Not for long — just long enough to understand that life is a temporary address. I went flatline nine times over 90 minutes due to an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.
One moment I was tethered to a body, the next I was somewhere else entirely. No tunnel, no booming voice, no judgment. Just light. Stillness. Love so vast it made language useless.
I was in a high-ceilinged living room in the mountains. Everything was sensuous. Light cascading colors on the wall, Harp music playing. A tropically-scented, thick oil traveling slowly across the wood floor and down the stairs.
Small, friendly, chirping birds surrounded me as I flew with them. I understood “bird talk” as they kept saying “Slow down…you’ll only experience beauty and awe when you slow down.” Ironically, I was wearing slippers, one that said “Slow” and the other one “Down” that came from my Hotel Vitale in San Francisco. The birds encouraged me to fly out the window with them. They skirted out of the room, but each time I tried to follow them, I was back in the ambulance or the ER repeating this scene to the person holding my hand.
I was back. Back in the body. Back in the noise. Back in the to-do lists and bills and petty human dramas that suddenly felt like the faint echo of a dream.
People love the first part of a near-death story — the celestial calm, the reunion with something sacred. Fewer people talk about the after part, the messy return. The hardest thing about dying, I learned, is living afterward.
Something inside you breaks — or maybe it opens. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You’ve glimpsed the infinite, and now you have to make breakfast.
For months, I felt out of sync with the world. Conversations seemed shallow. Time felt elastic. I would look at the sky and think: We’re all just passing through. Friends noticed I was calmer but also a little distant, as if part of me hadn’t fully come back. They weren’t wrong. I also realized it was time to totally alter my life in so many ways including selling the company I’d founded 24 years earlier.
That experience became the quiet foundation of everything that followed. It stripped me of ambition’s sharp edges. It taught me the holiness of the ordinary — the way sunlight hits a kitchen table, the feel of a loved one’s hand, the grace of still being here.
Scientists like Dr. Bruce Greyson have spent decades studying near-death experiences. They find consistent patterns: peace, timelessness, encounters with light. But no study can measure what happens to your soul when you realize that death isn’t the opposite of life — it’s the frame around it.
The upside of dying once is that it makes every day afterward feel like a bonus track. The downside is that you can’t ever go back to sleep.
Midlife, in its own way, is a rehearsal for that truth. The old identities die off. The body humbles you. The soul starts whispering louder. You realize there are only so many sunsets left to watch, so many I-love-yous left to say.
I didn’t come back from death with a prophecy. Just a promise: to live like I mean it. To love like I’ll lose it. To remember, in the small, luminous moments, that I’ve already been home — and that I’ll find my way there again.
Here’s a BBC story about Death Cafes you might find interesting.
-Chip