Jonel Abellanosa
Afterlife
Clara’s case is a classic near-death experience. A nurse, she’d been working for two decades in the physical therapy department. One afternoon a stinging rheumatic pain on her right shoulder joint progressed into full blown cardiac event. She blamed the constant hoisting of patients by the armpits to help them navigate parallel bars and relearn walking. She recalled how pain made her head feel hollow, her body cold, forehead moist, saltiness stinging her eyes. She was overweight, diabetic and hypertensive, chest pain she described as “thick” making her collapse in the nurses’ station. She described an awareness that she’s on the emergency room’s ceiling, looking down at her body, as doctors and nurses tried to revive her. She could hear every word. She saw with such clarity “colors pulsing with life.”
“A strong force pulled me out of the room. I floated over the parking lot. There’s a dark tunnel, small light growing from its end. Out of the tunnel my parents, my younger sister, my father’s brother and two of my cousins, my two cats, all dead, they came to meet me. They welcomed me to the place…heavenly…a beautiful mist…people glowed. Oh the peacefulness, feelings of love. Sunlight so peaceful. Breathing sounds of a distant sea. I didn’t want to return to my body, to my old life. But I had to return. My life flashed before me, from when I was a toddler learning to walk, to the afternoon of my cardiac arrest. I felt the wrongs I inflicted on others. Hurts and sufferings I made others feel, but I felt it a lot stronger. I wanted to cry aloud and ask forgiveness.”
I talked to Melisa, her partner, in a cafeteria. She recounted that before her NDE, Clara was a woman of volatile temperament, loudly opinionated, tolerating no disagreement. She was hot-tempered, her anger dangerous. She’d throw things, and was once the subject of a public disturbance complaint, barking like a mad dog at policemen responding to the emergency call.
Melisa never saw Clara’s gentle side until after her NDE. She’s puzzled but grateful Clara’s now an understanding person, gentle with words, kind. She speaks of love and peace, as if she’s acquired some insight she brought back to her new life. She’s determined to live a new life of peace and love.
I’ve been keeping in touch with Clara and Melisa. They now run a shelter and adoption center for abandoned, stray and senior dogs and cats, the first of its kind in Cebu City. I was invited to Clara’s 56th birthday celebration. A simple party, with veterinarians and volunteers present. Animals that haven’t found a forever home were her honored guests.
*
Miguel is the son of Cebu City’s richest man. His relatives are prominent in Sugbo’s political scenes. Prior to his life-threatening ordeal he was known as the family’s proverbial black sheep, notorious for his “roaring” sports cars and his reckless, death-defying driving. Rumors of cocaine addiction were widespread, most of the women seen with him having had scandalous reputations, local paparazzi hounding him wherever he went, because he’s married and has three children. I presumed his family would never agree to let me in his hospital room, let alone ask him questions as he convalesced. I wrote a letter explaining my purpose, mentioning the book I planned to write, with the hope of opening more public discussions on the NDE phenomenon, which might help de-stigmatizing it. I mentioned in my letter my belief that overcoming the fear of death could change lives. To my surprise his father, known for generosity, phoned me, giving me permission to ask his son questions in his hospital room.
Miguel welcomed my questions. He’s become an open-hearted because of his NDE, which was different - one of the only three instances I’ve documented to describe a hellish experience. The car crash had disfigured his face, wounds still prominent on his bandaged face when I visited. His left arm and left leg were bandaged, plaster cast. He had a hard time speaking, but gave the impression he wanted to have his story included in my book. He described following the ambulance, from the crash site to the emergency room, as a disembodied conscious awareness. Cacophonies were “sharp and deafening,” he said. He remembered sunlight “tripled in intensity,” making him squint. Like most of the others, his story includes the view from the ceiling, from where he saw his bloody body and heard every sound of the chaotic scene. He described the two doctors and nurses who tried to save his life.
“And then I was in a place so dark. I smelled something foul, like a sewer in summer. I panicked. The place became hell. It was burning, fire eating my body. It was so painful. There were millions of naked screaming people, and I knew they were lawbreakers. They clawed at each other, they clawed for the sky, clawed to be out of the place of incredible suffering. The place and the bodies were red and black, the only colors, red and black. I then saw each moment of my life flash in front of me like I was in some sort of hologram, my life from childhood until the car crash. I felt intensely the pain I caused other, hurts I inflicted. When I saw my wife and three kids I was remorseful, shocked at how cruel I was to others, my friends and loved ones, my wife, my three children, my mistresses. Then I heard the voice, loud and deep, like granddad’s voice, asking if I’m willing to change. When I felt the willingness to be a better person a strong force pulled and zoomed me back to my body.”
Miguel’s story is unique. Unlike most of the cases, the dark tunnel, at the end of which the small light grows, isn’t part of his NDE. I rephrased the same question several times, but he shook his head all the time. He said he didn’t experience the growing light at the tunnel’s end, which most of the others said would become a supernatural being - God, Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, Mama Mary, an angel or a divine being of peace and love. His near-death experience doesn’t include departed loved ones coming to meet him. In the two other NDEs with hellish experiences, dead relatives are described to also suffer in what the three of them called hell.
Months after he left the hospital Miguel took over managing his father’s philanthropic work. He sold his fleet of sports cars and gave the money to a fund for helping car crash victims who couldn’t afford treatment. I’ve been keeping in touch with him, attending the private ceremony when he renewed his marriage vows to his wife. She was pleasantly surprise, grateful for the good turn her husband’s life took after surviving the car crash.
