Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

16. The Well

Holley first met our friend Sylvia in the 1980s, when both were teaching at the Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, North Carolina. While there, Holley was also a close friend of Susan Reintjes. Susan is an intuitive—a fact that never got in the way of my feelings about her. She was, to my mind, a very special person, even if what she did was, to say the least, outside my straight-and-narrow neurosurgical view. She was also a channel and had written a book called Third Eye Open, which Holley was a big fan of. One of the spiritual healing activities Susan regularly performed involved helping coma patients to heal by contacting them psychically. On Thursday, my fourth day in coma, Sylvia had the idea that Susan should try to contact me.

Sylvia called her at home in Chapel Hill and explained what was happening with me. Would it be possible for her to “tune in” to me? Susan said yes and asked for a few details about my illness. Sylvia gave her the basics: I’d been in a coma for four days and I was in critical condition.

“That’s all I need to know,” Susan said. “I’ll try to contact him tonight.”

According to Susan’s view, a coma patient was a kind of in-between being. Neither completely here (the earthly realm) nor completely there (the spiritual realm), these patients often have a singularly mysterious atmosphere to them. This was, as I’ve mentioned, a phenomenon I’d noticed myself many times, though of course I’d never given it the supernatural credence that Susan had.

In Susan’s experience, one of the qualities that set coma patients apart was their receptivity to telepathic communication. She was confident that once she’d put herself into a meditative state, she’d soon establish contact with me.

“Communicating with a coma patient,” she later told me, “is a little like throwing a rope down a deep well. How deep the rope needs to go depends on the depth of the comatose state. When I tried to contact you, the first thing that surprised me was how deep the rope went. The farther down, the more frightened I became that you were too far away—that I wouldn’t be able to reach you because you weren’t coming back.”

After five full minutes of mentally descending via the telepathic “rope,” she felt a slight shift, like a fishing line deep down in the water getting a small but definite tug.

“I was sure it was you,” she told me later, “and I told Holley as much. I told her it wasn’t your time yet, and that your body would know what to do. I suggested that Holley keep those two thoughts in mind, and repeat them to you at your bedside.”