The Near-Death Encounter That Saved Me From Myself
My mind told me I was hallucinating, but my instincts told me I’d glimpsed the other side
Is there life after death?
It’s a question that’s been on our minds for thousands of years. My husband comes down on the side of skepticism — he believes that our consciousness ends as soon as our hearts stop beating. He says that when you die, it’s “lights out.”
There was a time that I would have agreed. As a teen, I rejected the heaven-and-hell paradigm of my Catholic parents, and the ideas of reincarnation imparted by my Taoist grandparents. I turned away from all things religious or spiritual, deciding that the faiths of the world were narratives invented to prevent the reality of death from driving us all insane.
When I was 18, though, something happened that created within me a belief in the spiritual realm, and the afterlife. I was in a particularly destructive phase, following two suicide attempts, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and clinical depression, and eight treatments of electroconvulsive therapy. Realizing that I didn’t really have the “guts” to take my own life, I started abusing solvents — inhaling glue and butane to alter my sour state of mind.
