Dr. Parti's NDE reviews his life and past lives

Rajiv Parti writes: “From the corner of my eye I could see my second chance coming. It came from the last person I ever expected to see. It was my father! I recognized him immediately although he looked at least thirty years younger than when he died. His hair was jet black and he looked sleek and handsome in his official uniform as a Director of Civil Aviation.

“Putting his arm around me, he tried to comfort me. That act of empathy was frightening. I realized that I couldn’t remember one occasion when my father had ever comforted me as a child. Like many Indian fathers of that generation and the generation before, the only time he or my grandfather touched me was to commit an act of punishment.

“Standing with my father in the afterlife, I had a flashback of that event in which I relived not only how I felt being beaten but how my father felt as well. I could intuit his anger and disappointment like it was my own. It was a confusing and painful perspective, because I could see everything that happened to me on that long ago day yet, at the same time, experience all that he felt and saw in those superheated moments.

In his near-death experience, Parti was surprised to see hope in the eyes of his father. “He looked like a person who was enlightened by love. A person who had gazed into the eyes of God. Universal knowledge granted us in the afterlife allowed me to see and feel him in this new way.

“I could see his father with him, younger and stronger than I remembered as a child. He too had the look of God in his eyes. He did not frown at my father’s revelation about the family tradition of anger. He confirmed it with a nod, and for a moment I could feel the pain in his life too. I knew that behind him was a chain of ancestors, each of who had been filled with anger by their fathers. I also felt their presence somewhere around me, exuding understanding and empathy for the generation behind them who had given them the disease of anger.

“But now I felt empathy from my father. Don’t pass the anger to your sons, he communicated. Without moving his lips, he spoke a truth I will never forget, words clearly from the divine realm: My son, if you are truthful to your own self, the God, the Divine, the Universe, will take care of you. Around me was a gauntlet of ancestors welcoming me to walk among them to a different realm. I was pulled into the tunnel, moved forward by their welcoming hands.

“My life review then took a pleasant turn. Childhood events that were steeped in kindness, innocence, and fun appeared. The simple moments are most important, came a telepathic message from God. The simple moments are the most important because there are no simple moments. All moments are memory and lessons. All moments build the person you are.

“I could see the Light at the end of the tunnel. It was bright and powerful like a thousand suns, yet as pleasant and welcoming as a beacon guiding me to nirvana. But my forward motion slowed, then stopped, and then suddenly I realized I was no longer moving forward but backward, backward to another place and time, one where past life events would explain some of my own life’s dilemmas.

“The darkness engulfed me, and out of it came visions of a life I didn’t at first recognize but that turned out to be one of my past lives. In the first vision, I was sitting in a royal courtyard in medieval India. Feeling the power of my position as a prince of the region. The scene before me was vivid. The grass was bright green, well kept and lined with tall statues of Indian gods and goddesses. In front of those statues were farmers, the farmers who tilled my land and raised crops that made me wealthy.

“I was angry, but I don’t know why. From my princely perspective, I rose up from my throne and walked toward the farmers, swinging a whip as I moved through the cool grass. I had no fear of retribution or self-defense from the farmers because on either side of me were several loyal soldiers who advanced with me and also swung whips.

“I could not remember why I was torturing those who worked so hard for me. I do know that I took great joy in slashing the backs of the farmers after they had fallen to the ground. And I do know that my wrist began to hurt terribly after I administered these beatings, so much so that I couldn’t use that hand again without experiencing extreme pain.

“As I watched my shameful performance, I flashed forward to my current life where I had experienced a torn ligament in my right wrist. The pain had become so severe that I had taken pain pills to cope with daily life. Why had I recalled the pain in my wrist now? Was it because I had been so mean to these people, workers who had looked to me for guidance and wisdom yet received the business end of a switch?

“I was horrible to you, I said as I watched the beating play out before me. Forgive me for what I was doing. One by one the farmers came to me and accepted my apology, some even touching me to convey human kinship, something they never would have done had they thought I wasn’t sincere. When they put their hands on me, I felt a jolt like electricity that rattled me to my very bones. I am sure it was this steady stream of loving jolts that healed the ligament tear in my right wrist that had caused me pain for years.

