Sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.
—Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed
As I was processing all of this, really in just a fraction of a second, a warm, inviting, golden glow appeared to my upper right. I sensed it as much as I saw it. It was not a fixed light but more of a moving beacon that seemed to want me to follow it. That is, there was no defined form to the glow. It was not round like the sun. It was more like the glow around the sun. In any case, I understood that I was dead and that my children were safe with my family and the community at the synagogue, so I gave in to the temptation and followed the beckoning glow.
Things suddenly got, well, stranger than they already were. For example, I immediately understood that time is not linear. Things were happening in my field of vision and new capacities were awakening within me, but they were all taking place at the same time, all at once. Moreover, my movement was not encumbered by my physical body. Whatever I had become floated or flew toward the warm glow. As I followed the glow, it led me to what I will call “the Garden,” although it was unlike any garden here on earth. Many things about my visit to the Garden I now struggle to describe. They are simply not imaginable or thinkable. We just cannot perceive the Garden “where” and “when” we are now. And so the words to describe them do not yet exist here. Maybe they never will. Perhaps they are not supposed to exist here.
But I will try to describe what I saw using our existing language and vocabulary. The glow led me to a beautiful bench made of what appeared to be hand-carved wooden scrollwork, which had been sanded and polished until the wood was glossy. The graceful curves and swirls of the deeply carved wood felt like satin to my touch. It was so incredibly beautiful and elaborately ornate that it looked like an antique throne built for two. The unique beauty of this bench was only surpassed by the otherworldly comfort I felt when a familiar voice welcomed me and told me to sit on the bench. The voice was that of my beloved grandfather whose death a year earlier, of course, I had been at services to commemorate when I was struck by lightning.
I took a seat on the ornately scrolled bench and found that it immediately conformed to whatever my individual body had become as soon as I sat down. The morphing bench was surrounded by an abundance of plants, the likes of which I had never seen before. The plants blossomed into magnificent flowers that seemed to explode with colors from another color and light spectrum not accessible here. My grandfather’s soft, familiar voice, complete with the French accent that made it so distinct in this life, immediately put me at ease. The voice said that audible speech would disrupt my absorption of my surroundings, so he was going to speak what I had come there to know in my head, silently, telepathically. I have come to believe that this was actually not my grandfather, by the way. I think it was God using my grandfather’s voice to put me at ease.
The soothing voice was a calming vocal presence that I perceived yet did not hear. He knew things about our family that only my grandfather, and perhaps God, would know. This presence imparted information to me that implied a vast grasp and knowledge of where I was and what choices I would need to make if I chose to “go back.” He relayed the clear impression that the choice to remain in the Garden or to reoccupy my burned and soaked body was mine to make. I understood that I could take all the time I needed in making the decision to stay or return, and that I would be given information that would help me make that most difficult choice.
I was dead, but I was more alive than when I had been that twenty-eight-year-old woman with the child and the umbrella in the synagogue parking lot a few seconds earlier. I was surrounded by and suffused with an unutterable feeling of unconditional love. The love was all-encompassing and embraced me in every way: in the palpable scents that hung in the air around me like ornaments; in the soothing sound of a gently babbling brook nearby; in the cadence of the gorgeous otherworldly music surrounding me; in the visual floral feast before me; and in the deeply comforting knowledge that I was safe, protected, and unconditionally loved by God himself.
The glow that I had initially followed into the Garden had moved away from me. It was still to my upper right, but now it was behind a range of mountains whose outlines in the distance were backlit with the shimmering light of the warm glow from behind them. I resisted the impulse to follow the beckoning glow to the mountains, since the peace, comfort, beauty, and unspeakable love that surrounded me where I was sitting were all that I could ever want. The sound of the brook nearby, the music in the air, the sweet scents of the blossoms and grass, and the vivid colors of the sky, mountains, and flowers, lulled me to depths that I had never known my soul to possess.
Regardless of whether my companion on the ornate bench was my grandfather or some other being higher up the ladder, I knew that I was not alone in the Garden. I did not turn to look at my companion because I somehow knew that it would be overwhelming for me no matter what (or whom) I saw. I did not want to disrupt the visual and emotional perfection in which I found myself by seeing something I could not emotionally absorb. I knew that the abundance of love that this presence communicated to me was an immersion in spirit, the memory of which would never leave me. Still today I can draw on that memory of unspeakable love whenever I need to do so. I could have happily, willingly, and gratefully remained there for eternity. It was a gift, tailored to me, from a higher being that loved me unconditionally.
