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Changed in a Flash

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

—Elie Wiesel

The most dramatic thing that ever happened to me is something I did not talk about for almost thirty years. Tell me, who would have believed a woman talking about how she died, left her body, went somewhere else, met and talked to God, and then came back to discover that she now had precognitive abilities? True, a few medical professionals and scholars had begun to study the “near-death experience,” as Raymond Moody coined the term in 1975, just thirteen years before my own. But it was still a new topic in the late 1980s. The subject was treated more as a mental aberration than an important phenomenon in its own right. It would take another three decades of study on the part of doctors, scholars, and scientists before I felt comfortable enough to say, “Hey, that happened to me. And it is real.” I am ready to speak now. What follows is my story.

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Jean Albert Duval, my maternal grandfather, died on September 5, 1987. His death was very hard for me. Then, almost a year later, in July of 1988, my maternal grandmother, Minnie Duval, passed away. My grandparents had always been very stabilizing forces in my life. I fell to pieces … just fell apart. I did not grieve normally. It was like grieving on steroids—a kind of hypergrieving. It was beyond bad. It was horrific. I was twenty-eight years old.

I was not present when Grandpa died. I was with my husband and children visiting my in-laws in Memphis at the time. However, I was in the room of the nursing home with Grandma when she died. Actually, there were three of us in the room with her: my dad, my aunt, and myself. Mom had stepped out to look for her brother. Dad was standing on one side of the bed. My aunt and I were on the other. When my grandmother took her last breath, all three of us turned at the same moment to look up to the same corner of the room, the one above the left foot of her bed. We all felt embarrassed by this, I think. We looked at each other as if to say, “What are you looking at up there?”

I think we were all uncomfortable with the idea that we were somehow not paying proper respect to Grandma lying there in the bed. But she wasn’t there. I knew, and I think Dad and my aunt knew, that Grandma’s essence had left her body and was now somehow suspended in the upper back corner of the room. There was a residual energy that had not yet left. When Mom’s brother arrived, we left him to his grief. A short time later, he opened the door and came out. He told us that when he had entered the room, Grandma was still there. He left when he could no longer sense her presence in the room.

I had never previously experienced the death of anyone like this before, much less the death of a woman I had adored since childhood. The clear sense of Grandma’s presence in the room after she died gave me my first hint that there may be other realms between or beyond what we think of as “life” and “death.”

Mourning and Shopping

When Grandma died, the first anniversary of Grandpa’s death was just around the corner, in early September. I missed them both terribly and decided to make myself feel better with some “retail therapy.” Neiman Marcus is an upscale department store anchoring one end of one of the most impressive shopping centers in Houston. I studiously avoided the place. It was too extravagant for our growing family’s budget. But on this occasion I was drawn to the store to buy myself something especially fine to wear to synagogue for the service in which my grandfather’s name was going to be read on the first anniversary of his death.

What I found in my shopping foray was a beautiful black-and-white suit and a stunning pair of black-and-white pumps. I was thrilled at the prospect of wearing such a gorgeous outfit. I was also petrified. There was no way to kick sand over the credit card charge that would hit our monthly bill, and no way to keep such uncharacteristically elegant clothes from my husband, Barry. Unless I hid them, which is what I did as soon as I got home.

The reading of the name of the deceased on the anniversary of their death is a significant event in Judaism. The anniversary is called a yahrtzeit (something like “annual memorial”) and is held on the Sabbath nearest the date of the death. The name of the deceased is read during the service, and a prayer called the Mourner’s Kaddish is recited by those in attendance. The Mourner’s Kaddish, or simply Kaddish, is a short prayer that is memorable for its rhythmic cadence and the special sense one gets, or that I get anyway, that the words are so old that dust falls from them as they are spoken. Reciting Kaddish is always a sad task, one that I try to avoid. I dreaded it especially on this day, September 2, 1988.

