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

30. Back from the Dead

Everywhere I went in those first few weeks, people looked at me like I had risen from the grave. I ran into one doctor who had been present at the hospital the day I’d come in. He hadn’t been directly involved in my care, but he’d gotten a good eyeful when I was rolled into the ER that first morning.

“How can you even be here?” he asked, summarizing the medical community’s basic question about me. “Are you Eben’s twin brother, or what?”

I smiled, reached out, and shook his hand firmly, to let him know it was really I.

Though he was of course joking about whether I had a twin brother, this doctor was actually making an important point. For all intents and purposes I still was two people, and if I was going to do what I’d told Eben IV I wanted to do—use my experience to help others—I would have to reconcile my NDE with my scientific understanding and knit those two people together.

My memory went back to a phone call I’d received one morning several years before, from the mother of a patient who’d called as I was examining a digital map of a tumor I was to remove later that day. I’ll call the woman Susanna. Susanna’s late husband, whom I will call George, had been a patient of mine with a brain tumor. In spite of everything we did, he died within a year and a half of diagnosis. Now Susanna’s daughter was ill with several brain metastases from breast cancer. Her prospects of survival beyond a few months were remote. It wasn’t a good time to take a call—my mind was completely absorbed in the digital image in front of me, and with mapping out exactly what my strategy was going to be to go in and remove it without doing damage to the brain tissue around it. But I stayed on the line with Susanna because I knew that she was trying to think of something—anything—to allow her to cope.

I’d always believed that when you’re under the burden of a potentially fatal illness, softening the truth is fine. To prevent a terminal patient from trying to grab on to a little fantasy to help them deal with the possibility of death is like withholding pain-killing medication. It was an extraordinarily heavy load to carry, and I owed Susanna every second of attention she asked.

“Dr. A,” Susanna said, “my daughter had the most incredible dream. Her father came to her in it. He told her everything was going to be all right, that she didn’t need to worry about dying.”

It was the kind of thing I’d heard from patients countless times—the mind doing what it can to soothe itself in an unbearably painful situation. I told her it sounded like a wonderful dream.

“But the most incredible thing, Dr. A, is what he was wearing. A yellow shirt—and a fedora!”

“Well, Susanna,” I said good-naturedly, “I guess there are no dress codes in Heaven.”

“No,” Susanna said. “That’s not it. Early on in our relationship, when we were first dating, I gave George a yellow shirt. He liked to wear it with a fedora that I also gave him. But the shirt and hat were lost when our luggage failed to arrive on our honeymoon. He already knew by that time how much I loved him in that shirt and hat, but we never replaced them.”

“I’m sure Christina had heard lots of wonderful stories about that shirt and hat, Susanna,” I said. “And about your early times together…”

“No,” she laughed. “That’s what’s so wonderful. That was our little secret. We knew how ridiculous it would sound to someone else. We never talked about that shirt and fedora after they were lost. Christina never heard one peep from us about them. Christina was so afraid of dying, and now she knows she has nothing to fear, nothing at all.

What Susanna was telling me, I discovered in my reading, was a variety of dream confirmation that happens quite often. But I hadn’t had my NDE when I’d gotten that call, and at the time I knew perfectly well that what Susanna was telling me was a grief-induced fantasy. Over the course of my career, I had treated many patients who had undergone unusual experiences while in coma or during surgery. Whenever one of these people narrated an unusual experience like Susanna’s, I was always completely sympathetic. And I was quite sure these experiences had indeed happened—in their minds. The brain is the most sophisticated—and temperamental—organ we possess. Tinker around with it, lessen the degree of oxygen it gets by a few torr (a unit of pressure), and the owner of that brain is going to experience an alteration in their reality. Or, more precisely, their personal experience of reality. Throw in all the physical trauma and all the medications that someone with a brain malady is likely to be on, and you have a virtual guarantee that, should a patient have any memories when they come back around, those memories are going to be pretty unusual. With a brain affected by a deadly bacterial infection and mind-altering medications, anything could happen. Anything, that is—except the ultra-real experience I had in coma.

Susanna, I realized with the kind of jolt that comes when you see something that should have been obvious, wasn’t calling to be comforted by me that day. She really and truly was trying to comfort me. But I hadn’t been able to see that. I’d thought I was doing Susanna a kindness by pretending, in my wan, distracted way, to believe her story. But I wasn’t. And looking back on that conversation and dozens of others like it, I realized just what a long road I had in front of me if I was going to convince my fellow doctors that what I’d been through was real.