Nancy Ryan grew up in a midwestern Catholic family, we are informed (in an episode aired by Megyn Kelly), but distanced herself from the Church, as so many do “growing up.”

Maturity, of course, is in the mind of the beholder. And nothing approaches such “beholding” quite like near-death occurrences.

Nancy’s experience happened on January 3, 2014, when a little voice had told her not to go out bicycling.

But Nancy did. “I don’t know where that came from, but I ignored it,” she said.

That’s when she was hit by a speeding, oncoming automobile. It was a woman driving an SUV and “I knew in a flash I was going to die.”

Nancy was flipped onto the woman’s hood before her body smashed under the large car into the pavement and was dragged along the road as interesting things began to occur.

Most interesting was how, instead of blacking out, Ryan found herself watching the scene as a woman — as she — struggled for life. She was both alive and yet somehow outside her body, watching.

Two days later, during surgery, Nancy’s heart stopped for a brief time. “It was at that moment that I found myself ‘waking up,'” she said. “I thought, ‘great,’ because there was a beautiful hillside, surrounded by flowers and trees and a beautiful mountain range in the distance, and a sense of peace and love and well-being that I had never felt before.”

This is a standard of many such episodes — the removal, forevermore, of fear of death.

At first confused, soon she wondered if she was dead, trying to discount the notion. How could she be in the afterlife when she didn’t believe in such things?

When Nancy wondered why she was where she was, there was “a welcoming Voice that said, ‘Because you are My child, because you’re home. Welcome home.'”

“There was a part of me that really wanted to stay, because I was both connected to my family on earth but also everyone else in that place.”

How does she conduct herself these days?

She is not afraid, says the Midwestern woman, of taking risks — “not in a bad way, but I realized I don’t want fear to run my life. I’m much more loving — incredibly. I have an incredible love for everyone and everything.”

Connected to everyone and everything.

A lesson desperately needed in divisive times.