On May 22, 2023, I died of respiratory and heart failure from stage 3 sepsis due to an undiagnosed gall stone. I had been struggling with a mystery illness that had seen me collapse in a grocery store on May 9th 2023, and almost again on May 16th. Both episodes resulted in emergency room visits, but I had been misdiagnosed and my case slipped through the cracks due to a DNA mutation related to the numbing of pain. 

One sunny Sunday morning in late July of 2011, at age 62, I was part of a pack of motorcycle enthusiasts who set off from Cardiff to Newtown in mid-Wales on our Triumph motorbikes. I had been negotiating a series of hairpin bends on my Triumph Bonneville when I had a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle at 55 mph. I don't know to this day whether it was me that drifted or if it was the driver of that oncoming vehicle who cut the corner; it all happened so suddenly.

In any case, I was airlifted by helicopter to the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in England where a number of specialist medical teams, led – as luck would have it – by this world-renowned surgeon, took it in turns for the next seven days to work on different parts of my anatomy in an effort to keep me alive. 

I had lost an enormous amount of blood and had what is called an open-book fracture of the pelvis, an open fracture of the right tibia and fibula, a dislocated left knee and a broken wrist, and my wife and son were told to prepare themselves for the worst as, according to this consultant orthopaedic surgeon, my chances of survival were not ... well, promising.

Sometime during the course of all this emergency surgery – I was told later that I had to undergo six major life-saving operations in seven days – I had what I came to realise quite a long time afterwards was a near-death experience. 

I was in a hospital bed and was being wheeled out of a ward and into a corridor. Everything was in subtle shades of white, and the lighting was defused. You could have heard a pin drop. The four nurses who wheeled me out into the corridor stopped almost instantly in front of an arched double door, also white, and we waited. It was all very calm and felt reassuring. After a short while, these double doors opened, and I was wheeled into what felt like a vast, cathedral-like space. The nurses "disappeared," that is to say that the bed I was in was now somehow propelling itself forward silently.

I was vaguely aware of quite a large crowd to my left, and it seemed that these people were all there for someone of some standing in society who had recently died and who had been laid out on a large four-poster bed which was suspended high above this vast hall. I had this feeling that he was a cleric, an archbishop perhaps, bare-headed, benign. There was the sound of organ music being played almost imperceptibly in the background. I didn't look directly to my left but was nevertheless aware of the presence of this crowd of people as I continued to move forward. 

What happened next felt perfectly natural. I seemed to leave my own body and levitate up toward the body that was lying in repose way above me. I felt totally calm throughout all this. He was quite some distance away, this mysterious figure, and high up at the very top of the hall. As I continued to move towards him my body seemed to stop in mid-air, and I just hovered there for an instant.

That was when I turned away from the corpse because something - albeit silently - had somehow caught my attention. I had a sense of someone else being in this space, full of peace and wonder. I turned about 45 degrees to my right and I looked down. There, below me, was an operating table surrounded by these surgeons and nurses, all wearing white. I looked and I realised that it was me they were operating on, and so I was watching myself – outside of my own body – fighting for my life. I felt a great sense of comfort and relief as I watched them go about their work. I was calm.

Still levitating in mid-air, as if this were the most natural thing to be doing, I then turned another 45 degrees away from this scene, so that I had my back to the man who was laid out in the four-poster bed above me, and I was now facing the faceless crowd who had come to honour him, or at least that's what it seemed like to me. I was at one and the same time a witness to this event as well as being very much a part of it. I didn't feel like an intruder. I felt welcome and accepted. 

I started to move downwards very slowly, very gently, and now the operating table was to my left and above me. Just like the four-poster bed, it seemed to be floating there, totally unsupported. I drifted down nearer and nearer to the front row of the crowd, this nebulous mass of faces, and I moved – no, floated – left, towards where the arched door would have been.

Then, even though I never saw his face, I distinctly heard the voice of my dear friend – the elderly actor whom I had visited on the eve of his own death to lung cancer the day prior to my own accident – and he was speaking in fairly hushed tones with someone next to him. I couldn't see him, but he was there. I heard him. Even though I wasn't able to make out a single word of what he was saying as I drifted past him towards the door, I do remember how comforting it was to hear the mellow, reassuring baritone of his voice.

And there, to the sound of that voice growing ever more faint as I moved away from the crowd and back to who knows where, it all ended, not abruptly, but in the way a scene might end in the days of those old black and white films: gently.

I had a near-death experience in 1999. I careered off a mountain while hiking and was (for a period of approximately 30 seconds) facing almost certain death or catastrophic injury. Despite every sinew in my body keeping me upright and alive as I lost control, my “final” 5-10 seconds were “out-worldly.”

An intense fight-or-flight response is, in itself, a biological marvel. As an agnostic, I’ve explained away my experience as my brain preparing me for the inevitable.

As I neared my “end” I went through the following: (1) I realized intellectually that I no longer had any say in whether I was going to live or die, (2) this “certainty” was a tremendous relief; I literally felt the weight of life come off my shoulders, (3) my life flashed past me and I had the experience that I had indeed no regrets, and (4) I felt this tremendous “purity” and joy.

Then suddenly, I no longer existed as a separate entity “in” the world. I no longer felt distinguishable from the grass and rocks around me. I tell people I had the experience of “dissolving” into the space around me, like in The Matrix. I can relate to the TED talk neuroscientist who had a stroke who talks about tapping into the world’s collective energy.

I stopped struggling, as I felt the vessel that was my body no longer contained me and I had already begun to move on from the physical world. Before I hit the ground, I experienced tremendous euphoria/peace.

I can’t say the experience was life-changing, but I have made a point to tell my loved ones not to fear their final moments.

A few years earlier I had another “our-worldly” experience that doesn't qualify as an NDE, but I was intrigued to see a question related to spirits/angels. While hiking in a remote forest in Germany when I was in my early 20s, a few years before my NDE, I encountered what I believe was the spirit of a fallen WWII soldier who directed me (amongst other things) to "look down" and I did, and at my feet was the shell of an American rifle bullet dated “1942,” presumably fired from the spot he shot it from and perhaps where he was killed. As an agnostic/atheist I have no explanation for this event but, the fact of the matter is, it happened.

I was on my bed. I was done eating but something in my body felt out of place. I lay down to realize that there is food inside my lungs and my body was convulsing in order to counteract the circumstances and prevail to save the lungs. 

I started to feel cold, feel a chill in my side, my hands, arms, legs and fingers, as if something of a vital fluid was unable to pulse with the reciprocating brain input.