“As I faded from the life of the medieval prince, many more of my lives flashed before me the way pictures in a picture book would if one were to flip through it very quickly.

“Suddenly the rapid review of lives stopped, and another specific life review began. I found myself sitting at the doorway of a large mud building, gazing out at a green field of plants. I was in a mountain town in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, and before me was a field of poppies, their green pods sitting atop the stems like Popsicles on a stick. I had inherited this field of poppies from my late father and was now one of the top opium producers in the region. I was making a tremendous amount of money from the sale of these poppies, but my financial status was no longer the focus of my life. Rather, I had fallen in love with my own product. I was an opium addict.

“In the beginning, it was heavenly to inhale the opium. It put my brain into a state of pleasure that made me feel as though I was floating in warm ocean water, detached from my surroundings. Infused with this evil bliss, I watched the poppy field change color with the sunset and the day pass into night. But the joy of using opium turned to hell when I decided I wanted more. I found myself ‘testing’ the crop all day, every day, telling my employees that I had to test the drug for purity before it went to market.

“I knew they knew the truth and also knew that they would eventually move me to a hut and supply product to me that would keep me high all day while stealing the farm’s proceeds. I knew all this, but I didn’t care.

“I have been given this addiction again, I thought, as I watched my nineteenth-century self smoke the highly addictive opiates. My addiction to modern narcotics was no different from that of the addiction I experienced more than a century earlier. What was different was that I was experiencing it in a past life. What does that mean? I asked myself. It means you now know that your challenges from the past are presented to you again, said the universal voice that was with me telepathically. You have another life and another chance to cure your addictions.

“I realized that in my current life, I was echoing behavior from my previous lives, behaving with a lack of love to those less fortunate, misusing my material wealth and social status, and numbing myself to real life with painkillers and antidepressants. As this insight pulsed through me, another wave of awareness washed over me: if I were still alive after this surgery, I would have to break these patterns and live differently. Perhaps I would be given another chance to conquer my failings.”

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Dr. Rajiv Parti’s experience “on the rim of hell”

“I had come to Bakersfield from Louisiana to work as a temporary doctor. My assignment was to work one month as an anesthesiologist in the San Joaquin Community Hospital. After years on the East Coast, it was a pleasure to be in the warmth of the San Joaquin Valley.

“My wife, Arpana, opened a dental office of her own, and I soon changed hospitals to take a position as an anesthesiologist at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, an institution dedicated to delicate heart surgeries. Within a few years, I was named head of anesthesiology. After that I joined several of my anesthesiology colleagues in starting a pain clinic where those with chronic pain could receive treatment in an outpatient setting. Soon we were on a road to prosperity that we could hardly believe. We traded our small house for a larger one and then an extremely large house as we built a family of two boys, Raghav and Argun, and a girl, Ambika.

My goal was bigger everything—house, cars, art collection, bank accounts. At one point in my twenty-five years at the heart hospital, I took a nine-month sabbatical in order to trade stock. I made millions of dollars, sometimes a million dollars in one day, but I lost it as fast as I made it because I thought I could read the direction of the stock market with greater accuracy than the pros. That didn’t happen, and I finally gave up this folly and returned to the hospital.

“Feeling like a master of the universe is easy in the world of modern medicine. In my specialty alone, heart surgery anesthesia, the medical world had made so many advances in technology and techniques that we could literally bring patients back from the dead by doing everything from unclogging an artery with a balloon to replacing it or even dropping in a transplanted heart.

“Reality popped that myth for me. In 2008 a routine physical revealed a significant increase in my PSA count, an indication that I had prostate cancer. A biopsy of the prostate gland told me how bad it was. I have good news and bad news for you, said my urologist and good friend who called one evening while my wife and I sat drinking tea in the backyard by the golf course our house overlooked. You have prostate cancer. But it’s in its early stages, and you can have it taken out and you’ll be cured.

Surgery, however, left Parti incontinent and impotent. Scar tissue kept forming, requiring four more operations and resulted in the need for Parti to wear an adult diaper. An artificial sphincter was implanted to solve this problem, but it became infected. Arpana drove Parti to the hospital for emergency surgery.

