Elizabeth would like to thank the following people, without whom this book could not have been written:
I would like to thank my husband, Matt Krohn, for his love, patience, and belief in my ability to write this book. His editing skills are only surpassed by his husbanding skills. Matt amazes me every day with his power to provide just what I need, just when I need it. I will forever be grateful to him for his physical and emotional support as I slowly got my story down on paper at last. He is a calming and loving presence and is the best friend a person could have. I am a lucky wife indeed.
My children also were so very supportive of this project, and I could not have written my story without all of them being on board and encouraging me to finally tell the details of what happened on September 2, 1988, and in the years since. After all, so much of it is about them.
First, I owe a huge thank you to Jeremy Balkin for heroically running back out into the storm to save his little brother. Jeremy was a four-year-old hero in 1988 and has grown into such a fine man. He has been supportive of me and has nudged me to share the details of what happened that day as I wrote this book. He is a terrific dad, and it gives me tremendous pleasure to watch him in his role as a parent. My pride in Jeremy is enormous and well deserved.
I also owe many thanks to Andy and Shana Balkin for their unwavering support of my emotional ups and downs as I wrote this book. They are exemplary parents, and their children are especially fortunate to have them both as role models. I thank Andy especially for holding my hand when I was struck by lightning, and for being by my side ever since. He is a principled and caring man any mom would be proud to call her son, and I am especially proud to be his mom.
A tremendous thank you also goes to Mallory and Harrison Botwin for supporting me throughout this journey. I am very fortunate that they are a major part of my life. Special thanks to Mallory for giving me the honor of being her mom. I am grateful every day that I came back for the opportunity to raise such a spunky girl into such a sparkling woman. That opportunity has always been such a gift. Every time I look at her it makes me know I did something right. She makes me proud every day.
No one on earth has ever been gifted better, more loving, cuter, smarter, or sweeter grandchildren than I. Maxwell, Efrayim, Yehuda Moshe, Evelyn, Leo, and Lillie have brought so much sunshine and pleasure into my life, each in his or her own unique way. Their gorgeous glowing faces and big hugs helped support me throughout this project. In addition to my children, I love each and every one of these special grandchildren more than there are stars in the sky.
I would also like to thank my loving and supportive parents, Marianne and Larry Greenfield, for being exactly the parents I have always needed them to be. From the day I was born, they have seemed to know intuitively exactly how to respond to me in any given situation. Their support has always been unwavering, especially as I worked on this book. They are both such amazingly wonderful people who I am so proud and lucky to call Mom and Dad.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I will be forever grateful for the serendipitous occurrences that brought me together with Jeff Kripal in October of 2015. I am indebted to Jeff for his endless patience and for helping me to get my thirty-year-old story written in as dignified a manner as possible. I thank him for becoming not only my coauthor and my teacher, but also a close and trusted friend. My gratitude to Jeff is boundless.
Jeff would like to thank the following people:
First and foremost, I would like to thank Elizabeth for trusting me and for revealing so much of her soul in these pages. I was always deeply moved by her integrity and fierce honesty. We laughed a lot, it should be noted.
I would especially like to thank Anyang Anyang, Cyrus Wirls, and Stuart Nelson of the Institute for Spirituality and Health in the Texas Medical Center, all of whom played important roles in arranging the original event at which Elizabeth and I first met and spoke. My PhD student Timothy Grieve-Carlson also helped considerably with researching databases on plane crashes and earthquakes that might have corresponded to Elizabeth’s nightmares. All of this work did not finally make it into the book but may well form the basis of a future website on the same.
I would also like to thank all of my colleagues in the professional study of religion and my friends and coconspirators here in Houston, all of whom helped me in different ways think through these questions in various professional and private formats. In November of 2016, I invited Elizabeth and Matt to a special symposium called “Bodies of Light and Super Saints” at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in order to get the feedback of close colleagues in the humanities and sciences who study such events. We spoke about the book project to the Houston IONS (Institute of Noetic Science) group in January and co-taught a course on the book manuscript at the Houston Jung Center in the spring of 2017.
I have also lectured on this material at Duke University, to their Paranormal Working Group; Stanford University, to the departments of anthropology and religious studies; the University of California, Berkeley, for two courses on the philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness; the northeast regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion, as their plenary address; the 60th anniversary celebration of the Parapsychological Association; and a conference on Judaism and the Chabad movement in New York City. Michael Murphy of Esalen; Lydia Dugan of Houston; Sean Fitzpatrick of the Houston Jung Center; Priscilla Wald, Joseph Donahue, and David Morgan of Duke University; Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University; David Presti and Robert Sharf of the University of California, Berkeley; Diana Walsh Pasulka of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington; Annalisa Ventola of the Parapsychological Association; and Philip Wexler of the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society were my hosts for these specific events. Other key conversation partners, mostly via correspondence, were Cherylee Black (about her own negative NDE and other related phenomena); Jonathan Garb, David Halperin, Brian Ogren, and Elliot Wolfson (on the Jewish materials); and Lee Irwin (on the Native American traditions).
Finally, my reading of and correspondence with Eric Wargo were particularly important and especially formative with the precognitive materials. I just think Eric is brilliant. His “tesseract” model of the brain and his glass-block universe could revolutionize not only the study of precognitive prodigies like Elizabeth, but neuroscience, physics, evolutionary biology, psychology, history, the humanities, and the social sciences in the process. I am not exaggerating. But that must wait for another time and another book, both, I hope, shimmering already somewhere down the glass-block universe.