Chapter One

I’ve often heard that a close brush with death can cause your life to flash before your eyes in an instant. There was a time I didn’t believe it, because how could all the experiences of a person’s life possibly replay in his or her mind in such a short interval? Wouldn’t your brain be occupied by the task of finding a way to save yourself?

Some say that such a flashback is brought on by a rush of adrenaline, which causes the brain to function at hyper speed. Have you ever been in a situation of shock and panic, where the disaster appears to occur in slow motion before your eyes, yet you can do nothing about it? When your body simply cannot keep up with the velocity of your perceptions?

In other situations, people have been known to take action with incredible strength and speed—lifting a car, for instance, to save a crushed child. How can that possibly occur? Is adrenaline truly that powerful?

Others theorize that the purpose is to help the person to access all his memories in order to find a way to save himself, or someone else. This seems logical to me, but who knows the true origins of such miracles?

All I can tell you is that I believe it is true. Life can flash before your eyes at the moment of impending death. I know it because I am one of those people who—while skirting death by a narrow margin—experienced a rush of adrenaline so potent that I glimpsed my entire lifetime, like slides flashing rapidly before my eyes. So who am I to doubt such a phenomenon?

What I fail to understand, however, is why I saw a life that was completely different from my own.