On another thread and forum Kentauros and i struck a chord over

the near death experience. I have had one and this good soul asked me to consider posting here. I will. Thank you, Kentaurus.

First of all, in most places here you can't post about these things because you will be trounced. Even people who admit to never having one will pile on because apparently they know something. Or other. Be that as it may, I had a near death experience a few years ago that somehow felt to me like a lesson i had to learn to shake up my trajectory before my life ended and I miss the point of being here. Yes, it felt that clear.

My parents died ten months apart. We were a team. We were a three-headed person. I felt all my life that a greater part of my general purpose was to take care of them and learn as much from them and their example as I could. They were so completely good I have no words to say about it. Suffice it to say, my trajectory was straight down when this happened.

At the point of my NDE I was run down in a major way and struggling with what to do about it. I knew the moment my mother and father slipped away that I was going to have to stay here. Giving up like that is not in the playbook. However, I was really sick and thought I was having a low blood sugar episode. I was standing on a ladder in my sister's warehouse stocking nut and bolt boxes. I climbed down and somehow found my way upstairs to her apartment. i took a cookie and crept to a chair across from where she was sitting and reading during her lunch break.

I remember her asking me what was wrong as I put a cookie in my mouth. Then I died.

It's not what you think it is. I heard a popping sound, the room went from color to black and white, then I died. I remember blackness for about a split second and then color again. The color was astonishing. It was greener green and bluer blue than anything you can ever show me here on Earth. I was on a street in the town next to where I grew up looking at a motel sign that I liked. It was a little mouse in a suit advertising a motel. Now, that sign is battered and faded but there it was perfection.

The grass was soft and green, trees were leafy and tall. The sidewalk was clean and not cracked and old. The sky was a blue that you can only dream of. It was so wonderfully peaceful and calm. Nothing ever here could match it. Then I realized I was lying on my stomach on the grass and someone was standing in front of me.

I remember the white sandals, old fashioned and the young feet wearing them. I looked up slowly and saw a beautiful summer dress with a flowing skirt that stopped in the middle of a teenaged girl's calfs. It was a soft creamy white and had little yellow flowers all over it. It billowed a little around her. I kept looking up and saw that this was my mother when she was about eighteen. She smiled at me, my beautiful, luminous, glorious mother. We didn't say a word but I knew all i needed to know.

I knew I couldn't stay.

I didn't get pushed back. I just knew I was needed, that our family couldn't bear anymore death and that Daddy and Mom's role as caregiver and that was totally made clear was shifting from them to me. I remember feeling completely well and good there. I remember loving her with a purity that is hard to express. Most of what I felt is so understated because human words are inadequate to say what it actually was like. She gave me such love that I remember it still clearly. Then I had to go back. I was looking up at her and then it reversed.

A popping sound, color goes black and white, then I was back. I was incredibly nauseated. I was completely gasping. My sister had seen me die and jumped up. She grabbed me and shook me as hard as she could. She has a grip that could mash steel and is very, very strong. She slapped me and screamed. I didn't hear her until I was back. She said I was gray skinned, my pupils were dilated and there was nothing in me that had form. I was dead limp weight. I was dead.

It took a while to digest this. The illness I had to experience this is inconclusive but I check out well every time I go for my exams. I was given a chance to choose. I was given a chance to see what is waiting for us and decide if what I had to do here was enough. It was. It is beyond me to tell you how wonderful this was. It is beyond me to tell you how I know what I know.

The next life is wonderful but I know that they would be terribly disappointed had I chosen the easy way out. Easy from my point of view. They raised me through great hardship and poured their wisdom and love into me. I owed them a full life where I could become what they were and help my family. I do. I am 'Auntie' who you can come to for help and solace. I am 'Grandmama' to a lonely kid in Georgia who likes to write and loves me because I LISTEN to her.

Notice I didn't see a light, go down a tunnel or see white clothed beings. Only a percentage of people who NDE have that experience. I also learned that hearing the pop is common. My experience is what a percentage of people experience. I learned a number of things:

1. Our egos are the enemy. The ego wants to rule us and when it does, others suffer.
2. There is only love. Its eternal. It surrounds you daily.
3. Death is just another form of living. All those you miss are around you, they hear you, they come when you think of them. Think of them. Pray for them. Love them like they were alive. They need and appreciate that.
4. You are the architect of your life. Be loving and get love. Be good and get goodness. Pray for peace and in the end it will come. We all have to pray for everyone. No one is worthless no matter how much they anger us or do wrong. They are the saddest souls of all.
5. You are never alone. Never.

I have this poem that got me through lots of misery. I will put it here. There are also many strange phenomena that I have experienced in my life and I treasure them all. The afterlife exists. It will be there for all of us in the end. Dying is easy. It's like 'stepping from one room to the next'. (My mother told me that). I personally have no fear of it now. Not after doing it once. In fact, it was the easiest thing I ever did that was monumental. I am in deep gratitude for having been able to have it. It changed my life forever for the good.

``

What is death? By Henry Scott Holland 1847-1918 Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral

Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same that it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.

``

Life is very good, my darlings. The afterlife is right beside you. The ones gone on ahead hear you and help you when they can. I have always heard their voices. It is part of our natural life of living, dying and living again. This is what I saw, heard and feel I know. I am delighted to share it with you.