My husband, Barry, was out of town on business, so I took our two little boys, Jeremy and Andy, to services. Jeremy was four, Andy two. With Barry out of town and given the importance of the event, it was the perfect occasion for me to wear my gorgeous new clothes. I wanted the boys to look equally fashionable. I dressed them in the cutest summer suits, madras plaid jackets, and navy blue ties. With their dark hair, blue eyes, and dimples, they were stunningly handsome.

That Friday afternoon we were running late for Shabbat services. Still, as we were leaving the house I decided that I wanted a photograph of the three of us. At the time, I was a little upset with myself for stopping to take a picture, since we were already going to be late. However, something was compelling me to take the photo. I had a brand new camera with a timer on it. So I quickly set it up on the tripod, gathered both boys in my arms, and smiled as the camera captured us in the last photo taken of the “old Elizabeth”—me, in my beautiful black-and-white ensemble, the last snapshot of the woman whose life was about to change forever.

Figure 1-1: Elizabeth with Andy (left) and Jeremy (right), about thirty minutes before she was struck by lightning. September 2, 1988.

The Strike

I got the boys in their car seats and backed the car out of the driveway into the waning sun of a late summer afternoon. As I turned into the synagogue parking lot fifteen minutes later, a single large thunderhead blocked out the bright sun. It began to rain. Then thunder boomed. Suddenly, I was in the midst of a furious storm with the rain pouring down in sheets. It had come out of nowhere on what had earlier been a sunny, beautiful day. I certainly did not want to get out of the car in that storm. I also didn’t want to sit in the car with the boys, though, because services had already begun, and I didn’t want to risk missing the reading of my grandfather’s name.

We were parked a few hundred feet or so from the synagogue door. I told Jeremy that I would open his car door and let him run to the awning that covered the entrance to the synagogue. I told him to wait when he got there. Jeremy took off. Once I saw that he was safely under the awning, I climbed over the seat into the back, got Andy out of his car seat, and prepared to open the car door. The storm had worsened. I always kept an umbrella in the car. I grabbed it with my left hand and opened the car door into a rainy squall. I knew that if I tried to carry Andy and manage the umbrella in the wind, we both were going to get soaked. So I set Andy down, took his tiny left hand in my right hand, and grabbed for a more secure grip on the umbrella with my left hand higher up on the metal shaft. I pulled the umbrella down very close to my head.

Andy and I had taken just a few steps when the air cooled perceptively and my skin and scalp prickled with a sudden chill. Or so I thought. Suddenly, I felt a crackling, like static electricity. There was just enough time for me to think, “Oh. This is really bad. This is stupid. I shouldn’t be holding an umbrella.” It dawned on me just how foolish it was to be crossing a parking lot in a storm holding a collapsible metallic lightning rod in my hand. I even actually thought, “Oh, this is really, really stupid because look at that. My wedding ring is touching the metal shaft of the umbrella.” All of these thoughts rushed through my mind as I consciously thought, “Let go of the umbrella.” But I couldn’t let it go. My hand was frozen in place, tightly gripping the shaft of the umbrella.

It was as if I had somehow beckoned or conjured up precisely what I feared. A small tine of lightning branched off from a larger fork and struck the tip of my umbrella. I know this because I was later told by a man who had witnessed the whole thing that he had seen a bolt of lightning with tiny little fingers coming off a larger bolt, which is what struck my umbrella first. That tiny finger of electricity did not knock me out. It only served to paralyze my arm and hand around the shaft so that I could not let go of the umbrella.

Then the big one hit. The power was unbelievable. The blinding light, deafening explosion, and crackling energy all hit me at once, changing, charging, and charring me.

It is difficult to explain what it was like. In terms of the physics, I know now that thunder happens when the channel made in the air by lightning collapses. Andy and I were in that channel as it rushed back together. The deafening noise that resulted literally split our eardrums. But, for reasons I did not understand at the time, I felt no pain at all. Andy sure did, though. He was screaming with his hands to his ears as Jeremy, also screaming, ran toward him from beneath the awning. Jeremy grabbed Andy’s hand and pulled him toward safety. Both boys continued to wail: Andy from the pain of his burst eardrums; Jeremy because he had just witnessed his mother killed by a bolt of lightning.