“As we sped toward Los Angeles, all I could think about were the negatives in my life, a long list that could be organized as: Unlucky, Cancer Patient, Infection Prone, Addict, Depressive, Materialistic, Demanding, Unloving, Egotist, Angry.

“Denial of my own illness made me angry with myself. My anger spread to other events in my life. First, I became angry with God for giving me prostate cancer. What possible good is it to give me such a horrible disease? Why did I deserve something like this?

“And then there were the pain pills. As my wife drove me to the hospital that night, I finally admitted to myself that I had crossed the threshold of addiction. And there was more. The combination of the cancer and my pill addiction had depressed me. To cope with that condition, I had started taking antidepressants. Soon I felt as if they were as necessary to my well being as the pain pills. Why had I lost control of my life?

At the hospital Parti dozed until, prepped for surgery, he got the bad news from his surgeon. Your ultrasound shows us that you’re full of infection. You have a severe infection we can’t touch with antibiotics when you are full of pus. We need to clean it out.

“Is the surgery over? I was zooming straight up as if in an elevator, I was sure of it. It was that feeling in the pit of the stomach when you are rocketing to the fiftieth floor in a skyscraper, and the mild G-forces tug steadily at your insides. Or is that really what I felt? My consciousness began to lift, and instead of seeing the doctor standing over me, I could see the ceiling approaching, its glossy surface getting slowly closer.

“There was a horrible smell in the room, and when I rolled over and looked down, I could see that it was emanating from my abdomen, where one of the surgeons had made several incisions and was now sucking out the infection with a bulb syringe. The odor of the pus was overwhelming and repellent. As the surgeon and a nurse diligently sucked tubes of pus into the bulb syringe and squirted them into a stainless-steel bowl, another nurse applied eucalyptus oil over their masks to take the edge off the odor.

“They seemed to have forgotten to dab the scented oil on the anesthesiologist’s mask because he appeared to be having a problem with the powerful stench. Apparently, the odoriferous conditions reminded him of an off-color joke, which he told as he struggled with the odor. I won’t repeat the joke, but everyone in the operating theater laughed, including me.

“From my position above, I could see the hard work presented by my case and knew as an anesthesiologist that one of the roles of my specialty was to provide humor during difficult surgery. I made it a point to remember the joke for use in my own repertoire, which came in handy later in proving the case for my out-of-body presence in the operating room.

“It had been several minutes since I had separated from my body, and in retrospect I can say that I was enjoying the new perspective. Below, I could see my face in a state of total repose as though nothing was going on with the body it represented. Is that really me, or is this really me? I wondered. I felt a pressure in my chest and became alarmed. It felt as though my heart was skipping beats. I wanted to tell them how I would handle this emergency, but I was not able to communicate with them.

Seeing is believing, and you can’t see the spiritual, one of my professors had said. Clearly there was now an ironic truth in what the professor said. Seeing is believing, and I was now in my spirit body seeing my physical body. I had ignored patients who told me they had left their body during surgery. Would the members of my own profession now ignore me? Or, worse, would they mock me behind my back?

“Suddenly something happened. All I knew was that an extraordinary shift had taken place in my perspective. It was as though my field of vision became much wider and my consciousness expanded well beyond whatever it had been before, as though all of my senses had the ability to see, and what they saw could easily be different scenes.

“It was frightening to have so much input, and some of the visions appearing on the edge of my sight—I call it mind sight—were unpleasant.

“My mind sight gravitated to the most pleasant of the images, a vivid and simple vision of my mother and sister sitting on a sofa in Delhi. They were relaxed and talking, with that unspoken love between mother and daughter so clear. The scene was vivid and detailed. My sister was wearing blue jeans and a red sweater and my mother a green sari and sweater.

“My spirit body moved into the lounge with them, and my spirit ears listened to what they had to say. Mom, I said. She did not hear me. Mom! I said, reaching for her and then through her. Mom, I’m here! My hands passed through her as if she was made of clouds. Or am I the one made of clouds? I wondered.