*
My interest in the Near Death Experience goes back to an afternoon years ago when I asked myself if death is painful. Time was generous, I had moments in otherworlds of fiction and poetry, which I read voraciously. I wondered, as if the question fell from the ceiling one midafternoon while I read Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, why we’re terrified of death. My instinct meandered, like it always does, along pathways of doubt. I insisted to myself that death is painful. No matter how creative I got in my own self-interrogation, the answer was always the same - death is painful. I told myself we are afraid of death because the fear is part of our biological survival tools. Some processes are painful, as cancer shows. But I was concerned about the moment when cardiopulmonary and brain functions stop irreversibly. Is the moment that leads medical professionals to declare death painful? I wanted to believe the opposite is true, the moment of death isn’t painful, or death is a vacuum therefore can’t accommodate pain. I wasn’t inclined to believe that fear of death is ultimately about our fear of end-stage processes of biological functions.
My self-study branched into consciousness studies, neurology and neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry, biology and anatomy, medicine and alternative healing, quantum mechanics and sacred texts. Such obsessive tunneling through intellectual mazes brought me weariness. I had spent copious times examining online articles, viewing YouTube videos, reverse-engineering and extrapolating into intuitive insight because of the lack of formal scientific training.
One afternoon I had the strong impulse to ask Dr. Gregorio Lazaro, one of my psychology professors, for assistance. I had noticed his fondness for my answers to his questions in class. We developed a teacher-apprentice friendship, meeting at cafes and coffee houses with three others of his students - Armand, Victoria and Joanne. He called the five of us “a discussion group,” which provoked my heartfelt laughter. Our conversations touched topics involving the mind and its processes. I noticed our professor’s infinite patience suggesting a depth of erudition. He was a thin man, his posture slightly stooped, making me wonder about early signs of Parkinson’s disease. I imagined his tubercular chest in his signature long-sleeve polo shirt that seemed a bit large for him. He wore a smile that attracted his students to his formidable intellect. He spoke like a poet. I seemed always missing something from his mastery of words left unspoken. He shaped me into an attentive hearer. He taught me more about poetry than any of my literature professors.
He was one of the directors of the biggest hospital in Cebu City, which has branches all over the Island of Sugbo and in Central and Eastern Visayas. I watched him interviewed on T.V several times. One time he humored the talk show host with an impromptu psychological profile so incisive the police was said to have picked up his leads in solving the serial murders that terrorized Manila for a year and a half. He functioned as the hospital’s spokesperson. His approachable demeanor made my initial quest for answers manageable.
To my dismay he was no longer one of the hospital’s directors. He isn’t listed in the phone book. Either he has no landline phone, or he doesn’t want unexpected phone calls or visits. I was grateful the hospital supplied his home address. I thought he must be in his late seventies, imagining infirmities on my way to his home on Beverly Hills. Ten minutes after talking to a maidservant on the other side of the peephole, the gate’s door opened.
Dr. Lazaro lives comfortably without the trappings of opulence. The garden in his property made me think of minimalist art and poetry. Orchids had flowered yellows and violets. His favorite plant seemed the hibiscus, several of the trimmed trees looking like eggs propped with a stick. A grotto of Our Lady of Fatima at the far end of the artificial landscape was impossible to miss. Square cobblestone slabs sat in trimmed grass. I counted seven of the granite squares arcing the way towards the mahogany door.
A lady possibly in her sixties, with salt and pepper shoulder-length hair, led me to the living room. A dozen paces on the marble floor and I saw Dr. Lazaro, seated in a wheelchair. The floral smell without flowers made me remember Dr. Lazaro’s comment about “the moral dishonesty of putting flowers in a vase.”
He smiled, but the nasal cannula made it look painful. The huge oxygen tank beside him glared with green. I extended my hand, promptly withdrawing my handshake when the difficulty with which he tried his best to be welcoming made me feel my smile wry.
Sitting on the long, white sofa with diamond-patterned throw pillows in gray, I got to the point of my visit, recounting in as few words possible the recent weeks of my self-study of human consciousness, which that moment was anchored in the NDE. I’m grateful he gave me a letter - which he dictated and the lady wrote down and later encoded and printed out - that gave me permission to continue my research in the hospitals, giving me access to patients if they and their relatives approved.
*
A mysterious case involves a five-year-old girl named Jamaica, who survived heavy rains and flood that brought her body from the town of her birth to the next southern town. A couple of farmers, trying to save their carabao from waters still surging after the typhoon left the Philippine Area of Responsibility, found her on the riverbank. Red Cross medics thought she was dead. The lady volunteer said that halfway through zipping the body bag in the ambulance, Jamaica opened her eyes and mouth as though she were shocked, taking a deep breath that pushed her midsection up. They rushed her to the hospital in the next town northward. Days later she was transferred to the hospital in Cebu City, enjoying the financial support of one who remains anonymous to this day.
Miguel helped me secure permission to see her. I waited till her doctors gave the permission for her to be transferred to a private room. I talked to her parents, explaining my research and the book I hoped to write. They were ordinary townsfolk, her father a fruit vendor, her mother staying home taking care of basic needs. Jamaica has two siblings, an elder brother and younger sister. I told her parents I wanted to find out if she experienced something out of the ordinary while unconscious. I’d read numerous articles, and viewed countless videos, online about children having NDEs. I nursed my own expectations, but I’d trained myself to always have an open mind.