As far as I understood the situation, I was heading toward the building with my screaming boys. I followed them into the synagogue lobby, where we saw someone that we knew walking back toward services from the restroom. The man immediately came over to Jeremy and Andy and asked them what was wrong. They knew better than to be disruptive during services, of course, yet they couldn’t seem to stop wailing.

As the man was trying to calm them down and figure out what had happened, I stood there wondering why no one was paying any attention to me. I also wondered where my umbrella was. I knew I’d had it in my hand, but it was gone now. I looked back out the narrow window in the synagogue door and saw the smoking skeleton of my umbrella lying on the parking lot in the rain. My gaze shifted to the right. About twenty feet away from the umbrella, I saw a crumpled figure lying on the pavement. I saw me.

Believe it or not, my first thought was: “Oh God, not the shoes! Damn.” I saw that the soles of my new pumps were burned and blown clean off. They had exploded as the only thing between me-as-lightning-rod and the wet ground. I could see my charred feet protruding from their remains. So I looked down at my feet where I believed I was standing in the lobby. I saw that my perfectly intact pumps were still on my feet but were not touching the ground. I was hovering a few inches above the carpeted floor. That was confusing, to say the least. It didn’t help clear things up that I was also lying in a heap in a grease puddle outside.

As this was all transpiring in my (… in my what? in my head out there on the pavement?), the man that had approached my boys went into services and, from the back of the room, asked if there was a doctor that could help. Now this is a very large Jewish synagogue near a major medical center. About forty physicians stood up and rushed toward the back.

I saw that my children were in good hands, so I floated back outside to where my body lay. I was looking down at myself. I know it is difficult to imagine, but I was really pissed off about the new shoes and outfit. I was thinking, “Get up. You’re lying in the rain in a grease puddle. You are never going to get the stains out of the suit.” Then, like a bolt from above, it hit me hard: “Oh, wait a minute. I’m not getting up because I’m dead.”

Black and White

As I hovered there over my body, I suddenly got it. I went from “Shit, my shoes are ruined” to “I was so wrong about so much.” Thoughts came rushing in all at once. I thought about those people who believed in an afterlife and who I had secretly ridiculed for years. They had been right all along. I was looking at my body and thinking something like: “What a waste. You were so wrong. How could you have been so wrong? You lived for twenty-eight years and learned so little.”

About what was I mistaken? So much. To begin with, my black-and-white thinking was wrong. I had always been very rigid in my beliefs. Everything to me had been right or wrong, alive or dead, black or white. There was no wiggle room at all. I suddenly realized nothing is black and white. And there I was, lying in the rain, and honestly, I was in a grease puddle that made everything look gray. All of the black and white that defined my life up to that point was gone.

My new view of my old self was harsh. I saw myself lying there in a kind of blur that was rapidly becoming infused with gray. The splendid white of my new suit was already a dingy, greasy gray. What I comprehended that disturbed me so was that the black-and-white, sharply defined borders that neatly defined my previous life were also blurring, graying now. Suddenly, the sharp divisions that had ruled my routines no longer mattered. This was not something I reasoned myself toward or even “thought” about. It was an understanding that came to me instantly, suddenly, shockingly. It was more like an awakening than a thinking. I looked at my body on the ground and knew that whatever had just happened to me had given me an insight that the woman lying there could never have grasped on her own, even seconds earlier.

Then something else happened, something deeply connected to my childhood. I had been sexually abused as a child for six years by a teenage boy who babysat for us. He is now a registered sex offender. My final thought as I left for the afterlife was this: “You know how to do this. Remember?” I was thinking of how I learned to leave my body during the abuse by the babysitter, and then return when it was over. I understand that psychiatrists may call my out-of-body experiences as an abused child “dissociations.” I think of them as repeated rehearsals that enabled me to survive a lightning strike years later. Those two defining life events—one horrible (the childhood sexual abuse), the other beautiful (my visit to heaven and conversation with God)—were linked by the near-death experience itself, and and by what was what was now rushing through my mind.