The landscape was clearly meant to comfort and assure me. The sound of flowing water, be it a brook, stream, waterfall, or ocean waves, is something I have always found to be gentle and soothing. A view of any scenery has always been enhanced for me if there is a body of water there. I think that is why it was so prominent among the other sweet sounds and music that permeated the Garden. The presence of all that I found to be warming, loving, and inviting taught me that, in this place, all who arrive encounter and perceive whatever is most comforting and reassuring to them. My source of comfort was the unmatched beauty of my surroundings and the all-embracing feeling of unconditional perpetual love, all captured in the Garden. This was my heaven.
Jeff has encouraged me to say more at this point. So let me put it this way. Let me say that I understood that all who come to this wondrous place are soothed and welcomed by whatever they find most comforting and pleasurable in life. Therefore, I was not surprised to find that my particular heaven took the form of a lush, perfectly manicured garden. Someone I saw in the distance may have expected his or her heaven to be a snow-blanketed forest. I instinctively recognized that while I found myself in a beautiful garden, someone else there might encounter a snowy forest, a boundless meadow, or a serene beach. Yet we were all in exactly the same place. We were in heaven. I also understood that in heaven one’s own appearance projects the best of whatever one believed oneself to be in this life. Each of these kindnesses, moreover, added to my ease during my visit to the Garden.
I feel so inadequate to convey the totality of the place where I was. As I tried to explain earlier, time in the Garden is perpetual. It is layered with events and sensations that all occur at once. This changes pretty much everything. For example, all the lines that I had drawn in my previous life to separate past, present, and future had vanished. As I attempt to write what I experienced, I am left only with those explanations that I once received from those whose experiences I mocked. One of the many ironies in this redirection of my life is that I now hold to be true what they did—most fundamentally, that there are connections to something much greater than ourselves. I also now understand that it is possible to return from another realm or dimension and be completely unable to help those who have not beheld it to understand that it exists at all. Something can be perfectly true and completely unbelievable.
The knowledge that was being transmitted to me as I sat on the ornate bench in the presence of the loving being who spoke in the voice of my beloved grandfather was also being shared with the other humans there, humans whose forms I perceived in the distance. Everyone was in pairs. No one was alone. They were dressed in what I knew as street clothes. And they were all beautiful, youthful, healthy, and perfect. I wondered, “If they are perfect, am I?”
I looked at my left hand, curious to know how the burn from the lightning strike had affected it. Remarkably, my hand looked as if it belonged to a younger woman. There were no chipped nails or wrinkles, and certainly no burn from the lightning. There was also no wedding ring. All I saw was the taut, smooth, pristine skin of myself at eighteen or so. The skin on my hand was perfect.
Although I saw people in the distance, no one approached me. Nor did I approach any of them. Why were they all paired up with someone? Did I appear to them to be alone? These questions were immediately answered by my companion, who told me that I was also part of a pair, and that he was the other half.
This raised more questions for me. Could the other people there see two of us? We must have appeared to the distant human forms as they did to me—as a pair, and as beautiful as I ever was at my best. Did this partner of mine look like my grandfather at age ninety when he died, or did he look eighteen like everyone else there? Or did he have an entirely different appearance? I don’t know because I never turned to look at him. I think I was not supposed to see him because I would have been overwhelmed at the sight of my beloved grandfather.
Or by the beauty of God himself.
My guide in the Garden gave me knowledge and entertained my questions for the entire two-week period I was there. My questions were answered instantly. As quickly as I could conceive the questions, I received the answers. I understood the passage of time in the Garden realm by observing the movement of the three celestial bodies that orbited and revolved above us. These moon bodies or planets were vividly bright orbs that looked, as best I can describe them, to be what we would call violet, although violet here on earth comes nowhere close to the intensity of violet in the Garden. This ability to read and understand the movement of the orbs as a calendar of sorts was one that I found I already possessed. By instinctively “reading” this “calendar,” I came to know that my visit to the Garden lasted two weeks. I instinctually knew how time worked and passed in the Garden realm, just as I know how it works where we presently reside.