Jamaica had a sunny smile. No doubt she had a near death experience. She repeated classic details, the dark tunnel and light, a being meeting her halfway that she called an angel, her happy surprise seeing her departed puppy, and the usual colors pulsing with life. She turned to her parents, pointing at them and saying they’re not her real parents. Her father laughed and her mother smiled, embarrassed. They looked stunned as she told an incredible story.
She revealed the names of, she said, her real parents. They live in Cebu City, her father a pediatrician, her mother a high school principal. She mentioned the address of the clinic, the school’s name. She described their house, her mother’s shelves of books, her real father’s gray SUV. I wrote down details furiously, asking her several times to repeat her descriptions. According to her, she died six years earlier, a car “that roared” slamming her against a tree. The police never found the driver and the car. She showed the scar on the side of her neck, saying that something woody pierced through - the last thing she remembered before she died. I inspected it and asked her parents about the keloidal scar. Her mother said it looked like a birthmark when she was a baby, till it started growing when she was two into “the shiny thing.” Jamaica’s father said they thought it wouldn’t stop growing, till it did when she was four. Now it looked like a shiny brown tamarind attached to her neck. Jamaica said she could lead us to her real parents’ house. She added she could play the piano “like an expert.” Her parents laughed, saying she never sat in front of a piano let alone touch one.
I was so excited when I found the clinic, its glass door with the pediatrician’s name. I found the school, and though it was nightfall I found two janitors who confirmed the principal’s name and her job. I knew what I’d find in the address the girl provided - her previous parents’ house as she described its facade, the starapple tree in front of its wall next to the gate, the eatery close by, the homeless chihuahua she said was her friend that was still alive six years after her death.
I had a sleepless night scouring the internet, discovering a wealth of scientific papers, articles and YouTube videos about reincarnation. I never anticipated my self-study branching into reincarnation studies. The reincarnation phenomenon meriting scientific studies involves children almost exclusively.
Days before her doctors gave Jamaica the permission to return home, I contacted Miguel, asking if he could provide funding for a DNA paternity test. Miguel was willing to provide the money, but I was clueless how to approach the pediatrician with the incredible story, let alone convince him to allow swabs of his buccal cells. But the most important consideration was whether my eagerness would tear a family apart or keep it intact. Jamaica said she loves her current parents more than her previous parents, so I let the issue rest.
I found a way to make her sit in front of a piano and to my astonishment, she played like a child prodigy, a virtuoso.
*
I wondered if a mechanism holds death’s processes together in a predetermined pathway, most likely still neural, sensual experiences still anchored in materiality or biology. I read up on brain functions, on the neural pathway of vision, how the visual cortex processes photons and recreates images the brain allows us to see. I divided into manageable study subjects the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, ascertaining by intuition or subconscious deduction (which I’ve learned to feel as also an emotional construct) how the brain follows or veers, to avoid sensory overload, in filtering and processing information.
There seems no biological or neural basis to any explanation why colors in an NDE event are exponentially enhanced visually. It’s easier to believe the pineal gland does drip, according to a lot of public speculative deductions, dimethyltryptamine at the transitional cusp - the split second before the brain shuts down itself and the heart. A lot of online articles described DMT a “gateway drug.” This endogenous tryptamine alkaloid occurs in large quantities in the cerebrospinal fluid, for instance. It’s not clear where in the body this substance Dr. Rick Strassman calls “the spirit molecule” is produced. The lung is one suspect. Since endogenous DMT binds to the sigma-1 receptor, present all over the body and plays a major role in prolonging cell life when oxygen is low, my extrapolation is that the body floods itself with DMT in the event of, say, a stroke or cardiac arrest, or during a major stressful event like a life-threatening accident that induces severe shock. It’s a viable explanation for the mystical experience. My growing belief in the afterlife predisposed me to favor conjecture as fulcrum for more research. Believe first, and then find the evidence. Without the proverbial laboratory, I was left with common sense, instinct and the intuition I keep honing, to formulate my own conclusions. I reminded myself that as a skeptic my aim is to believe.
*
A strange case involves a twenty-two year old man born blind. I found him in a hospital in a southern town. His name is Esteban. The parish church has taken him in as one of its dormitory residents. For free board and lodging, promised to him for life, he works as candlemaker, and during summer as one of the rattan bag weavers in a program partly funding the church’s outreach activities. According to his elder brother he slipped off the railings, from the dormitory’s fourth floor, while filling the clothesline with newly washed clothes. The resident doctor said he hit his head on the marble landing. It took long for the ambulance to arrive, and he had lost a lot of blood. His blood pressure had plummeted to dangerous levels. They thought he was dead. Twenty-seven minutes later he “literally rose back to life.”
