I must have been 15 or 16 the first time I came across the term “near-death experience.” It was summer and Raymond Moody’s “Life after Life” – the book that brought the subject of NDE’s to widespread public attention – was on the shelf at the public library. It was the first purportedly reputable study, from a psychiatrist and medical researcher, of hundreds of cases of people who’d experienced “clinical death,” been revived, and whose accounts have since become so familiar: the tunnel, the white light, the presence of dead loved ones, the life review, and the (often reluctant) return. I think I tore through the book in an afternoon in some combination of horrified fascination and rising hope, mingled with utter disbelief. Fifty years later, my reaction to the subject of NDE’s is about the same -- although the science is very different.
What happens after death remains a mystery. And that’s as it should be, I think. But the border between life and death, and the nature of our fraught passage from one to the other, is once again a subject of scientific research and has led to some recent surprising – and remarkable – discoveries. This week, we’re re-airing Steve’s interview with Sam Parnia, an intensive care physician at the NYU School of Medicine and one of the world’s leading experts on resuscitation science.
Death, as he describes it, is not a moment but a process – and an increasingly reversible one. Listening to their conversation, I learned some things that I hope every ICU team knows. But I’m also struck by the fact that while modern medicine is extending the border between life and death, sooner or later, we all cross it. What lies beyond is unknowable terrain – which is both awful and awe-ful, it seems to me. In other words, the mystery is not an error, not something to be dispelled – it’s part of our source code, the question mark at the heart of existence. Today, when I hear accounts of inexplicable things people have experienced when they were close to or even technically dead, I no longer care that much about their veracity, which is probably beyond assessment, anyway. What I hear instead is the sound of grief and hope intertwined – proof of our spiritual imagination.
I hope you enjoy the show this week and that it gets you thinking, as it did me. As always, thanks for listening!
– Anne