It just started out kind of out of nowhere. I was having some autoimmune-type things like fibromyalgia and rosacea in my cheeks and stuff, but I mean, a lot of women have that. I was home with my daughter one day, just drinking a smoothie in the living room. I had a history of anaphylaxis to shellfish, but I hadn’t had an attack in years and years. I just kind of kept those EpiPens around, obligatory, you know, because you’re supposed to, but I’d never used one.

I’m in the living room and I start having difficulty breathing and swallowing. I’m a nurse, and I was like, “Holy cow, this is anaphylaxis.” So I gave myself my EpiPen. My son drove me to the hospital. It was a small town we were in, and I knew the nurse who was checking me in. I won’t say her name, but when she was checking me in, I thought, “Oh man, I’m in trouble. She’s got no idea what she’s doing.”

She said, “Well, why did you come? You took your EpiPen, what’d you come to the hospital for?” And I thought, wow, you don’t even know the basic protocol for anaphylaxis. You take your EpiPen, you go to the hospital. She said, “We’re waiting on a bed for one of the rooms, so I’m just gonna set you here in the hallway. We’ll get to you soon.”

I’m a critical care nurse. That person goes right to the trauma bay, because you may end up having to intubate. So I’m in the hallway, I’ve got stridor – that horrible, tight breathing sound – and people are just walking around doing their thing. I’m dying. I give myself another shot of my EpiPen.

Finally, the PA looks over and is like, “She’s not looking so hot.” They get me in a room and at this point we don’t have an IV or anything, and I’m crashing fast. Don gets there and they move me into trauma, and they can’t get an IV because when you have anaphylaxis everything kind of clamps down. It’s just going from bad to worse. Don says, “If you don’t do something, she’s gonna die. You need to intubate her.” They said, “Oh no, we’ve got plenty of time.”

It was immediately after that that I just quit breathing. It’s funny, because I popped out of my body so I could see what was going on. I’m kind of watching and I’m thinking, “Man, who is that girl? She’s pretty sick.” I was so depersonalized, I didn’t realize that was me. They intubated me, and then everything was just black for a while.

The next thing I remember, I kind of materialized in the back seat of my sister’s car. She was driving from Wisconsin to Kentucky and she was at this gas station. She had pulled over and it was pouring rain. I knew my body felt weird, like not solid, and I couldn’t feel my bottom and my legs against the seat. That seemed odd. I just couldn’t sort out what was going on.

I’m in the back seat of her car and I see her clothes, and they don’t match. I’m thinking, “What on earth is she wearing? She looks ridiculous.” I sensed something was wrong. “Why is she driving in this pouring rain? She should be home. Maybe something’s happened with one of the kids.” I saw her pull her phone out. She got onto Facebook and she typed, “Hang on,” or, “Hang in there, kiddo, I’m coming.”

Then I popped back out of her car and I was just in this dark void. I was in this expanse that was so dark, and it seemed limitless to me as far as its space. There was an oppressive nature to it. I wonder if some of that was being on the ventilator and the agitation that occurs in a patient, even in a coma, from being on a ventilator. I wonder if I was kind of feeling that on that side, because as a nurse, it seems to me what people would describe.

I had this oppressive work of breathing. I knew I didn’t need to breathe over there, but it still seemed like I had to perform the work. I was just stuck there. I couldn’t figure out how to get out, and time is really different there. Time here is so structured, and time there really gets away from you. I always tell people, if I had to compare earthly time with the time that I spent in the void, I would say it was probably about ten years.

I began to wonder if I had ever really lived – like maybe I just imagined all of that to have something to think about in that place. I just didn’t know what was going on, why I was trapped there, what I could do to get out. I would try to move, and I’d drag myself forward a little bit, then I’d get so tired and go into what I call the “deep sleep,” where I had no awareness. That kind of went back and forth for a long time.

Finally, I started doing some introspection and saying, “Is there something that I need to understand or learn before I can leave here? Or realize that maybe I did live that life and there’s something… maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m why I’m stuck here.” It just occurred to me that the spiritual space that I was in was a picture of the spiritual space that I had made on the earth realm.

Since my divorce many years ago, I had kind of built this wall around myself to protect me and protect the kids. A wall is great to protect you, but it also keeps people out and it keeps you in. I really started to isolate. I mean, I went to work, I took care of my kids, I took care of my house. I went to work, I took care of my kids, and I took care of my house. I stopped putting myself out there. The isolation that I had built on this side followed me over.