I know that this appears to contradict what I explained earlier about the simultaneity of time in the Garden. Why there was a way to ascertain the apparent passage of time in eternity, where everything happens at the same time, became clear as my guide imparted knowledge to me. I am not sure I can explain it, but let me try. As I wrote previously, everything appeared to be happening all at once. But once I began to converse with my companion and receive information from him, time seemed to become linear again for the duration of my visit (or so is my memory here). I have come to understand that this happened not because time actually became linear for two weeks, but because I would have no other way of “decoding” the information I received in the Garden here in this world. The only way I can understand here what was told to me there is to remember it in linear terms. I know this is confusing. I honestly do not know if the near-death experience itself was linear, or whether I just need to remember it in those terms in order to decipher it. My gut feeling is that (a) time there was not linear, but (b) linear time is my only frame of reference here.
The presence told me that I was welcome to stay there or return to my earthly body. The choice was mine. His job was to help me make the decision by answering questions I had about my life, my family, and the future. He also explained that, if I decided to stay, he would escort me from the Garden along a path and over the mountains to where the glowing beacon still patiently awaited my arrival.
It was not an easy choice. Returning to earth seemed to involve the risk of losing the fortifying sense of love without bounds or time that I knew there. I did not know then that this gift of incomparable love I felt would be with me forever on some level, regardless of whether I decided to stay there or return to my body.
Not all of what I was told there was ethereal in nature. For example, I was told that George H. W. Bush would shortly be our next president, and that the Cincinnati Bengals would play in the 1989 Super Bowl. These things might seem trivial or even silly to some (American elections and football games in heaven?), but I do not think that the specific events themselves were the point of the information. That is, I do not think that heaven is about politics or sports unless the deceased is a former politician or athlete. I think this information was given in order to help me grasp the nonlinear nature of time. Having the knowledge of future earthly events taught me that those events had already happened in the past yet still were going to happen again … in the future. In short, I was realizing the relativity of time, relative, that is, to where one is in time.
This is going to take some explaining, and I am not sure I can. But let me try. It seemed to me that eternity itself was keeping an accounting of time. I understood that since time doesn’t really exist as we think it does here on earth, someone or something in eternity is keeping track of every event that has happened, is happening, and will happen. I comprehended this concept of simultaneous time while I was in the Garden much more clearly than I do here. This is why, I think, it was so important that I be given information about future events: so that if I decided to return to my earthly body I would have a “trigger” to remind me of the simultaneous nature of time.
And in fact, this trigger worked beautifully. When George H. W. Bush was elected eight weeks after my trip to the Garden, suddenly my lessons on the simultaneous nature of time came rushing back to me. Suddenly, I remembered. Prior to the election, my lessons about the nature of time were buried so deep that I had yet to draw them forth since my return. The presidential election and then, a few months later, the Super Bowl served to remind me how real the Garden was and how the true nature of time works. Even though I do not understand the concept of simultaneous time here as well as I did there, I know that it is true, and I never question it.
My companion told me two things that clinched my decision to leave the Garden and return to my still unfinished life. Both involved my children. First, he told me that if I returned to my life, I would have a third child, a daughter. He explained that she had already selected Barry and me as her parents. As he told me this, I understood that reincarnation is a fact. This was a topic to which I had previously not given much, if any, thought. Had I thought about it, I would have laughed it off as impossible. But suddenly I knew it to be a very real process. Nevertheless, he told me not to let this future third child color my decision too much, because if I decided to stay in eternity, my future daughter would simply select other parents. In other words, she would return regardless of my decision.
The second thing he told me that helped me decide to return was that my marriage to Barry would not withstand the changes in me that this whole experience had wrought. If I chose to return, I was told that Barry and I would be facing a divorce in the future. This was a clincher for me, as I knew that I wanted to be the parent to raise our children. But in order to do this I first had to be there, of course, which meant coming back. Divorce or no divorce, I felt very strongly that I needed to be the one to raise them, which made the desire to return even stronger.
The missing wedding ring on my smooth hand when I looked at it in the Garden might have been a harbinger of all of this. Still, I had a hard time believing we would get divorced. Barry and I were perfectly happy with each other and our growing family. What I did not yet realize was that the Elizabeth who returned from the Garden was not the same Elizabeth who had been struck by lightning in the synagogue parking lot. The new Elizabeth would see life in varying shades of gray. Nothing would be black and white ever again. I was simply not the rigid, opinionated, well-defined person Barry had married.
