The mysteries of dying and death from those who know

The Ten Things that Happen When You Die

In recent years Colm Keane has established a wide readership for his books on the afterlife. His earlier titles We’ll Meet Again and Going Home proved to be bestsellers in Ireland. His writing was prompted by personal experience, but is based on wide research, particularly on interviews.

This book, however, deals with “near death experiences”, which in recent years have attracted a great deal of attention. He writes that those who, through illness or accident, “die” – that is their hearts stop and the monitors flatline, pass through the same ten stages.  This involves sensations of leaving one’s body, moving through a long tunnel to a place of bliss. Then there are encounters with loved ones and friends, and with a supreme being. Further stages involve a resolution of life with judgement and a sense of eternity.

All of this echoes in a way much that Christians have believed, or held over the centuries, which is what makes it of interest to many.

His witnesses, however, did not die. This is an important fact. When they experienced these sensations they were not in fact dead. They did not so much resume life, as return to consciousness.  So in fact these experiences are not the experiences of death, but experiences of life.

Comatose

The late Lyall Watson wrote a popular account of the processes of death entitled The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death (1974). The title came from Shakespeare’s play in which (it will be recalled) Romeo assumes that his Juliet is dead when, in fact, she is only comatose. This is not death but seeming death.

Watson reported that it was very hard to know when in fact a person could be said to be dead. Even when the heart and brain cease working, the body is alive in the sense that the cells are still alive. Indeed until the processes of mortification are complete death is not a certainty.

What Colm Keane reports seems to be a universal experience, a structured experience common to all human beings. Yet scientists have considered that these processes are neurological, the activities of a brain which is only seemingly dead.

So though the scientific bases of what he reports might well be debatable, nevertheless these reports of “near death experiences” have given comfort to many. And his readers will be taken on a mysterious journey into the realm that lies between life and death.

But for a Christian there remains another stage, unreported on, the journey from death to life.