“I was mesmerized by what I saw and heard, and so focused on my mother and sister that the sudden sound of instruments clanking in the operating room frightened me. I turned my head to the left, the direction from which the sounds were coming, and I could see into the operating theater. To the right were my mother and sister in New Delhi and to the left, my body on a surgical table in Los Angeles.

“Seven thousand miles separated the two scenes, yet both were there in front of me. I was a mechanistic medical doctor, and this event represented new physical laws that I didn’t understand.

How can I be hovering? Where is my brain, and what am I seeing with? Am I breathing? Why can I hear? Will ever get back into my body, or am I destined to roam through eternity, a spirit without a body? Will I see others out there like me?

“My world turned dark, and for a moment I was relieved. I’m returning to my body, I thought. But that relief was replaced by fear as I saw a distant lightning storm off to my right, one that seemed to draw me in very quickly and soon became loud with the sound of thunder and . . . screams and moans of pain and anguish as wildfire moved over burned souls that withered from the intense heat. I was made to lie on a bed of nails, where their needle sharpness tortured my flesh.

“I was drawn in as if on a moving sidewalk that took me to the edge of this flaming canyon. Smoke filled my nostrils and with it the sickening odor of burning flesh. I was on the rim of hell. I tried to turn away and couldn’t. I tried to move back but couldn’t. Every time I took a step back, an unseen force moved me forward, leaving me with a horrific view of the most agonizing place one could ever imagine.

“Naraka, I thought, the Hindu word for hell. Although I hadn’t lived in India for decades, it was the Hindi word that imprinted itself in my mind as I tried to move away from the conflagration before me. Another name came to mind, Yama, the Hindu god of death. He will be arriving soon, I thought. And then my soul will be burned with those other burning souls.

“What is my karma? In my religion, karma means that your future life will be determined by your behavior in this life and previous lives. You have clearly not been making love. I heard this message as though it were spoken in my ear. I looked around and could see no one at my sides. The message came to me telepathically, but it was so powerful God may well have spoken it.

“You have led a materialistic and selfish life. I knew what I heard was true, and I felt ashamed. Over the years, I had lost empathy for my patients. I did my work like a machine, not a human being. I saw my patients as profit centers, people who could give me the wealth and prestige I wanted in exchange for my services as an anesthesiologist.

“My thought turned to my family and how I was sometimes verbally abusive. This was particularly true of the way I treated our son Raghav. Of our three children, Raghav was the one for whom I had the greatest expectations. As the eldest, he was expected to achieve the most in life. You are not working hard enough, I shouted angrily when his grades reflected a lack of understanding of the subject I loved. On these occasions, I was ashamed, but pretended my ire was righteous.

“Now, on the rim of hell, I felt my chance to heal the past was gone. My God, give me another chance, I prayed. Please give me another chance.”

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

The "frozen man" remembers his surgery!

Anesthesiologist Rajiv Parti writes: “By all indications, the patient on the operating table was dead. His heart was stopped, and his body drained of blood. There was no respirator turned on to keep him breathing and no oxygen being fed to his lungs. The EKG machine that would ordinarily beep in time with his heartbeat was silent because there was nothing to beat in time with. All of his organs had stopped functioning, and his brain revealed no waves on the EEG machine.

“In fact, the patient wasn’t dead, not really. He was in suspended animation through a surgical procedure known as hypothermic cardio-pulmonary bypass and circulatory arrest, a procedure that replaces the patient’s blood with a cool fluid that lowers body temperature to approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit and stops all bodily functions. Just like death, but not quite.

“The purpose of the surgery in his case was to repair a tear in the aorta, the main artery leading from his heart. This is a dangerous surgery, but there was little choice. Without it, his weakened aorta would eventually burst and kill him instantly. If the surgery didn’t kill him, he would have a normal life span. He was almost damned if he did, but definitely damned if he didn’t.