As soon as I figured out that this was the “eternity” that I had created, there was this rumbling and it exploded open. All these little pieces of the darkness, like almost shards, were flying and spinning around. The darkness was pushing further and further away, and a spirit comes.

I didn’t know who she was at first. She’s larger than life, orange hair on her head that is so bright it’s on fire. There are these little licks of flame that are her hair. She is such an attractive spirit, I couldn’t keep myself from going to her. I go to her and she holds me against her chest, and I realize it’s my grandmother.

I’m weeping. I’m so relieved that someone’s there and I’m not alone and the dark is gone. I’m just overcome and I’m crying. Her energy is circling around me and mine is still separate, but she’s encompassing me. These shards of the darkness keep trying to get in and they hit her energy and they’re flung further away.

She’s holding me and I’m crying, and she says, telepathically (because they don’t speak), “Calm yourself, dear one.” The words were like… if any of the people who read this have ever been given morphine or fentanyl or whatever IV for surgery, that immediate rush that you get that’s super relaxing and you can feel everything – that’s what it was like. It was like a chemical. I felt it acting on me. The intention of those words acted on every cell in my body. I immediately relaxed and kind of melted into her.

Her energy was just amazing. I could feel her loving me. I asked her, “Am I dead?” And she said, “Oh no, no. It’s like you learned in science: energy can’t be created or destroyed; it just changes forms. It’s true here too. So you don’t die. You either are alive on the earth side, or you’re super alive on this side. It’s just this transition. You are kind of in between, and there’s a little cord that’s holding you to your living side. If you wanted to go back to that, you could.”

I thought, okay, that makes sense. She just kind of loved on me for a little while and I was floating in this light. I didn’t realize she had gone. All of a sudden there was this rumbling, thundering presence that shook everything that ever had been or ever would be. Every planet in the cosmos was rumbling with this energy, and I could feel it in my bones. I knew something big was coming.

I never saw a person. I always refer to God as “He” just because the energy felt very masculine to me, but I can’t say with certainty this was a man, and I don’t think God is a man. I think He was this mix of masculine and feminine, because He was nurturing, but that power makes you think of a man, at least for me as a traditional person.

He came to me and I heard Him say this telepathic thing: “I Am.” That was it. That’s all He had to say. I’m like, man, You’re the stuff. You just come up to somebody and say, “I Am,” and you’re like, “Yeah, You are.” There was a resonance, and it was the key of D, is what it sounded like to me. It had this vibration to it that was alive, that just went through me. I could feel it coursing through every part of me.

I’m there with Him, and immediately I got kind of scared. “Oh no, I wasn’t ready for this. He’s going to look at all the stuff that I’ve done wrong that I’m so ashamed of.” He wasn’t judging me; He was super loving and everything. But it was like being naked in front of a crowd. I just wanted to hide. He kind of soothed me in that, and I knew we were going to go through my life.

I’m dreading stuff like a kid worried about their parents reading their diary. All those things that I was so worried about, that I was dreading, never came up. What the heck, right? I think I’d probably beat myself up enough about those. Instead, other things came up, and first He showed me the good.

All of the things that I’ve done that I feel really good about did not come up. The things that came up were small things. There was a scene in the grocery store that I had forgotten about, probably when my kids were little. The woman in line in front of me was short just a couple dollars to pay her bill, and she was trying to figure out what to put back. I knew what it was like to be in that position as a young mom. I said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’ve got it,” and I gave her the money.

I’m seeing this scene like I’m there, and immediately it flashes forward and I see this woman working in a food pantry. She’s blessing these people with food. God’s showing me, “I want you to see the ripple effect of every little act of kindness.” I saw that and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.”

Then we went through some of the negative things. The one thing that really stuck with me was that, of all the things I’ve done in my life that I’m not proud of, the thing that was shown to me as probably the hardest thing to never do again was to control my thoughts about other people.

God showed me. He said, “Let me explain something to you. A thought has a certain measure of energy to it, and a word has even more, and an action has more than that. But it all starts with a thought. What you think about is what you talk about, which is what you end up doing. So it starts here: you’ve got to control your thoughts and your heart.”

He showed me these negative thoughts that I had had about people, and they were deserved; let me tell you, these were some jerky people. He showed me that when you have a negative thought about that person, that energy goes out there and attaches itself to that person, and you contribute to the “jerk” that that person is. Now you’ve attached more of that energy to them.