Esteban had been out the intensive care, his head bandaged with a smudge of faint-colored blood. He recounted his NDE in a semi-private room. Amazing how a man blind from birth could narrate such a visually lively account. He described the emergency room he saw from his disembodied position on the ceiling, the heart specialist taking off his wedding band before taking over the resuscitation procedures, which I’d confirm to be accurate. The ways he described landscapes of his experience, the trees, birds, prairies, savannahs, and the dead father he never knew coming to meet him with a walking cane - gave a strong impression he not only saw as a blind man but saw everything not for the first time, although he was born blind. How could he have described “mountains,” “hills” and “shorelines,” with those words supposed to encapsulate prior visual experience? His description of leaves bore distinctions of shape, “like eyes”(lanceolate), “like feathers on both sides of the stem” (pinnate) and “like almonds”(obovate). His account of the his life from his toddler years to the moment of his accident was so detailed with heightened visual impressions as if he were never blind. His case strengthened my resolve to study reincarnation deeply.
I confirmed his father had left him, his brother and their mother when he was little. Their mother died more than a decade later. His elder brother had married and sired six children. It was difficult for him to live with them. He was lucky the parish priest is a blood relative. People I asked were unanimous Esteban could never have known his father walked with a cane in his final two years.
*
It’s likelier that pain is absent during the moment of death. The brain has a mechanism of shutting itself, stopping the heart, at the edge of spiritual transition, and severe shock seems the catalyst. This is perhaps why a person shot in a part of the chest, but which doesn’t inflict fatal damage to an organ like the lungs, dies instantly, before blood loss. Perhaps why a person dies seconds after a single stab wound to the stomach, why a person dies from blunt force trauma without the blow inflicting damage to the brain. Perhaps why people in a car or helicopter crash have been documented to die without fatal wounds. Sudden severe shock from trauma or stress event appears to make the brain shut itself and the heart down. I’m still not sure whether the mechanism has a biological basis or is in fact incorporeal, otherworldly.
My first question has been evolving, and has entered the afterlife dimension. I want to know if death is cessation or transition. This branching self-study always returns to the philosophical question, which makes it inevitable for me to scour ancient spiritual and religious texts. These ancient texts of wisdom are unanimous the afterlife is real. Whether paradisal or hellish, or both existing separately, the ancients agree death is transitional.
My research has brought significant changes to my life, my worldview. The deeper I delve into reincarnation studies the more I don’t want to live again. Karma has become an inevitable subject of great interest - for proper understanding contextually and a priori. I believe I should be doing what I understand is right all the time. I should no longer hurt others, unless I conclude it’s necessary, but which should never go beyond speech or the verbal reprimand. The life panorama that attends the NDE makes it clear I will suffer in far greater intensities the sufferings I cause others. My greatest fear is if I live again after my death, because of the wrongs I committed in the previous life. I’m starting to believe a time discrepancy existing between reality and subjective experience - that even though to outside observers like doctors and nurses the survivor is unconscious for, say, only thirty minutes, from the point of view of the person experiencing an NDE it could last thousands of years. What if the NDE is hellish? What if the person with the hellish experience doesn’t complete the NDE and return to life?
I wondered if it would be right if I induced my own NDE. God knows I’d give up this body, expend this existence, to prove a theory that has obsessed me more than anything my whole life. This question makes me constantly examine my health, the status of my body and its functions, not so much for maintaining or improving health as to figure out what malady might let me go through the same experiences I document for the book I’m writing. I’m glad and grateful I don’t have to reach that interlude of existence and return a kind, understanding, caring, compassionate, loving and peace-loving person. I believe I’m already that person, because of my deep research and interactions with life’s most profound questions. Returning from the cusp of death a good or better person is the common factor that holds together the other aspects of a near-death experience. Until I’m sure I’ll experience an NDE, a pleasant paradisal and not a hellish one, from which I’ll return to enrich my account in the book I’m writing, I’ve stopped inducing my own cardiac event for an NDE.
*
My research has again opened a new dimension of interest. Two weeks ago Miguel asked me to contact all the subjects of my self-study. He wanted them to attend his birthday party yesterday. He wanted to know them intimately, form a peer group. Two of his foundation employees assisted me, and we contacted eighteen NDE experiencers included in my study. Sixteen confirmed attendance.
We had to meet several of them at north-bound and south-bound bus terminals. With one of Miguel’s drivers, I fetched Jamaica and her parents. She was full of excitement and curiosity, as if she saw the city and its lights with new eyes. When the car passed through the gate of Miguel’s palatial home at Maria Luisa Estate Park, she wondered aloud at the opulence and extravagance of wealth in front of her eyes.
But when Miguel met us in the expansive foyer, extending his hand to her parents, his grayish Shih Tzu with ribboned hair walking beside him, Jamaica screamed as if she were simultaneously irate and horrified, looking at Miguel with sharp eyes. She pushed her head a few inches forward as she screamed, as if she were a cornered wounded beast. She looked like she was about to devour Miguel. I was stunned speechless as her scream melted into a loud cry, as she touched the keloidal scar on her neck.
She then she lunged at Miguel, almost crashing to the marble floor at Miguel’s sidestep. The distressed dog barked and barked as it fled like a crazed little creature. Jamaica gathered herself and raced after the Shih Tzu, stumbling.
She at last caught it with both hands, sinking her teeth in the frightened dog’s neck, the Shih Tzu screaming.
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in The Cape Rock, Rural Fiction Magazine and Woodcrest Magazine, and have appeared in hundreds of magazines including Otoliths, Chiron Review, The Lyric, Invisible City, Mobius: Journal of Social Change, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The Anglican Theological Review, and nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars prizes. His poetry collections include, Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems, (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs, and three other beloved dogs who have passed on beyond the rainbow bridge. He loves all animals.
