I've read numerous near death experiences. The first one by George Ritchie was what got me interested in researching the subject. In it he speaks of the incredible speeds he reached and the difficulty in finding his own body once he realized he had passed away. He was being conscripted into the war but had died from a fever. He records:
I hurried inside. There was the admissions department partment where I had reported ten days ago. It was evidently still the middle of the night, because the offices were closed and locked. I started off along the left-hand corridor, but stopped when I saw that it led to what looked like a staff dining room.
Where was the ward I had awakened in earlier tonight? At last at the end of several hallways I came to a large room that looked familiar. There was a sleeping ing form in each of the beds that lined the walls, but the one that I was looking for--the one I was now convinced belonged to me--was in one of the small single rooms near the door, that I was sure of. I looked eagerly in all three of these, but the first two were empty and in the last one was a man in traction, both legs encased in plaster casts.
I returned to the corridor and looked up and down, undecided. Where was that little room? What wing of the huge hospital was it in, even? I racked my brain, trying to remember something--anything-that anything-that would help me locate it, but it was no use. I would have been unconscious when they brought me there from the X-ray room, and when I woke up I had been so obsessed with the idea of getting to Virginia that I had rushed off without even a backward glance. The fact was that somewhere in over two hundred barracks there was one tiny room that was infinitely important to me--and it could be in any one of them at all. And so began one of the strangest searches that can ever have taken place: the search for myself.
From one ward to another of that enormous complex I rushed, pausing in each small room, stooping over the occupant of the bed, hurrying on. There were hundreds and hundreds of these narrow single-bed cubicles, each so like every other one, and the wards all so alike, that soon I became confused about which ones I had been to, and whether I was simply retracing my steps over and over. And slowly a far more alarming truth began to register. I had never seen myself! Not really. Not the way I saw other people. From my chest down I had seen myself "in the round" of course, but from the shoulders up, I now realized, I had seen only a two-dimensional mirror-image staring at me from a piece of glass. And occasionally a snapshot, equally two-dimensional. That was all.
The roundedness, the living, space-filling presence of myself, I did not know at all. And that, I now discovered, is the way we recognize each other. Not by the shape of the nose or the color of the eyes, but by the whole three-dimensional impact of all the features at once. I knew my height and weight of course. "Six feet two, one hundred and seventy-eight pounds," I kept repeating, as though memorizing the description of a stranger. But what help was that when the person was lying in bed? Here were row after row of soldiers who all must be around that size. They were all of them, like me, in their late teens or early twenties, all of them in hospital pajamas under brown Army blankets, every one of them with a G.I. haircut. (George Ritchie, Return From Tomorrow)
Ah-ha! some may say. Fever! Must have been a hallucination. But I had a fever once with hallucinations and nothing made sense. There was no 3D, no details in what I saw or remembered. I recall seeing orange tomatoes and calling them pumpkins, then having only the sketchiest of recollections afterwards. It didn't happen the way Ritchie describes here.
Again, no one knows for sure unless they've experienced it. My maternal grandfather had an experience on his deathbed and saw something. He tugged on my mom's sleeve and pointed at the end of his bed and up. And my dad, just a day before his death, was caught smiling at my mother. "What's up with you?" she said. My dad, who while living was a big near death skeptic, simply took her hand and beamed. "I saw her," he said. "I've talked to her...twice."
"Who?" my mom queried.
"My mother," he replied, giving her hand another squeeze. We were all flabbergasted. First, dad wasn't all that much into smiling. Second, he wasn't really into religious experiences. And especially near death experiences.