“This is why forgiving is so important,” He said. When you forgive people, people say, “Oh, it’s not for them, it’s for you.” It is for them, because if they don’t receive some measure of forgiveness, that energy is still attached to them and it can’t come away. The energy’s got to go somewhere. Energy isn’t created or destroyed; it just changes forms. When you have a thought – so if I think something negative about you – that thought attaches itself to your spirit and it makes you more the person that you are, that I’m thinking you are. When I forgive you, that energy is able to be redirected. That little bit of negative that I put on you, that made you more the negative person that you are, now comes off because I’ve forgiven you.

It’s really important to that other person’s journey for you to forgive them. It’s really important to you, because not only does that negative energy attach to them, but it attaches to you, and energy attracts energy. So if you’re harboring all of these negative feelings about people, even if they’re well-deserved, you’re just drawing more of it to you because that energy is attached to you. Wow. I mean, that’s life-changing information.

Here I am with this loving Creator who’s kind of let all the big stuff go that I was really worried about, and then I suddenly became angry with Him. I realized I’d been angry with God for a long time. I told Him, “You say You’re this loving God, and You want the best for Your children, and I call bull crap.”

You can just be so honest there. I said, “I’ve seen what You’ve allowed my own children to go through. Here their dad abandons them when they’re just babies. Him leaving me was hard enough and not deserved. For him to abandon his own children… I thought, ‘I can take whatever he did to me,’ but watching those kids talk to him on the telephone and then go to the mailbox every day to check for a gift that he said he was going to send that’s never coming, and watching them walk back heartbroken every day – what kind of God allows that?

“It would have been easier on all of us – and this is terrible to say – if he had died. I could have told the kids this story about what a wonderful man he was and how much he loved them, and they would have at least had that. But now they’ve got this man that’s alive who is failing them in every way, and of course children take that on and attribute it to something being wrong with them.”

I had really held that against God. I was bitter and I wanted to be mad at Him. I was kind of balled up about it. He said, “Oh, you’ve completely misunderstood Me. Let Me show you something.”

We flash forward and we’re sitting in the bleachers. David, my oldest son, is sitting to my right. When I had the experience, my grandson was two. In this scene, David is to my right and Cole is older, maybe five or six. We’re watching him play soccer, and he’s running up and down this field and the sun’s on his hair. You know that magic of kids – just that something about them. He’s running up and down the field, and seeing him in his strong body and his hair, it’s just magic.

David looks at me and he says, “Mom, I’m never going to get through this. Mom, I’m going to be the dad to him that I deserved.” If it took his dad leaving for him to make that commitment, then I get it. It’s been worth it. I’ve got to say, he’s been that dad.

A couple of years later, Cole’s playing soccer – who would have known that too, right? He was playing soccer, and David looks at me and he says, “Mom, I’m going to be the dad to him that I deserved.” I mean, it just sucks the air out of you. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that happened.” It was this confirmation from God: “You were here.” There are times you doubt that near-death experience because so many people doubt. He’s like, “No, you were here, and I’m making manifest the things that I promised you.” I was like, wow.

The other thing I learned there was that we have a really screwed-up definition of good and bad. To us, “good” is when nothing is wrong and everything is right. In the spiritual realm, good is forward motion, no matter how awful it feels. If you’re moving forward, you’re growing. You’re affecting the lives of other people, even if you’re doing it through grief or hardship. That’s considered “good” up there. He’s like, “If you’re doing good work, even though all the circumstances around it suck, you’re still good. It’s not bad; you’re moving forward.”

The day that you start sitting in that recliner and you stop interacting with the world and you’re just in that mode of “I’m going to do what makes me comfortable” – that’s bad, even though nothing bad is happening. That’s not what we’re here for. We weren’t here to be sedentary creatures that have no effect on the world around us. There’s no point in you being here if that’s what you’re going to do.

I learned when I was over there that before we come to this life, there is actually a decision-making process that we go through with some consultation of spirit guides and things like that about what family we want to come to and what general lessons we’d like to learn while we’re here. I think we know the whole story before we come; I think we forget it when we get here. I try to remind people of that, because before you came, you knew what traumas you were going to face and you were like, “That’s the life I want to live. I want to have those lessons because those are going to contribute to the growth of my spirit in the way it needs to grow.”