Afterlife
Clara’s case is a classic near-death experience. A nurse, she’d been working for two decades in the physical therapy department. One afternoon a stinging rheumatic pain on her right shoulder joint progressed into full blown cardiac event. She blamed the constant hoisting of patients by the armpits to help them navigate parallel bars and relearn walking. She recalled how pain made her head feel hollow, her body cold, forehead moist, saltiness stinging her eyes. She was overweight, diabetic and hypertensive, chest pain she described as “thick” making her collapse in the nurses’ station. She described an awareness that she’s on the emergency room’s ceiling, looking down at her body, as doctors and nurses tried to revive her. She could hear every word. She saw with such clarity “colors pulsing with life.”
“A strong force pulled me out of the room. I floated over the parking lot. There’s a dark tunnel, small light growing from its end. Out of the tunnel my parents, my younger sister, my father’s brother and two of my cousins, my two cats, all dead, they came to meet me. They welcomed me to the place…heavenly…a beautiful mist…people glowed. Oh the peacefulness, feelings of love. Sunlight so peaceful. Breathing sounds of a distant sea. I didn’t want to return to my body, to my old life. But I had to return. My life flashed before me, from when I was a toddler learning to walk, to the afternoon of my cardiac arrest. I felt the wrongs I inflicted on others. Hurts and sufferings I made others feel, but I felt it a lot stronger. I wanted to cry aloud and ask forgiveness.”
I talked to Melisa, her partner, in a cafeteria. She recounted that before her NDE, Clara was a woman of volatile temperament, loudly opinionated, tolerating no disagreement. She was hot-tempered, her anger dangerous. She’d throw things, and was once the subject of a public disturbance complaint, barking like a mad dog at policemen responding to the emergency call.
Melisa never saw Clara’s gentle side until after her NDE. She’s puzzled but grateful Clara’s now an understanding person, gentle with words, kind. She speaks of love and peace, as if she’s acquired some insight she brought back to her new life. She’s determined to live a new life of peace and love.
I’ve been keeping in touch with Clara and Melisa. They now run a shelter and adoption center for abandoned, stray and senior dogs and cats, the first of its kind in Cebu City. I was invited to Clara’s 56th birthday celebration. A simple party, with veterinarians and volunteers present. Animals that haven’t found a forever home were her honored guests.
*
Miguel is the son of Cebu City’s richest man. His relatives are prominent in Sugbo’s political scenes. Prior to his life-threatening ordeal he was known as the family’s proverbial black sheep, notorious for his “roaring” sports cars and his reckless, death-defying driving. Rumors of cocaine addiction were widespread, most of the women seen with him having had scandalous reputations, local paparazzi hounding him wherever he went, because he’s married and has three children. I presumed his family would never agree to let me in his hospital room, let alone ask him questions as he convalesced. I wrote a letter explaining my purpose, mentioning the book I planned to write, with the hope of opening more public discussions on the NDE phenomenon, which might help de-stigmatizing it. I mentioned in my letter my belief that overcoming the fear of death could change lives. To my surprise his father, known for generosity, phoned me, giving me permission to ask his son questions in his hospital room.
Miguel welcomed my questions. He’s become an open-hearted because of his NDE, which was different - one of the only three instances I’ve documented to describe a hellish experience. The car crash had disfigured his face, wounds still prominent on his bandaged face when I visited. His left arm and left leg were bandaged, plaster cast. He had a hard time speaking, but gave the impression he wanted to have his story included in my book. He described following the ambulance, from the crash site to the emergency room, as a disembodied conscious awareness. Cacophonies were “sharp and deafening,” he said. He remembered sunlight “tripled in intensity,” making him squint. Like most of the others, his story includes the view from the ceiling, from where he saw his bloody body and heard every sound of the chaotic scene. He described the two doctors and nurses who tried to save his life.
“And then I was in a place so dark. I smelled something foul, like a sewer in summer. I panicked. The place became hell. It was burning, fire eating my body. It was so painful. There were millions of naked screaming people, and I knew they were lawbreakers. They clawed at each other, they clawed for the sky, clawed to be out of the place of incredible suffering. The place and the bodies were red and black, the only colors, red and black. I then saw each moment of my life flash in front of me like I was in some sort of hologram, my life from childhood until the car crash. I felt intensely the pain I caused other, hurts I inflicted. When I saw my wife and three kids I was remorseful, shocked at how cruel I was to others, my friends and loved ones, my wife, my three children, my mistresses. Then I heard the voice, loud and deep, like granddad’s voice, asking if I’m willing to change. When I felt the willingness to be a better person a strong force pulled and zoomed me back to my body.”
Miguel’s story is unique. Unlike most of the cases, the dark tunnel, at the end of which the small light grows, isn’t part of his NDE. I rephrased the same question several times, but he shook his head all the time. He said he didn’t experience the growing light at the tunnel’s end, which most of the others said would become a supernatural being - God, Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, Mama Mary, an angel or a divine being of peace and love. His near-death experience doesn’t include departed loved ones coming to meet him. In the two other NDEs with hellish experiences, dead relatives are described to also suffer in what the three of them called hell.
Months after he left the hospital Miguel took over managing his father’s philanthropic work. He sold his fleet of sports cars and gave the money to a fund for helping car crash victims who couldn’t afford treatment. I’ve been keeping in touch with him, attending the private ceremony when he renewed his marriage vows to his wife. She was pleasantly surprise, grateful for the good turn her husband’s life took after surviving the car crash.
