tightly, in fact, that it would feel as if my bones were being crushed. He explained that this was necessary because my soul was now much larger than my body, and it needed to be squeezed back into my physical frame. Apparently, a physical body is merely a vessel that houses and contains one’s soul. Once the soul is freed from the constraints of the body, it no longer has to be a particular size. It can expand and fill as much space as is needed or desired.
"My understanding of the unconditional love, my knowledge of the afterlife, and all the information I had absorbed there were now part of who I was, and this had expanded the size of my soul. As promised, the hugging was bone- crushingly painful and suffocating as he lovingly squeezed me back into my burned body.
"I woke up in
the rain on the wet asphalt of the synagogue parking lot."
Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.
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