Heaven Can Wait

Patients recount near-death experiences in drawings

From Newsweek:

A new book promises incontrovertible proof of the afterlife. That's cold comfort to those of us left behind.

On a spring day last year, three months after the death of my younger son, Max, I opened my front door and saw a butterfly resting on the steps—an Eastern tiger swallowtail, I later determined, a species native to the Northeast but not one I remembered seeing before in the middle of Brooklyn. The date stuck in my mind because, as it happens, it was also my birthday. The butterfly, with its otherworldly beauty and silence, is, of course, a common metaphor for the soul. Its emergence from entombment as a chrysalis may have inspired ideas about human resurrection.

Read more ....

The Afterlife Of Near-Death

From International Herald Tribune:

Every experienced flier has sensed a whisper of death in a blast of turbulence at 25,000 feet, and many will swear they've heard their names called, loud and clear.

It's not a moment people forget.

"All I could think about," said a 50-year old nurse who'd recently been in a plane that lost an engine, "was my garage. How I hadn't cleaned it, and how messy it would be when someone came in and saw it. It's crazy what you think about."

The mind reels in the presence of death.

From the shore and TV screens, the evacuation of a US Airways jet that ditched in the Hudson River on Thursday looked almost stage-managed, a slow-motion rescue complete with heroes and zero death.

Read more ....