*
My interest in the Near Death Experience goes back to an afternoon years ago when I asked myself if death is painful. Time was generous, I had moments in otherworlds of fiction and poetry, which I read voraciously. I wondered, as if the question fell from the ceiling one midafternoon while I read Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, why we’re terrified of death. My instinct meandered, like it always does, along pathways of doubt. I insisted to myself that death is painful. No matter how creative I got in my own self-interrogation, the answer was always the same - death is painful. I told myself we are afraid of death because the fear is part of our biological survival tools. Some processes are painful, as cancer shows. But I was concerned about the moment when cardiopulmonary and brain functions stop irreversibly. Is the moment that leads medical professionals to declare death painful? I wanted to believe the opposite is true, the moment of death isn’t painful, or death is a vacuum therefore can’t accommodate pain. I wasn’t inclined to believe that fear of death is ultimately about our fear of end-stage processes of biological functions.
My self-study branched into consciousness studies, neurology and neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry, biology and anatomy, medicine and alternative healing, quantum mechanics and sacred texts. Such obsessive tunneling through intellectual mazes brought me weariness. I had spent copious times examining online articles, viewing YouTube videos, reverse-engineering and extrapolating into intuitive insight because of the lack of formal scientific training.
One afternoon I had the strong impulse to ask Dr. Gregorio Lazaro, one of my psychology professors, for assistance. I had noticed his fondness for my answers to his questions in class. We developed a teacher-apprentice friendship, meeting at cafes and coffee houses with three others of his students - Armand, Victoria and Joanne. He called the five of us “a discussion group,” which provoked my heartfelt laughter. Our conversations touched topics involving the mind and its processes. I noticed our professor’s infinite patience suggesting a depth of erudition. He was a thin man, his posture slightly stooped, making me wonder about early signs of Parkinson’s disease. I imagined his tubercular chest in his signature long-sleeve polo shirt that seemed a bit large for him. He wore a smile that attracted his students to his formidable intellect. He spoke like a poet. I seemed always missing something from his mastery of words left unspoken. He shaped me into an attentive hearer. He taught me more about poetry than any of my literature professors.
He was one of the directors of the biggest hospital in Cebu City, which has branches all over the Island of Sugbo and in Central and Eastern Visayas. I watched him interviewed on T.V several times. One time he humored the talk show host with an impromptu psychological profile so incisive the police was said to have picked up his leads in solving the serial murders that terrorized Manila for a year and a half. He functioned as the hospital’s spokesperson. His approachable demeanor made my initial quest for answers manageable.
To my dismay he was no longer one of the hospital’s directors. He isn’t listed in the phone book. Either he has no landline phone, or he doesn’t want unexpected phone calls or visits. I was grateful the hospital supplied his home address. I thought he must be in his late seventies, imagining infirmities on my way to his home on Beverly Hills. Ten minutes after talking to a maidservant on the other side of the peephole, the gate’s door opened.
Dr. Lazaro lives comfortably without the trappings of opulence. The garden in his property made me think of minimalist art and poetry. Orchids had flowered yellows and violets. His favorite plant seemed the hibiscus, several of the trimmed trees looking like eggs propped with a stick. A grotto of Our Lady of Fatima at the far end of the artificial landscape was impossible to miss. Square cobblestone slabs sat in trimmed grass. I counted seven of the granite squares arcing the way towards the mahogany door.
A lady possibly in her sixties, with salt and pepper shoulder-length hair, led me to the living room. A dozen paces on the marble floor and I saw Dr. Lazaro, seated in a wheelchair. The floral smell without flowers made me remember Dr. Lazaro’s comment about “the moral dishonesty of putting flowers in a vase.”
He smiled, but the nasal cannula made it look painful. The huge oxygen tank beside him glared with green. I extended my hand, promptly withdrawing my handshake when the difficulty with which he tried his best to be welcoming made me feel my smile wry.
Sitting on the long, white sofa with diamond-patterned throw pillows in gray, I got to the point of my visit, recounting in as few words possible the recent weeks of my self-study of human consciousness, which that moment was anchored in the NDE. I’m grateful he gave me a letter - which he dictated and the lady wrote down and later encoded and printed out - that gave me permission to continue my research in the hospitals, giving me access to patients if they and their relatives approved.
*
A mysterious case involves a five-year-old girl named Jamaica, who survived heavy rains and flood that brought her body from the town of her birth to the next southern town. A couple of farmers, trying to save their carabao from waters still surging after the typhoon left the Philippine Area of Responsibility, found her on the riverbank. Red Cross medics thought she was dead. The lady volunteer said that halfway through zipping the body bag in the ambulance, Jamaica opened her eyes and mouth as though she were shocked, taking a deep breath that pushed her midsection up. They rushed her to the hospital in the next town northward. Days later she was transferred to the hospital in Cebu City, enjoying the financial support of one who remains anonymous to this day.
Miguel helped me secure permission to see her. I waited till her doctors gave the permission for her to be transferred to a private room. I talked to her parents, explaining my research and the book I hoped to write. They were ordinary townsfolk, her father a fruit vendor, her mother staying home taking care of basic needs. Jamaica has two siblings, an elder brother and younger sister. I told her parents I wanted to find out if she experienced something out of the ordinary while unconscious. I’d read numerous articles, and viewed countless videos, online about children having NDEs. I nursed my own expectations, but I’d trained myself to always have an open mind.
