In 1991, a singer-songwriter from Atlanta named Pam Reynolds went in for brain surgery and died during the procedure.

Not "close call" died. Not "her heart stopped for a second" died.

Her body temperature was dropped to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Her heart was stopped with potassium chloride. Her blood was drained from her brain. Every electrical signal in her brain flatlined. She was dead by every clinical measure science has for the word.

She was also, apparently, watching from above.

When Pam came back, she described vivid, verifiable details from the operating room - surgical tools, conversations between staff - at a time when she should have been completely unconscious. Her eyes were taped shut. Her head was secured in a vice. Small speakers were placed in her ears emitting high-decibel clicks to monitor brainstem function. Normal sensory input was, by design, impossible.

Her surgeons confirmed the details; they didn't have an explanation.

Nobody does. And that's kind of the point.

Near-death experiences have been recorded since ancient times. Across cultures, across centuries, across wildly different belief systems, people who come back from death's edge report strikingly similar things: leaving the body, moving through a tunnel, an overwhelming light, a feeling of total peace, a review of their life, encounters with people who have already died.

Near-death experience accounts often involve leaving the body. The basis and content of the patterns are similar. The differences are in the interpretation.

A Buddhist monk and a Baptist grandmother and an atheist software engineer from Ohio all report roughly the same thing. They just describe it using different names.

Weird. But in a good way.

Neuroscientists will tell you (with good reason) that the dying brain does strange things. Oxygen deprivation causes hallucinations. Endorphins flood the system. Some researchers note that NDEs occur even under general anesthesia, including out-of-body experiences where patients report watching medical personnel working on their bodies. That said, an out-of-the-body experience is hard to write off as a simple chemical reaction.

There's also the dentures guy.

In a 2001 study by cardiologist Pim van Lommel, a man who had been in a deep coma later told a nurse that he recognized her. He told her he saw where she had placed his dentures during resuscitation efforts, then described the cart where she placed them. They were there precisely as he described.

He was in a coma. He shouldn't have seen anything. He saw everything.

The scientific explanation for cases like this - where people report accurate, verifiable information from a state of clinical death - is, to put it gently, incomplete. The leading theory is still basically "the brain is weird and we don't fully understand it," which is technically true but also not very satisfying.

This is where it gets less about science and more about something harder to measure.

Across nearly every documented NDE, certain themes on life repeat so consistently they've become almost cliché at this point. Love mattered. Relationships mattered. The way they treated people mattered. The career stress and the money anxiety and the years spent performing a version of themselves for other people's approval - not so much.

Life reviews in NDEs often include an awareness of what others were feeling and thinking during earlier interactions - a kind of emotional accounting from a third-person perspective. Imagine watching a highlight reel of your life from everyone else's point of view simultaneously. The moments you're proud of land differently. The moments you're not also land differently.

Bottom line: Nobody comes back from an NDE and thinks: I really wish I'd worked more weekends.

Honestly? Not much. Not in any definitive sense.

We don't know if consciousness survives death. We don't know if what NDE survivors experience is a glimpse of something real or an elaborate hallucination generated by a system shutting down. We don't know if Pam Reynolds was watching her own brain surgery from above or if her mind somehow constructed an accurate account of it through some mechanism we haven't yet identified.

What we do know is this: millions of people have had these experiences. They come from every culture, every religion and every level of skepticism across time. It's estimated that five percent of the adult U.S. population has had an NDE - more than eight million cases. Most of them don't talk about it, because they already know what you're thinking.

And almost all of them come back changed. Permanently. In the same direction.

Less afraid of death. More interested in love. More honest about what actually matters.

Whatever is happening during a near-death experience - brain chemistry, spiritual transit, something we don't have a category for yet - it seems to clarify something.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the content of the experience is less important than the direction it points.

Which is, as it turns out, the same direction every issue of this series has been pointing.

You already know what matters. You probably just needed someone who died to say it out loud.

Next issue: Loss. How to grieve — and why most of the advice you've been given about it is wrong.

Love to all,

Drew

I share thoughtful word art and short reflections on life, death, and what actually matters in between. One short note every week or two. No pressure. No noise. Unsubscribe anytime. Visit the website for more.

Thanks and we’ll talk again soon -

Drew