Fringe-ology (5 page)

Long's breakdown of the NDE seems most relevant, for our purposes, because it is the newest and arguably the most comprehensive and because his results don't differ markedly from most other surveys. The relative consistency across accounts is usually regarded, among believers, as indicative that one central phenomenon is at work here. Skeptics, of course, focus on the differences among people's stories. But there are two things I find compelling: in our culture, the NDE itself is an orphan—entirely unwanted by those at the extreme poles of belief and unbelief. Skeptics are inclined against the NDE representing any objective reality. Fundamentalist Christians often deny it any veracity on the grounds that it presents the possibility of an afterlife steeped in a nondogmatic, irreligious spirituality.

The problem, for those of us in the middle, is that these polarized views tend to obscure what might be most important about the NDE: its impact. In sum, whatever happens in an NDE, experiencers tend to
react
to it in much the same way. The vast majority take the experience to be real, and they change. They more greatly value their families and friends. They become less materialistic. Most remarkably, they no longer fear death.

In other words, NDE research confirms what Kübler-Ross experienced in her own journey through the halls at the Chicago hospital: people who undergo some kind of near-death experience feel a sense of contentment. For them, death looms as a kind of spiritual eject button, separating them from their living friends and families yet popping them out into an infinitely more expansive existence.

This last fact lends the NDE real heft. If this is an illusion, it is one that is irrefutably important to nearly everyone who experiences it. This also gives psychologists something real and measurable to work with. The historical accounts provide further verification, corroborating the NDE across centuries and millennia as an experience endemic to humans—and not borne from the power of suggestion.

I reached out to a former military nurse, a retired colonel named Diane Corcoran. She first encountered the NDE phenomenon in the late 1960s and early '70s, in Vietnam soldiers, well before Raymond Moody's bestseller. Corcoran is career Army, and in our conversation she spoke with the matter-of-fact authority of a lifelong member of the military. In 1969, while serving in Vietnam, she tried, like Kübler-Ross, to make herself a receptive ear to all the wounded soldiers on her ward. But one day, a soldier told her about the accident that left his body wrecked. He had been knocked unconscious, yet he remembered it all. Because after he was struck by a moving vehicle, he left his body and looked down on himself. He saw other soldiers come running to help him, or his body, anyway, which lay still far beneath him. Then he saw a tunnel nearby, floated toward it, and peered down its length. He hovered there, seemingly between two worlds, certain that whatever happened to the husk of him below, he was going to be all right. Corcoran listened to the soldier and blinked dumbly. “At first I said nothing,” she remembers. “It seemed like the smartest thing to do. I mean, I just didn't have any idea what he was talking about.”

But then she understood something else: the soldier was at once convinced of the reality of what he had undergone and worried that other people would think he was crazy. He needed her validation. He needed her to honor the importance of what he had gone through. And so she said, with supreme understatement, “That must have been an incredible experience.”

The skepticism these early experiencers encountered suppressed any widespread public knowledge of the phenomenon for quite a while—at least six years that we know of, by my count, given that Kübler-Ross herself wrote a chapter on the subject before deciding it best served the world gathering dust. It is, of course, impossible to determine the number of people who decided to shut their mouths and keep the white light to themselves. But it's not hard to understand why. Debates on the paranormal often break down in rancor, which is surprising because in an epistemological sense this might be one riddle to which we can never really
know
the answer.

Death is, by definition, the end of life. Anyone who tells us about the death experience is very much alive, rendering their view of the afterlife, one way or the other, suspect. Further, materialist arguments can only be so authoritative on the subject. What happens to a person's consciousness after death can be pondered, imagined, or hypothesized, but not directly observed or measured. The thought that consciousness is purely a product or epiphenomenon of the brain is the mainstream scientific view. But the truth is, as we'll see in chapter 3, the source and nature of consciousness remains an unsolved mystery. There are numerous aspects of the NDE that can be studied by science, but what happens when we die still seems a subject most closely associated with philosophy.