Jamaica had a sunny smile. No doubt she had a near death experience. She repeated classic details, the dark tunnel and light, a being meeting her halfway that she called an angel, her happy surprise seeing her departed puppy, and the usual colors pulsing with life. She turned to her parents, pointing at them and saying they’re not her real parents. Her father laughed and her mother smiled, embarrassed. They looked stunned as she told an incredible story.
She revealed the names of, she said, her real parents. They live in Cebu City, her father a pediatrician, her mother a high school principal. She mentioned the address of the clinic, the school’s name. She described their house, her mother’s shelves of books, her real father’s gray SUV. I wrote down details furiously, asking her several times to repeat her descriptions. According to her, she died six years earlier, a car “that roared” slamming her against a tree. The police never found the driver and the car. She showed the scar on the side of her neck, saying that something woody pierced through - the last thing she remembered before she died. I inspected it and asked her parents about the keloidal scar. Her mother said it looked like a birthmark when she was a baby, till it started growing when she was two into “the shiny thing.” Jamaica’s father said they thought it wouldn’t stop growing, till it did when she was four. Now it looked like a shiny brown tamarind attached to her neck. Jamaica said she could lead us to her real parents’ house. She added she could play the piano “like an expert.” Her parents laughed, saying she never sat in front of a piano let alone touch one.
I was so excited when I found the clinic, its glass door with the pediatrician’s name. I found the school, and though it was nightfall I found two janitors who confirmed the principal’s name and her job. I knew what I’d find in the address the girl provided - her previous parents’ house as she described its facade, the starapple tree in front of its wall next to the gate, the eatery close by, the homeless chihuahua she said was her friend that was still alive six years after her death.
I had a sleepless night scouring the internet, discovering a wealth of scientific papers, articles and YouTube videos about reincarnation. I never anticipated my self-study branching into reincarnation studies. The reincarnation phenomenon meriting scientific studies involves children almost exclusively.
Days before her doctors gave Jamaica the permission to return home, I contacted Miguel, asking if he could provide funding for a DNA paternity test. Miguel was willing to provide the money, but I was clueless how to approach the pediatrician with the incredible story, let alone convince him to allow swabs of his buccal cells. But the most important consideration was whether my eagerness would tear a family apart or keep it intact. Jamaica said she loves her current parents more than her previous parents, so I let the issue rest.
I found a way to make her sit in front of a piano and to my astonishment, she played like a child prodigy, a virtuoso.
*
I wondered if a mechanism holds death’s processes together in a predetermined pathway, most likely still neural, sensual experiences still anchored in materiality or biology. I read up on brain functions, on the neural pathway of vision, how the visual cortex processes photons and recreates images the brain allows us to see. I divided into manageable study subjects the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, ascertaining by intuition or subconscious deduction (which I’ve learned to feel as also an emotional construct) how the brain follows or veers, to avoid sensory overload, in filtering and processing information.
There seems no biological or neural basis to any explanation why colors in an NDE event are exponentially enhanced visually. It’s easier to believe the pineal gland does drip, according to a lot of public speculative deductions, dimethyltryptamine at the transitional cusp - the split second before the brain shuts down itself and the heart. A lot of online articles described DMT a “gateway drug.” This endogenous tryptamine alkaloid occurs in large quantities in the cerebrospinal fluid, for instance. It’s not clear where in the body this substance Dr. Rick Strassman calls “the spirit molecule” is produced. The lung is one suspect. Since endogenous DMT binds to the sigma-1 receptor, present all over the body and plays a major role in prolonging cell life when oxygen is low, my extrapolation is that the body floods itself with DMT in the event of, say, a stroke or cardiac arrest, or during a major stressful event like a life-threatening accident that induces severe shock. It’s a viable explanation for the mystical experience. My growing belief in the afterlife predisposed me to favor conjecture as fulcrum for more research. Believe first, and then find the evidence. Without the proverbial laboratory, I was left with common sense, instinct and the intuition I keep honing, to formulate my own conclusions. I reminded myself that as a skeptic my aim is to believe.
*
A strange case involves a twenty-two year old man born blind. I found him in a hospital in a southern town. His name is Esteban. The parish church has taken him in as one of its dormitory residents. For free board and lodging, promised to him for life, he works as candlemaker, and during summer as one of the rattan bag weavers in a program partly funding the church’s outreach activities. According to his elder brother he slipped off the railings, from the dormitory’s fourth floor, while filling the clothesline with newly washed clothes. The resident doctor said he hit his head on the marble landing. It took long for the ambulance to arrive, and he had lost a lot of blood. His blood pressure had plummeted to dangerous levels. They thought he was dead. Twenty-seven minutes later he “literally rose back to life.”