“I was the anesthesiologist on the case. It was my job to administer anesthesia to the patient while the surgeons opened his chest to expose the heart. Then, after the surgery, when warm blood was returned to his body, my role was to keep the patient safely and deeply anesthetized as we brought him back to life. In between, when the cooling solution filled the circulatory system and the patient’s vital signs appeared as flat lines on the monitors, I had little to do but observe the deft hands of the surgeons as they performed their delicate and complex patchwork on this king of all arteries. They had only sixty minutes to work their magic.

“When we brought this patient to the operating room, he was already heavily sedated. I spoke to him momentarily when we transferred him to the operating table, but he didn’t have much interest in conversation. The sedation and the realization of what was about to happen had sunk in and he remained silent, wondering, I am sure, if I was the last person he would ever see. I didn’t give him much time to think about it. I injected propofol and other anesthetic drugs into the saline tube placed in an arm vein and watched him drop off to sleep. After placing an endotracheal tube into his windpipe, I watched carefully as the patient’s chest was opened and his heart prepped for the surgery. Then a surgical specialist administered the cold perfusion fluid, and another carefully drained his blood into an oxygenator that would keep it primed with oxygen and clot free. Before long the patient was in suspended animation, and the surgery had begun.

“Over the years I have worked on several of these operations, and they always amaze me. The genius of the research that led to this surgery, the deep concentration of the skilled surgeons—to me this procedure took medicine to a new frontier.

“From my place at the head of the table, I looked down at the patient. He seemed as dead as any dead patient I have ever seen; yet he would make it back to life and be among the living for many years.

“For the next hour, I watched the chief surgeon work with speed and urgency, racing against the clock to repair the damaged artery. The room was filled with controlled tension and fear, and not just because of the delicate nature of the operation. A good percentage of patients undergoing this surgery do not survive—not because of the surgery, which is almost always successful, but because the human body is not always capable of returning from the dead. The surgery was successful but the patient died is not considered the punch line of a joke with this operation; rather, it is a reality that we in the operating room are all too aware of.

“When the surgery was completed, we moved with great efficiency to bring the patient back to life. As the blood was transfused back into his body, I administered more anesthesia so he wouldn’t awaken too quickly. Then the ice was unpacked from around his head so his brain could warm up. As the cold blood was slowly warmed, platelets were added to enhance clotting, and then cardioversion paddles were activated on either side of his heart in hopes of jolting it to a start.

“This was the point at which we all held our breath. If the cardioversion jolts did not restore the heartbeat, the patient would die. On the third try, this patient’s heart began to thump regularly. After several minutes observing the heartbeat, a closure surgeon stepped forward and sewed his chest together. Then this resurrected patient was taken to the intensive care unit (ICU) for recovery.

“I was one of the first to greet him when he awoke. He was groggy, but he knew where he was and he was glad to be there. I think he didn’t expect to be alive. When he saw me, he cracked a smile.

I was watching you guys in the operating room, he said.

“What he said clearly didn’t register, and I must have look puzzled.

I said, I was watching you guys in the operating room, he repeated. I was out of my body, floating around by the ceiling.

How can that be true? I asked myself. He was frozen!

Yeah, he said. I saw you just standing at the head of the table, I saw the surgeon sewing the patch on my artery. And then he went on to describe the number of surgeons in the operating theater, where they were positioned, the actions of the nurses, and other events that made it clear he had been observing events from somewhere above us.

“I could hardly believe what he was saying. Over the course of my twenty-five-year career, I had attended to hundreds of patients, many of whose hearts were barely beating when they arrived in the operating room. There had been patients who claimed to see deceased friends during their cardiac arrest, or who saw lights at the end of tunnels, or who claimed to see people made of light, but I chalked that off to some kind of fantasy and referred them to the psychiatrist. As one of my medical schoolteachers had said: If you can’t touch it, hear it, or see it on a monitor, send it to psych.

“But what had happened to this man was different. He had accurately described the operating room I was working in with great clarity. He not only showed signs of being alive when his heart and brain were inert but also of being awake.

Your heart was stopped, I said to him. Your brain didn’t have any activity. You couldn’t have seen anything. Your head was packed in ice.

“The frozen man challenged me again by describing details in the operating room he hadn’t mentioned earlier—information about surgical tools and comments about things that took place well into the surgery.