This strikes me as rather obvious. I only bring it up because so many people seem to forget it. And I believe that if we remember our own inability to deliver a definitive vision of what lies beyond death, we might find ourselves a little less threatened by others' opinions. Welcome to reality: you don't know what happens when you die, and the person arguing with you doesn't know either. Some people don't seem to care for an afterlife. Me? I'd like to believe in an afterlife. My mother has died; so have my oldest brother and a dear brother-in-law. But I'm also not interested in fooling myself.

My mother's death is, in part, what drew me into investigating Kübler-Ross. As my mother slowly succumbed to a long-term illness, nothing at all paranormal happened. But I did receive the benefit of Kübler-Ross's work, rereading
On Death and Dying
over a couple of difficult days. The story she tells of a farmer is the one that haunted me. The farmer she describes took his beloved wife to a big city hospital in the hope of saving her. He wanted to spend every minute with her. He wanted to sit beside her during the day and sleep with her at night. But he was not allowed to stay in the intensive care unit for more than five minutes an hour. He took what he could get, coming and going under orders, staring at his wife's white face and holding her hand till he was told to leave. In contrast, nearly forty years later, my family was allowed to stay with my mother everywhere, and at all times—when she was in a private room, and when she was in intensive care.

My father, married to my mother for fifty years, issued a simple order. “Your mother asked that she never be left alone,” he said. “So that's it. We're not going to leave her alone.”

And we didn't. She had a family member by her side in the hospital, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. My father logged the vast majority of hours with her. The nurses and doctors were so taken with his dedication that they eventually put my mother in a private room and made a bed next to her for my father to sleep in.

I spent comparatively few nights there—two per week. But one night, toward the end, a nurse's aide woke me. “I had to meet you,” she said. “I've met the husband, and the daughters. Now I had to meet the son. Your family's dedication is amazing.”

I think of the old man Kübler-Ross described who could not stay with his wife for any extended period of time and feel so tremendously grateful that at the end we were able to spend this time with my mother. On maybe the most emotional of those days, my sister Karen and I spent an hour or two sitting on either side of my mother's bed. My father had recently discovered the hospital television included an easy listening music channel. I can't remember what song was playing. But we sat on either side of my mother, each holding one of her hands. My mother sang a little. Her voice was weak. She asked Karen to sing for her. As Karen's voice rose, my mother closed her eyes. She smiled. “Isn't this cozy?” she said. “Isn't this nice? We'd never have done this if we were home.”

She repeated that last fact a couple of times. And although her medication usually made her drop off to sleep within a few minutes, she stayed awake for nearly half an hour that night. “Don't fight,” she said suddenly. “Life's too short. Don't ruin it by fighting.”

Our family house, like so many, was not always peaceful—a subject my mother had never addressed. To have her mention it at all, saying no more words than necessary, released a tension built over many decades. She hung on to our hands. She fell asleep, smiling. This was the kind of moment Kübler-Ross sought to facilitate by encouraging medical staff and families and the sick to acknowledge the predicament they faced and settle their unfinished business.

Had Kübler-Ross not decided to focus her book purely on the end of life, rather than the afterlife, it's possible my family and countless others would have suffered far more difficult experiences than we did. Kübler-Ross may even have been fated to obscurity. That said, I think it's high time we—believers and unbelievers alike—acknowledge what we do know for sure about the NDE: right now, the ultimate conclusion we each choose to draw seems based more in the vision of the world we bring to the data rather than the data itself. Believers applaud the researchers who conclude there is an afterlife; skeptics celebrate those who decide the NDE is the product of brain function. I argue that, in many cases, the data merely become a means of landing ourselves in the world we most wish or expect to see.

By Jeffrey Long's count, at this time skeptics have put forth no less than twenty explanations for the NDE. The number, I think, has ventured so high because people report NDEs at times when they were physically dying, and times when they weren't dying; at times when they were merely in fear of death, and at times when they felt no fear at all; at times when they were under general anesthetic or some cocktail of drugs, and at times when they were completely unfettered by pharmaceuticals. Skeptics, then, are searching for some singular explanation or combination of explanations that can occur in various states of consciousness, yet each trigger an NDE.

