A River of Light

I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Hill had just awoken from a weeklong coma-like state, brought on by the prolonged resuscitation that he had undergone to revive him from an aborted sudden death episode. He had arrived at the hospital in a deep coma, and I painted a rather bleak picture concerning his chance for recovery to the family that was present. Oddly, they did not seem overly upset at Mr. Hill’s current predicament; indeed, they approached his potential demise with a thinly concealed sense of enthusiasm. Puzzled by the family’s behavior, I learned from the nurses in the intensive care unit that Mr. Hill was a well-known business man and investor, known for his ruthless practices, who bought and sold companies with a complete disregard for the people whose lives he manipulated. Married multiple times, his infidelity, alcohol abuse, and explosive temper were the stuff of legend. He seemed to have a particular flair for foreclosures and evictions. He was at a local courthouse seizing the assets of a young family (bankrupted by a child’s illness) when his cardiac arrest occurred. With each passing day, neurology gave him less and less chance of recovery. As we were in the process of removing the ventilator, we were shocked to find that Mr. Hill had started breathing on his own. Then, little by little, he made a slow progressive recovery. At first, it appeared that he would suffer severe neurological impairment; he acted like a small child. Then suddenly, he woke up and cried. The nurses paged me and I came to speak with him. Mr. Hill’s words virtually flooded out of his mouth: he wanted to tell me about where he had been; he wanted to tell me about the light. While I had spent a career dealing with sudden death survivors I had never had anyone describe a near death experience to me before. In great detail he described a sudden feeling of floating, then hovering above his body and watching the paramedic’s resuscitation efforts on him. He then described being drawn upward through a passage to a great source of light, “A River of Light” as he called it, where he felt that he was outside the confines of normal time and space, a place that words could not describe. Then, in an instant, he relived the sum of his life, not only from his prospective, but the perspective of others as well, and he found himself sorely lacking. Then, with great reluctance, he felt himself being drawn back down through the same passage back to his body. I sat silent by his bedside as he spoke, unsure of how to respond. An estimated 13 million people throughout the world have reported having had a near death experience.1 The term near death experience (NDE) was first used by Raymond Moody in his 19752 book Life after Life, and is defined “as a distinct subjective experience that individuals sometimes report after near death episode, which includes situations in which a person clinically died and was brought back to life, as well as circumstances where death is likely or expected, such as military combat.”1 While each individual’s description of an NDE varies, they tend to be remarkably similar.3,4 It begins with an out-of-body experience with the individual observing the attempts at his or her own resuscitation, followed by passage to a place of light associated with a sense of peace and tranquility. Often there is a review of or accounting for the actions of one’s life, a process (experienced as either pleasure or agony) followed by the return of the person to his or her body. While debated as to whether these are life after death confirmations or merely elaborate postanoxic hallucinations, there is little debate as to the effect of an NDE on those who report them. Mr. Hill awoke as a different man, who said that he now recognized aspects of the divine in each and every person. The family had little idea how to relate to this radically different person, who now smiled, laughed, seemed at peace with himself, and said he no longer feared death. His business associates and certain family members demanded that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation. After an hour of conversation, the psychiatrist concluded that he was one of the sanest people he had ever met. He underwent placement of an implantable defibrillator and was later discharged from the hospital. Mr. Hill’s subsequent transformation was akin to something out of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. He gave up his previous business practices and set up a large foundation to support charitable causes. He personally sought out the people he had wronged and made amends with each of them. He remarried one of his previous wives, and became a faithful husband. He supported every church, synagogue, mosque, and temple in the city, saying that each religion was a reflection of the divine. When later he died from end-stage heart failure, he departed as a man at peace with himself. He was hailed as a community benefactor and good citizen.