“He was interested in talking more, but I stopped him and ordered a shot of Haldol, a strong antipsychotic drug. The stock market had just closed, and I wanted to see how my investments had done that day. I didn’t tell him that, of course. I told him a sort of truth, that I had other patients to see, and promised I would come back later to talk about his experience.

“The day after Christmas 2010, the curious memory of the frozen man came rushing back. At the age of fifty-three, I found myself lying in the recovery room of the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center talking to an anesthesiologist about my own near-death experience (NDE) that had just taken place during surgery.

“The problem was he didn’t believe me, or else he didn’t care. Like the frozen man whose NDE I had ignored myself, I now had ventured into a spiritual world and felt more alive than ever before. Not only had I completely left my body and brain behind and gone into another realm of consciousness, I had returned with an astonishing amount of wisdom that was readily available to me. I knew the other place I visited was completely real, and later it would prove itself again.

“Yet as I tried to share all of this information with my colleague, I could tell he wasn’t the least bit interested. In fact, when he promised to return later so I could tell him the entire story, I knew that karma, the idea that you reap what you sow, had now taken place. Just as I had promised to return to the bedside of the frozen man and listen to his story, so too was my colleague making the same promise. And like me, he never returned.

“It has now become my life’s mission, my dharma, to bring the message of consciousness-based healing to the world, to heal diseases of the soul. I deliver that message to you now in this book. A dream of spiritual peace is a common one. I want to show you how to attain it."

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Your will be done on earth as in heaven

Your will be done . . .

You, who Jesus called father

Your will for all creation

A doing we can do

Will do

 

As in heaven . . .

Your eternal realm

No where or when, but real

Our home too

With you

 

On earth . . .

Here and now

Your will becoming our will

Amazing grace

Now we can see

And we will

Message for Reggie Anderson via a patient’s NDE

Dr. Reggie Anderson writes: “Although I had finished my obligation to the National Health Service Corps several years earlier, Karen and I questioned whether or not God still wanted us in Ashland City. Since our arrival, the quality of the health care in Cheatham County had improved dramatically. During my tenure, I’d watched as a clinic, an emergency room, and finally a hospital was built.

The answer to Anderson’s question came in an astonishing way. He was treating Eunice, a patient in her late sixties, for diabetes and high blood pressure when she had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in Nashville. Several hours later Anderson received a call from the treating physician in Nashville, Dr. Wong.

We took Eunice to the cath lab, Dr. Wong said. Everything was going well, and just as you suspected, she was having a large anterior myocardial infarction. She had a 99 percent blockage of the left anterior descending artery. We opened the vessel with the balloon and then . . .

“He paused. Everything he’d said up to that point made sense and frankly was what I expected to hear. But when he stopped mid-sentence, I wondered if something else was wrong.

Go on, I said.

We opened the vessel with the balloon and then, everything went south.

What happened?

She died on the table. I had a resident with me, and we worked on her for at least an hour. I was about to let her go, but my resident wanted to practice running a code, so I let him while I supervised.

What was the time of death?

Well, see, that’s the thing. An hour into the resident running the code, and two hours from the time she flat lined, her heart kicked in and started beating by itself.

Are you saying she’s alive?

I’m saying she was dead for two hours, and now she is alive.

What kind of condition is she in?

I have her on a vent in the ICU, and she’s in a coma. With that much time doing CPR, I’m really not sure how much functioning will come back.

Three days later Eunice awakened from her coma and asked to see Dr. Anderson. When he entered her room, he was surprised at how good she looked. “Her skin was radiant, her eyes sparkled, and she looked almost girlish, which no one had probably said about her for more than forty years.

Dr. Anderson! She said, reaching for my hand.

Hello, Eunice. How are you feeling?

Great, just great! She said with much more enthusiasm than I would have expected from a woman who had been legally dead only seventy-two hours earlier. Sit down. I have a story to tell you.