It has been speculated numerous times that some medication administered by hospital staff helps produce the NDE. But thus far, no clear correlation has been found between the use of recreational or medicinal drugs and NDE incidents. Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand-born psychiatrist, has argued for a connection between these mystical flights and the drug ketamine. But ketamine is an ass-kicker of a narcotic with profound dissociative effects; while it
can
lead to experiences similar to the NDE, it can also lead to myriad other sensations—trippy happenings, feelings of falling, even psychotic experiences. Intriguingly, though Jansen started as a skeptic, ascribing purely material theories to the phenomenon, he has come to believe both ketamine use and NDEs may represent a glimpse at a larger, more fundamental reality. But there seems to be some fundamental difference between the two trips, so ketamine, at this point, looms more as an idea than an explanation.

Dr. G. M. Woerlee has claimed that NDEs during resuscitation are produced by cardiac massage, which he says can produce enough blood flow to the brain to allow consciousness. But as we'll see in a moment, it seems unlikely that the amount of blood flow generated by CPR is sufficient to sustain consciousness at a high enough level for the brain to formulate the orderly, vivid experiences associated with an NDE. We can best view that, however, through the lens of the perhaps most publicized skeptical theory, which belongs to U.K. psychologist Susan Blackmore. She delivered the real poison pen letter for NDEs in her book
Dying to Live
; I focus on her version of events because most modern debunkings of the NDE originate with her “dying brain hypothesis.”

Blackmore is an elegant writer who makes her case over the broad length of a book. But her argument can be summarized rather quickly: in short, a lack of oxygen, known medically as anoxia, results in a narrowing of vision, fading first at the edges, that would create the illusion of a tunnel and light. Further, endorphins released at the time of death, under stress, might serve as the source of euphoria associated with NDEs. Accurate perceptions made while “out of body” are created out of memory, expectation, and the sensory detail accumulated before consciousness was lost. A sensation of timelessness is created by our loss of a sense of self as the brain breaks down.

Dying to Live
stands as the most comprehensive argument anyone has launched against the NDE as a window on the afterlife. That said, some of Blackmore's key points don't stand up well under scrutiny. A number of medical doctors have conducted their own research into NDEs. Sam Parnia, Michael Sabom, and Jeffrey Long have all written books on the subject, and Parnia, as do others, notes that many people who report NDEs aren't lacking for oxygen at the time. Perhaps even more damaging to Blackmore's case, in his book
What Happens When We Die?
, Parnia writes, “If the dying brain theory were correct, then I would expect that as the oxygen levels in patients' blood dropped, they would gradually develop the illusion of seeing a tunnel and/or a light. In practice, patients with low oxygen levels don't report seeing a light, a tunnel or any of the typical features of an NDE; and, in fact, this experience has never been reported by any other doctor or scientific study as a feature of a lack of oxygen.”

While Blackmore focuses much of her attention on the subject's experiencing a lack of oxygen, her explanation falls apart most readily in that very instance (the same goes for Woerlee's cardiac massage theory). According to Parnia, “Memory loss is so closely associated with any insult to the brain, whether from a blow or a lack of oxygen, that the degree of memory loss is used as a diagnostic tool to assess the severity of the brain damage.”

Such memory loss usually encompasses a period of time from minutes to days or even weeks before losing and after regaining consciousness. So even if people were regaining awareness as chest compressions were administered, they still seem deeply unlikely to report
anything
at all or at best fragmented memories. Yet people who undergo NDEs enjoy seemingly complete recall. Further, numerous studies have also shown that their recollections of what happened during their resuscitation are incredibly accurate. Conversely, when patients with no claimed out-of-body experience are asked to describe their resuscitation—even if that means guessing—they get it wrong. Television hospital dramas, it seems, are no substitute for
being there.
But there is another subtler yet important point that I think gets lost in the debate.