So I opted for the return ticket. It was apparent that my time as a walking, talking, stained, burned, and insecure human being was not yet over. Even if there was a slight chance of divorce, I knew that I wanted to be the parent to raise Jeremy, Andy, and, if my guide was correct, our future daughter. I had a burning curiosity to meet this daughter whom I already loved.
My partner in the Garden cautioned me that going back would be physically very painful. The burns on my feet and body and my burst eardrums were injuries that I had not yet felt because I had not been in my body to suffer them. By reclaiming my physical self, I was also agreeing to accept whatever physical pain was there to bear. I understood from my guide that I would have to spend about three months off my burned feet. My companion reiterated that I needed to remember the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love because I would possibly not directly experience it again until I returned to the Garden at the point when I leave this particular life and body for good.
He also told me about another kind of pain I would feel as I returned to my body. He said he would have to “help” me back into my body by hugging me tightly, so tightly it would feel as if my bones were being crushed. He explained that this was necessary because my expanded soul was much larger than my body, and it needed to be squeezed back into my physical frame. My understanding of the unconditional love, and everything else I had been taught in the Garden, was now part of who I was. This knowledge and understanding had expanded the size of my soul, which was now much larger than it had been when it departed my body. As promised, the hugging was bone-crushingly painful and suffocating as he lovingly squeezed me back into my burned, wet, gray body.
I “woke up” on the wet asphalt of the synagogue parking lot.
I gasped for air. It filled my lungs and revived every cell in my body, except for my immobile left arm and hand. These were frozen, paralyzed in the same posture and grip I was in when the lightning struck. I don’t think my body had moved at all from the position it was in when I was struck and fell in a heap on the pavement. I really cannot say if I was breathing at all during the couple of minutes here that I was gone. What I can say is that my left arm was still frozen in place, my beautiful new suit was now a permanently greasy gray, and the soles of my once gorgeous new pumps, still on my feet, were no more. They had taken the force of the electrical current as it grounded out through me and then through them.
My eyes opened, and I could see people rushing toward me from the synagogue. An initial sense of confusion overcame me as it dawned on me that, while I had been somewhere else for what I experienced as two weeks, here in the parking lot it was likely not more than a couple of minutes that had passed. I could not understand how it was possible to have received so much information and be so completely transformed in such a short time. It was all so disorienting.
Serendipitously, one of the many physicians at services that evening was a doctor who had extensive experience treating victims of lightning strikes and electrocution. He was a white-water rafter and had helped several people who had been struck by lightning while rafting, which, apparently, is not an uncommon experience.
I eventually learned that the relatively modest injuries I sustained from my lightning encounter were probably due to how I was struck and the nature of lightning itself. Lightning transmits its incredible energy ever downward as it seeks the earth and grounds out. From the tip of my umbrella, the charge apparently flowed through the metal frame to the place on the metal shaft above the wooden handle where my wedding ring had been in contact with it. Had the lightning hit higher on my body, say, on my head, my experience would likely have been very different. My “near-death experience” probably would have been a “death experience.”
When I awoke, it was still raining, but not as hard. I remember being helped into the synagogue and placed on the couch in the rabbi’s study. I was in and out of consciousness, and really, really tired. The doctor was there. I recall him telling me to open my eyes. But I was so tired. I was able to open them, but I could keep them open for only a couple of minutes at a time. The doctor examined me and concluded that I had a mild lightning injury, an MLI. No hospitalization was necessary at that point. He listened to my heart with his stethoscope and said it sounded fine. He explained that I had keraunoparalysis (lightning paralysis), and that it would be temporary. The paralysis lasted for about six hours but did eventually subside. He also encouraged me to have the burns on my feet and left hand looked after and told me I’d have to keep off my feet, which meant bed rest, until they healed.
Looking back on it all now, I confess that it feels a bit outrageous that the doctor did not feel that I needed to be checked in to a hospital. He did tell me that, if I were to go in, they would simply call him in as the resident lightning specialist, and that he would do exactly what he just did and tell me the same exact things. So there was some practical sense there, I suppose.
Hospital or no hospital, I was back now.
But I was no longer me.