Esteban had been out the intensive care, his head bandaged with a smudge of faint-colored blood. He recounted his NDE in a semi-private room. Amazing how a man blind from birth could narrate such a visually lively account. He described the emergency room he saw from his disembodied position on the ceiling, the heart specialist taking off his wedding band before taking over the resuscitation procedures, which I’d confirm to be accurate. The ways he described landscapes of his experience, the trees, birds, prairies, savannahs, and the dead father he never knew coming to meet him with a walking cane - gave a strong impression he not only saw as a blind man but saw everything not for the first time, although he was born blind. How could he have described “mountains,” “hills” and “shorelines,” with those words supposed to encapsulate prior visual experience? His description of leaves bore distinctions of shape, “like eyes”(lanceolate), “like feathers on both sides of the stem” (pinnate) and “like almonds”(obovate). His account of the his life from his toddler years to the moment of his accident was so detailed with heightened visual impressions as if he were never blind. His case strengthened my resolve to study reincarnation deeply.
I confirmed his father had left him, his brother and their mother when he was little. Their mother died more than a decade later. His elder brother had married and sired six children. It was difficult for him to live with them. He was lucky the parish priest is a blood relative. People I asked were unanimous Esteban could never have known his father walked with a cane in his final two years.
*
It’s likelier that pain is absent during the moment of death. The brain has a mechanism of shutting itself, stopping the heart, at the edge of spiritual transition, and severe shock seems the catalyst. This is perhaps why a person shot in a part of the chest, but which doesn’t inflict fatal damage to an organ like the lungs, dies instantly, before blood loss. Perhaps why a person dies seconds after a single stab wound to the stomach, why a person dies from blunt force trauma without the blow inflicting damage to the brain. Perhaps why people in a car or helicopter crash have been documented to die without fatal wounds. Sudden severe shock from trauma or stress event appears to make the brain shut itself and the heart down. I’m still not sure whether the mechanism has a biological basis or is in fact incorporeal, otherworldly.
My first question has been evolving, and has entered the afterlife dimension. I want to know if death is cessation or transition. This branching self-study always returns to the philosophical question, which makes it inevitable for me to scour ancient spiritual and religious texts. These ancient texts of wisdom are unanimous the afterlife is real. Whether paradisal or hellish, or both existing separately, the ancients agree death is transitional.
My research has brought significant changes to my life, my worldview. The deeper I delve into reincarnation studies the more I don’t want to live again. Karma has become an inevitable subject of great interest - for proper understanding contextually and a priori. I believe I should be doing what I understand is right all the time. I should no longer hurt others, unless I conclude it’s necessary, but which should never go beyond speech or the verbal reprimand. The life panorama that attends the NDE makes it clear I will suffer in far greater intensities the sufferings I cause others. My greatest fear is if I live again after my death, because of the wrongs I committed in the previous life. I’m starting to believe a time discrepancy existing between reality and subjective experience - that even though to outside observers like doctors and nurses the survivor is unconscious for, say, only thirty minutes, from the point of view of the person experiencing an NDE it could last thousands of years. What if the NDE is hellish? What if the person with the hellish experience doesn’t complete the NDE and return to life?
I wondered if it would be right if I induced my own NDE. God knows I’d give up this body, expend this existence, to prove a theory that has obsessed me more than anything my whole life. This question makes me constantly examine my health, the status of my body and its functions, not so much for maintaining or improving health as to figure out what malady might let me go through the same experiences I document for the book I’m writing. I’m glad and grateful I don’t have to reach that interlude of existence and return a kind, understanding, caring, compassionate, loving and peace-loving person. I believe I’m already that person, because of my deep research and interactions with life’s most profound questions. Returning from the cusp of death a good or better person is the common factor that holds together the other aspects of a near-death experience. Until I’m sure I’ll experience an NDE, a pleasant paradisal and not a hellish one, from which I’ll return to enrich my account in the book I’m writing, I’ve stopped inducing my own cardiac event for an NDE.
*
My research has again opened a new dimension of interest. Two weeks ago Miguel asked me to contact all the subjects of my self-study. He wanted them to attend his birthday party yesterday. He wanted to know them intimately, form a peer group. Two of his foundation employees assisted me, and we contacted eighteen NDE experiencers included in my study. Sixteen confirmed attendance.
We had to meet several of them at north-bound and south-bound bus terminals. With one of Miguel’s drivers, I fetched Jamaica and her parents. She was full of excitement and curiosity, as if she saw the city and its lights with new eyes. When the car passed through the gate of Miguel’s palatial home at Maria Luisa Estate Park, she wondered aloud at the opulence and extravagance of wealth in front of her eyes.
But when Miguel met us in the expansive foyer, extending his hand to her parents, his grayish Shih Tzu with ribboned hair walking beside him, Jamaica screamed as if she were simultaneously irate and horrified, looking at Miguel with sharp eyes. She pushed her head a few inches forward as she screamed, as if she were a cornered wounded beast. She looked like she was about to devour Miguel. I was stunned speechless as her scream melted into a loud cry, as she touched the keloidal scar on her neck.
She then she lunged at Miguel, almost crashing to the marble floor at Miguel’s sidestep. The distressed dog barked and barked as it fled like a crazed little creature. Jamaica gathered herself and raced after the Shih Tzu, stumbling.
She at last caught it with both hands, sinking her teeth in the frightened dog’s neck, the Shih Tzu screaming.
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in The Cape Rock, Rural Fiction Magazine and Woodcrest Magazine, and have appeared in hundreds of magazines including Otoliths, Chiron Review, The Lyric, Invisible City, Mobius: Journal of Social Change, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The Anglican Theological Review, and nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars prizes. His poetry collections include, Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems, (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs, and three other beloved dogs who have passed on beyond the rainbow bridge. He loves all animals.
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