Near Death Experience of A Religious Man
When I was a freshman in college my father had a heart attack. He was always a very hard worker. He worked a full-time job and ran a dairy farm. He was also a very devout Catholic. We did not have a great deal of money, yet we were sent to private Catholic grade school. Practicing our faith was a very important part of our family life. My father was a quiet man that lived a Christian life rather than talked about it. His arteries were so blocked that he needed to have bypass surgery. This was in the late 1970’s so this procedure was still very new and only available at a research hospital that was located seventy miles from the farm.
My father’s surgery was complicated due to the fact that the surgeons had no idea how damaged his heart was. They lost him for several minutes on the operating table. After several weeks in a coma, my father finally regained consciousness. He had several months of rehabilitation before he was finally able to come back home. During this time, he was even quieter than he had been prior to the heart attack. One afternoon I asked him if he remembered anything about the time he was in the coma. He answered me by asking what I knew about near death experiences. I told him that there have been many articles written about the afterlife and angels. He asked me if I could find him a book about near death experiences. My father was always so busy working that I had never seen him read a book. He read the newspaper each day and he also read the bible, but I had never seen him read a book. I told him that I would look for one.
This was in the days before the internet. I went to the library and asked the research librarian if she could help me locate information on near-death experiences. She said there were several good books as well as several articles. In one book the author had compiled interviews that she had done with many survivors of near-death experiences. The author had also interviewed several nurses and doctors that have been present during multiple deaths, to see if they had similar experiences while is the presence of someone that died. The book was based on the belief of an afterlife and the continuation of a person’s soul. I thought my dad would like the spiritual undercurrents of the book.
I took the book to my dad and asked him why he was interested in near death experiences. He said that he needed time before he could talk about his reasons. After a few days, I went back to visit my dad and asked him if the book was interesting. He told me that many of the near death experiences were similar to each other and also to what he had experienced. He said he could not put into words what he had seen, but he was no longer afraid of death because he was certain there is an afterlife.