So this “higher you” makes these decisions. Here, they’re terrible, and here they’re awful because we perceive this life as being really a long time. But when I pulled out of my body, this seemed like it had been over like that. People say, “Well, what about kids with cancer that are suffering? What about kids that are born horribly deformed?” I just tell them, those are the most sacrificial spirits. Those are the ones on the other side that said, “I’ll come void of even the ability to communicate, just so I can show people a love that transcends speech.”

So I’m in this light and this kind of healing process begins, where the light comes through my feet and starts creeping up through my body. It’s healing every little cell that it comes in contact with, spiritually. It goes through my stomach, it goes through my chest, and it’s so powerful. I can just feel this energy coming up through me. It gets to my tongue and these beautiful songs come out that I can’t stop.

God’s energy shot out my eyelashes and it was so bright. It was like looking at the sun without having any pain, without your eyes dilating, and without heat or anything. I tried to close my eyes because I didn’t want any of the energy to get out, and so I’m closing my eyes and it shoots out my eyelashes. It goes out into the expanse and turns around and comes back. I can feel it going through the little curves in my brain.

Then I feel like I get to this more core part of myself, and God’s there. It blew me away. I’m like, “Whoa, wait a minute. Do You mean to tell me You’ve been in there all the time? You’re not this external thing?” He’s like, “Well, I’m kind of both.” I’m like, “So all of us, even the people that don’t believe, God is in there?” He’s like, “You can’t take Me out any more than you could take out your own father’s DNA. I made you. I’m in there. You can choose to not acknowledge Me. You can choose to walk around saying your dad’s not your dad, but we can prove he is. I’m telling you I’m in there, and I’m just waiting to love you. Even through all of this crap you’re going to go through – and you went through some hell there for a while, and you’ve had a lot of trauma in your life – I’m melting all of that away.”

I started realizing I was going to have to make this decision about going back. There was a point, actually when I was still in the void, that I was able to progress and move and see myself in my hospital room. I saw myself lying there in a coma and I saw my daughter there. I knew what she had worn that day and was able to describe that back to her. I knew what part of the room she’d stood in.

I get to this point where I’m in the light with God and I have to come back. It seemed like a decision that I probably had made before I was born, that I’d known this was going to happen and that I was going to choose to go back, because I hadn’t lived the life I was supposed to live – not even close. In fact, I had avoided doing the things I was supposed to do.

I can’t tell you how heartbroken I was to leave. Don says to me, my husband’s like, “Why would you not want to come back to me?” I’m like, “I can’t make you understand that. Until you’ve been there, you just can’t understand it. I knew you’d be okay eventually.” So I made that decision to come back, and I was crying. I told God, “At least let me remember it, because if I can’t remember this, I don’t think I’ll have any hope.”

When I woke up, I was off the ventilator. My sister was standing there. The first thing I said was, “I was with God.” The nurse came in and she called the doctor. I’m in St. Joseph Catholic Hospital, and the first person they send in to see me is a psychologist. “You can’t see God.” So they wrote that I was having delusions, and that stuff follows you. I thought, I just couldn’t get over the irony of that.

It’s interesting, the response you get when you have a near-death experience. As a believer, as somebody who believed in God beforehand, I just assumed that all of my friends who were religious would be the ones that wanted to hear the story. The people that I have gotten the hardest time from have been the religious folks.

I always try to remind people, because I do understand what their reservation is. I tell about this dark and empty void I was in, and they’re like, “Well, wait a minute. You’re a Christian, you should have gone right over to Heaven.” I think I’ve figured that out. A near-death experience is not a death experience. I think God knows you’re only going to be there a short while. He knows you’re going to decide to go back because you’re not done yet. So I think the near-death experience is tailored to the experiencer – what they need – so they can go back and overcome some things that are hindering them in their life. That’s not the same experience you’re going to give somebody who’s coming to stay.

So, for all of the folks who are Christians who say, “Well, you didn’t see Jesus,” and all these other things – I was just there for a little visit, and those little visits aren’t like moving in.

When I woke up, my sister was there at the hospital. I said, “I saw what you typed on Facebook,” and of course there was no way I could have known that. It really freaked her out. I said, “Why were you wearing that outfit?” She said, “When I got the call, I just grabbed whatever clothes were on the end of the bed and I threw them on, threw some stuff in a bag, and left.” That’s why she was mismatched. She verified the pouring rain, pulling over, and all of that stuff. So there’s no question that I saw that.