The last thing I remember was lying on the table while they did something with my heart. Then suddenly there was a lot of commotion. People were yelling and handing medical equipment back and forth. I knew they were working on my shell. They said that I died on the table—that I was dead for two hours! But I don’t remember it because I wasn’t there on that table. I was somewhere else where I was more alive than I’ve ever been. Everything was peaceful there and calm, very different from here. It was the exact opposite of the craziness that was going on where my body lay on that table. A sensation of total peace enveloped me, and I felt as though I were floating.

I didn’t feel any more pain. Even before my heart attack, I always had pain, what with the arthritis and the neuropathy. But now, I no longer had that burning in my legs; in fact, they felt strong. For the first time in three years, I stood up and walked without a wheelchair or a walker!

I walked down a path to a stream. I could feel its icy spray blowing on me as I passed. I stopped to take a drink, and the water was as cold and fresh as an Alaskan stream, but the water was sweet—it tasted like honey.

When I looked around, I saw an astounding array of colors, and the pigments seemed so concentrated! It was more colorful than anything I’d ever seen or imagined.

“By this time, one of the ICU nurses had entered and was listening too. Eunice started talking faster.

I walked around a bend in the path, and I saw an open field with the greenest grass—I’ve never seen that color of green before. Right in the middle of that meadow stood a horse-drawn carriage! My father loved horses. Seeing that beautiful animal reminded me of him.

Suddenly, my view was blocked. A crowd of people stood in front of the carriage. I looked closer, and I saw my father, my sweet mother, and my dear brother! They died years ago. Then I recognized other people in the crowd who had passed away decades ago. But when I saw them, it was as if no time had passed at all. Our spirits were united with an understanding that defied words. In fact, I’m not even sure we used words to communicate.

They all said they were doing great. They specifically asked me to tell you that what you’re doing here in Cheatham County needs to continue. They wanted to encourage you. I sat down with them in the grassy meadow. They’d prepared a picnic lunch for me, and you know what, Dr. Anderson? There was no diabetic food there! I could eat whatever I wanted!

“I smiled at the nurse. I knew how much Eunice must have enjoyed that. She hated having to watch her sugar intake.

Dr. Anderson, I’ve never felt that peaceful and content. It was like being snuggled in a velvet robe. I really wanted to stay there. But then, Jesus came and sat down beside me. He asked me if I could come back here for a while, so I could encourage others. He told me I wouldn’t have to stay long, and I would be able to come back soon. He said he wanted me to come back here for two reasons. The first one was to encourage you . . . to tell you that you are doing his will and should stay the course. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what he told me to tell you.

“I teared up; a minute later, I was crying. I knew what that meant. God wanted us to stay in Ashland City.

The second reason was to encourage my family and friends to believe that Jesus is real and that there truly is a heaven!

“I held her hand until she fell asleep. Then I turned off the lights and went to find Karen. She was in the lobby reading a magazine. She must have sensed my coming because she looked up as I came closer.

I can tell by the look on your face that this is a good one, she said.

“I burst into tears as I told her everything Eunice had said. I felt so honored and humbled to have received such a blessing of encouragement. It reminded me of the day I’d walked out of the Tennessee wilderness (both literally and figuratively) after my conversion dream. I’d felt the same way then. I knew there were people who did more for God, who were better Christians than I was, or who desperately needed to hear his voice because of something they were going through.

Why did he choose to send a message to me? I asked Karen.

“Her reply was simple. You’re his child.”

Reggie Anderson, Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters with the Hereafter (Tyndale, 2013), 221-229.

Entering heaven together

Called to the ER, Dr. Reggie Anderson barely had his gloves on when the gurney rolled through the door.

White female, Seventy-nine years. Collapsed at home. 911 called. She was intubated on-site and IV placed. She had asystole on the monitor. However, we continued CPR en route since we were so close.

“Asystole was a dire form of cardiac arrest—the heart completely stops beating, and no electrical activity can be detected on the monitor. It is usually a serious and life-ending heart attack. Betty Sue hadn’t responded to any of the EMT’s initial interventions. The survival rate for her age and lack of response was less than one percent. Things didn’t look good. But a one percent chance was better than no chance at all.

“We moved her into the two-bed emergency room to see what we could do. The EMTs had been doing masked breathing, so we moved her from their portable machine to our larger one. No activity registered on the monitor.

Continue CPR. Push the EPI.

“Still nothing.

One amp of bicarb. Continue CPR.

“Nothing.

Charge the paddles.

“We shocked her heart. Still nothing. The ambulance attendant poked his head in the room and said: Her husband, William, is outside.

We’re busy working on Betty Sue. Tell him I’ll be out when I can talk to him. It will probably be a few minutes.

I don’t think you understand, the EMT said. She called us for him. William had a heart attack first. We’re doing CPR on him in the hall.

What? I looked up in time to see my nurse’s jaw drop.

“The EMT explained that the husband had collapsed at home and the wife had called 911, but by the time the ambulance arrived, William and Betty Sue were both lying on the floor.

Well, bring him in and put him in cot two! I said.

“Running two codes at once in our tiny ER was unprecedented. I continued to work on Betty Sue while the EMTs and nurses set up William in the adjoining bed. I strongly sensed God’s presence inside the ER. I felt his warmth as intensely as I’d ever felt it. The divine scents calmed me as I felt the veil parting for one or both of these precious souls.

Their children should be here in five minutes, the nurse said.

Continue CPR on both patients until they arrive.

“Handling one code was challenging enough, but trying to keep up with two at the same time was impossible without God’s intervention. Thankfully, I felt him directing my attention between the two patients and keeping me focused as I supervised the nurses. Once William was hooked up to his monitor, I could see that his heart wasn’t registering any activity either. Like his wife, he was flat lined.

“I intubated him, and we started mechanical breathing. Still no signs of heart activity. Let’s try to shock him. I didn’t think that shocking him would work any better than it had with Betty Sue, but I had to do something for the adult children who were about to learn they’d lost both parents within minutes of each other.

Charge the paddles.

“I turned to look at Betty Sue’s monitor one last time before I shocked William, but as soon as I turned toward her bed, his nurse said something that made me turn right back.

Doctor, something’s happening here.

“She pointed to the monitor where it showed a hint of activity. Then, even before we could shock his heart, we saw a single heartbeat. Blip.

Hold the paddles, I said. I think we’re getting a pulse.

“Then there was another. Blip. Only this second blip wasn’t from William’s monitor; it came from somewhere behind me. I turned to see what was happening, and I realized it was on his wife’s monitor!

Blip. A second beat on William’s monitor. Blip. Another beat on Betty Sue’s monitor. Blip, blip, blip went William’s monitor, and Betty Sue’s echoed with a blip, blip, blip. I turned my head to watch each volley of heartbeats as they registered on the monitors. Without intervention, William’s heart had begun to beat regularly, and then his wife’s followed! Soon the two heartbeats were beating in a synchronized rhythm.

“It was the most unusual thing I’d ever seen. The activity in the room, which had been so busy and chaotic while we were trying to run two codes, had ceased. All the medical professionals were speechless as we stood in awe and listened to the monitors amplifying the sounds of two hearts beating in unison. Days after the couple was transferred to the ICU in Nashville, Anderson received a call.

I have an interesting story to tell you about your patients, the Nashville doctor said. They arrived in the ER, and I had the same conversation with the kids that you did. They wanted the ventilators kept in to help them breathe, but they decided they didn’t want any further heroics. If their hearts stopped, we weren’t supposed to start them again. I admitted both patients and put them in separate rooms in the same cardiac unit.

This morning during rounds, I was standing at William’s bed when his monitor flat lined. Since we weren’t going to resuscitate him, I called time of death, and then went down the hall to the nurses’ station to write, “Discharged to a funeral home,” in his chart. While I was writing, I happened to look up at the monitors in front of me, and I noticed Betty Sue’s. While I was watching, hers flat lined too!”

“If heaven was closer than I thought, would that explain how, when God called William home, Betty Sue heard him and responded? Or did William, with one foot in heaven, stretch out his hand to his wife’s soul, so she could come with him? How close does heaven have to be for us to reach out and touch our loved ones, or for our loved ones to touch us?”

 

Reggie Anderson, Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters with the Hereafter (Tyndale, 2013), 215-219.